A Keynote Address

The first time I shared a room, and arguably the closest I ever came to meeting Steve Jobs, was in the keynote address at WWDC in 2007.  Although I’d owned a few Macs by then, starting with the “flower pot” iMac, I had  only started exploring development on the platform.

My favorite anecdote about Steve was the story a client of ours told us about him using an app we’d written, on his couch at home, on an iPad, the night before the iPad launch.  He was impressed with what we’d done.  I was on cloud 9.

My father once told me, “A computer costs $50,000.00 or more.  $2000.00 for the machine, and the rest to pay the person that runs it.”  Despite the comment he did purchase a used Apple ][e for my brother and I to use.  I wrote a lot of code in my single digit and teen years on that machine, or as my father put it, “Played games all day and all night.”  I even worked around the fact that in an attempt to fix a broken ‘G’ key, he super glued the post and I never used the actual key again.

Years later I would be employed at a company that would sell for millions of dollars.  Some of my proceeds of that money I spent on the new iMac I mentioned before.  I also took the time to fax a copy of the check I received from the Bank of New York to my father, with the words, “I’m not playing video games!!” brutally scrawled on the sheet below the image.

Steve, I never met you, but you inspired me to stick with my instincts, against the odds I faced, and it has made all the difference in my life.  I aspire to inspire as you did.