Wednesday, October 05, 2011

The world revolved around him.

It was really weird waking up to not having Steve today. I've never known a world without him. Which sounds trite.

I was about 12 years old when "computers" started popping up. Components connected with ribbon cables strewn everywhere. Not the nice clean plug and play machines you see now.

By 16, I was lying about my age to work at NEC. You were suppose to be 18.

From then, I pretty much took the graphics off ramp. The guys I dated still were under Apples control. One guy I dated even worked for NeXT. Even I wound up working at Apple for a brief time. Everyone was always trying to work there. Even though they weren't doing that well, everything in the Valley still revolved around Apple.

It's weird to have any feeling about the guy. For most of my life I've just pretty much thought he was a dick. I didn't meet him personally, but all the reports from everyone who worked with him would end in the same common theme. Man.. that guy is such a dick.

It wasn't until this recession that I really became to appreciate him to some extent. It is unbelievably hard to reinvent yourself. You have to be willing to burn your house down and lose everything. A stark contrast to today where people expect to take chances and lose nothing.

Maybe I'm just sad about losing a piece of old Silicon Valley. Flying by the seat of your pants without government intervention or help. But maybe I've been sad about that for a while. He did have A Gore on his board of Directors after all.

The whole thing still just seems really weird.

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