Yesterday, October 5th 2011, Steve Jobs passed away at his home surrounded by friends and relatives.

Having heard the news I felt compelled to post my own little tribute to the man who's basically responsible for me still working in computing, 16 years after I first started.  I became an Apple user and yes, fanboi, around the year 2000, just when Apple were starting to solidify their comeback from the abyss of the mid 90's where the company very nearly ceased trading.

Influenced by my good friends Michael Oglesby and Andrew 'Mac' Smith, I got into using Macs where I was working at the time, and then within months committed to my first Mac purchase, a lamp-stand 15" iMac.  

During school and college I'd been exclusively a Microsoft DOS and Windows lad, but at uni I started to long for something a bit different and more exciting.  So I tried Linux for a while, becoming quite proficient and working the command line and recompiling kernels to install drivers, doing config setups for X Windows, etc.  After a couple of years of this though, I realised that Linux was a very long way from being accepted as a main-stream desktop OS and when I joined CCTA (Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, later to become the Office of Government Commerce) as a technology analyst, I was briefly given a Mac as my main desktop computer... and suddenly found the excitement I'd been looking for.

Computing actually became fun again, I started to look forward to product announcements and Steve Job's yearly keynotes, and me and my colleagues would stay late after work and use they office's broadband connection to watch the live keynote streams online.  It became a bit of an institution, to watch Steve pace the stage, make fun of windows and PCs and do the annual photoshop bake-off between the newest mac and an 'off-the-shelf' PC.  It was a friendly rivalry that kept us all interested and rooting for the underdog and what we 'knew' to be the better platform.

Alas, as broadband got more universal and we could start to watch the keynotes from home, thats when Apple pulled the plug on the live streams stating that they cost too much to maintain.  Still, the edited version would usually be available to watch the next day and sometimes we'd sit and watch, commenting and oohing and ahhing at the next greatest thing to be announced.

We would download and install the latest developer previews of OS X to see how much faster and better they were than the previous versions.  OS X was this new exciting land of computing, beautiful to look at, great to use and at the same time safe and secure just when windows was going though its darkest issues with malware and spyware.  It had the underlying geeky complexity of Linux (being a unix based system), but the user friendliness of Mac Classic or (said through gritted teeth) Microsoft Windows.  It was a home for creatives and techies alike and although its still not universally accepted, its done a great deal to drive OS innovation and force its competitors to keep up and compete on features and innovation rather than rest their on market share.

Pretty soon the iPod got announced, and everyone pronounced it would be an expensive failure (Slashdot's, Cowboy Neil legendarily called it 'Lame'), after all, Apple was a computer company, not a consumer electronics company, what did they know about MP3 players?  And the rest, as they say, is history.

Eventually Steve went on to become something of a household name (at least for geeks anyway!).  Through the iPod and iPhone, Apple went on to sell more Macs than it has ever done, 1 in 4 of all computers sold in the US is a Mac.  For a brief time this year Apple was rated as the most valuable company in the world surpassing even the oil giant Exxon Mobil. None of this would have been possible without the driving force and vision of Steve Jobs, he took a company on its knees, just months from death, and turned it into the company everyone looks to for the next big thing in consumer technology.  Without Steve's vision you would not be using your computers and phones in the same way you are today, you would not be buying music online in the same way you are today, and you would not be as excited about technology in the same way you are today.  Steve did that, and that is what he should be remembered for.  He influenced us, Apple's loyal customers and users, and through us, he influenced everyone else.

If you'd said to me 10 years ago, that Apple would have the world best selling MP3 player, the world's best selling smart-phone, be selling a quarter of all new computers in the US, would have a worldwide market share of well over 10% (less than 3% when I started using Macs!), that Macs would be using Intel CPUs, that Apple would be the world's biggest online Music retailer, that Apple would be the most valuable tech company in the world, and that Steve Jobs would be dead at the age of 56... I really wouldn't have believed you.

Rest in peace Steve, 1955 - 2011. You will be missed.

My Macs (in order of appearance):

• Angle-poise 15" iMac
• 12" Powerbook G4 (work machine)
• MacMini G4 + Sony flat screen monitor
• PowerMac G5 Tower (1.6 ghz) 17" Apple Cinema Display (work machine)
• MacMini Intel CoreDuo + Dell 20" flat screen monitor (work machine)
• 20" White iMac Flatscreen (Intel Core2Duo, work machine)
• Aluminium 24" iMac Flatscreen (2008 model, still using)
• Aluminium MacBook 13" (2008 model, still using) + 24" Apple LED Display (2009)
• Aluminium MacBook Air 13" (2011 Thunderbolt model, current main machine) + same 24" Apple LED display