Cristael's Thoughts on Steve Jobs

At last Wednesday’s MacValley meeting, we had a moment of silence for Steve Jobs. We all mourned the passing of a man who was wholly unique.

I remembered way back in the mid 1980’s when I was, like so many people, drawn to the Mac -- the computer for the rest of us. To this day, I am a member of ‘The Rest of Us Society of America’, that ninety-nine percent of us who are not computer experts.

So back in 1985, I bought my first 128K Mac and a ImageWriter printer to go with it. I took them home, and I found out that I could cut! I could copy! I could paste!

No more plastic bottles of messy, sticky white-out. No more typewriter erasors that left a hole in the typing paper. It was a writer’s dream come true.

Never mind all the fancy stuff that came later. For me, that first copy-and-paste on my 128K was a defining life moment. One of those times when you see a better world at your fingertips.

That day, Steve Jobs and the Mac became a part of my life. And today, my iMac is helping to make my dreams about writing come true.

A great man is one who changes the world for the better in ways that are small as well as great. And Steve Jobs did just that. Jobs’ visionary dreams, his ability to gather the most brilliant and most creative people around him, his drive for perfection, and his genius for marketing, gave us the Mac, the iPad, the iPod, and the iPhone.

Power was handed to so many people, lots of us just average folks, by the products that Steve Jobs dreamed and then put on our desks.

Jobs had a vision for Apple, and he had the sheer determination to make it work. Over the years, Jobs’ vision has worked for me and so many others like me, in so many ways.

Truly, God made Steve Jobs and then He broke the mold.