John Cromartie's Tumblr

The passing of Steve Jobs is a really big deal. His contributions to computing made a big impact for me, personally.

We programmed Apple Logo on Apple IIGS computers in the computer lab in 3rd grade. It just “clicked” with me, and nearly 20 years later, I’m still programming (and I have actually come full-circle and picked up Lisp; it turns out Logo is a Lisp). In after-school programs, I tinkered with more advanced (classic) Macs and Hypercard.

After Jobs’ influence had waned, while Apple was cranking out ambiguously-numbered Quadras and LCs and other forgettable machines, I dabbled in programming for DOS and Windows, but nothing stroked my curiosity like those Apple machines. I remained a “computer guy” but nothing much of a programmer.

Fast-forward to high school. I remember the afternoon, waiting with bated breath for OS X 10.0 to be installed on a salvaged Power Mac G3. The UNIX core and NeXTSTEP-descended interface of OS X was the most exciting thing (to me) in computing for a long time. I somehow arranged for a Power Mac G4 as an early graduation present and dove into Xcode, and programming shell scripts, PHP, Ruby, Objective-C, and anything else that I came across.

The promise of being able to make apps that looked like slick Apple apps was motivation enough to learn Objective-C, Cocoa, and Xcode. OS X lit the fire under me to get coding again, and OS X (and attendant hardware; secondary for me, really) have been a constant companion ever since.

So thanks to Steve Jobs for stoking the passion of my hobby and my career.