I don’t watch the news, and only find out tidbits of what goes on outside my ‘bubble’ through my Yahoo homepage, and posts on Facebook. Without technology, it’s likely I’d have no clue that anything went on in the world. Like today, when I opened up my browser, and saw that Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, died today at the age of 56.

In 1983, I was in 8th grade. I remember taking a required computer class where I was exposed, for the first time, to the Apple Computer. It was a medium sized box, with a black screen, flashing rectangular cursor, and green bit map numbers and letters. In class, we were taught how to write a program (code I guess) that would tell the computer to draw lines. The test was to write a program telling the computer to draw a square. I remember being one of the first people to complete the task and thinking, what else do you have for me?

Through most of high school we didn’t use computers, except for keyboarding class. As a Junior, and high school newspaper staff member, we used computers at the old Bellevue ‘Journal American’ to type and print out copy. Then, we ran it through the wax machine and hand pasted layouts that were printed into the ‘Knightlife’. The (olden days) memories of long evenings at the ‘JA’ are a good reminder of how much technology has made the publishing world a lot easier. The following year, when I was the Feature Editor of the paper, our school purchased a few of the Apple II E computers for the journalism department. It was so cool to learn and use Pagemaker to layout our stories and pictures for press.

After high school, if you can believe it, I made it through college without a personal computer. We had access to computers solely for typing papers, which I did a lot of, and had to use the required word processing program issued by the college on a 5.5″ floppy disk. In my last two years of college, in the Interior Design program, we learned a DOS based CAD (Computer Aided Design) program. My early years of learning ‘code’ helped me a lot not only in that class, but in my several years of CAD that followed.

Between high school and somewhere in my thirties, I don’t remember using any Apple products. But at some point, they started showing up at our house. First, my husband was issued a MacBook Pro from work. I mean, from MICROSOFT. He needed to make sure the interface he was designing worked on the Mac. Soon after, our son ‘inherited’ the MacBook, which catapulted his YouTube and general movie making career. Then, when the iPod Touch came out, Santa brought one for our son, followed by one for my husband’s birthday. My son is now on his 2nd MacBook, and, 2 years later, still uses his iPod Touch every single day.

All the while, I have used PCs in the form of desktop and laptop computers. I got an android phone, and occasionally played on the iPod. Until, the release of the iPad. My curiosity stirred for over a year, until I decided it was the perfect tool for writing, something I’ve dreamed of doing for a long time. So, I bought the iPad 2 for my birthday, which, incidentally, is when I really DID start writing. I take it with me everywhere and use it for email, Facebook, looking up recipes, taking notes, helping my son with math and spelling, and, of course, blogging. My true passion in life is to inspire others and make a difference in the world through my writing, and now I have the tool I need to live that out.

Thank you Steve Jobs for your incredible foresight, passion, and innovation that changed the world. Apple, I believe, was the leader in the user friendly computer world, and, I just bet, anyone reading this could write their own story of how this man’s work affected their life.