I didn't know Steve Jobs, but I definitely feel an emotional connection because of how much he affected my life. As a middle-school kid in the mid-eighties, I learned BASIC on a Sinclair ZX-81, which attached to a black & white TV, used audio cassettes for storage, and came with 1K of RAM. We had the 16K RAM expansion pack. It was a piece of garbage, but it was fun to play with.

I knew people who had Apple IIs and Commodores, and I had used TRS-80s in computer labs. None of them were particularly impressive. My dad and I knew we would eventually have to get a real computer, and we were planning to get a Coleco Adam.

Then the Mac came out. (We weren't into football; I never saw the Superbowl ad. We learned about the Mac from the computer magazines we subscribed to.) It was love at first sight. It was obvious that this was how computers should be.

But an original Mac cost a boatload of money: $2495 (over $5000 today). My parents said we'd get a real computer when I started high school. So we passed on the original Mac, and the Mac 512, and the Mac XL ($3995 in 1985, over $8000 today). When I started high school in 1987, we bought a Mac Plus ($2599 in 1986, but I think about $1800 when we bought it in 1987).

For me it's been Macs ever since then. The darkest days, of course, were in the mid nineties. Especially for me: I graduated from college and got a job in 1995. At work I had to use Windows—Windows 3.1 at first, and then Windows 95, both disastrous, tasteless imitations. (Of course Steve wasn't at Apple anymore, but he had built something so good that Microsoft could not match it, no matter how much profit they made or how much market share they swallowed.) Worse, at that time it looked like Apple might not survive, and the future would be dominated by Windows. Even the lowest low point, Mac OS 8, was still so much better than the alternative that I vowed to go down with the sinking ship, among the last stragglers holding onto the last Macs.

But the ship didn't sink, and the rest is legendary.

Perhaps we shouldn't attribute the original Mac so entirely to Steve. There was a whole talented team behind it, much like the Apple of today (smaller, of course). But Steve definitely was the one who built Apple into a position where it could create the Mac, and he was the demanding, critical presence that made the Mac so good. By founding NEXT, he also kept himself in a position to push the computer industry forward even after he was forced out from Apple. And that enabled him to engineer Apple's comeback. I hope that Apple will maintain Steve's ideals and perfectionism for many years to come.