Yesterday evening I was at our local bowling alley with pretty much all of the MyLocally team celebrating the successful launch of our new baby MyLocally.com. I was stepping back from another unsatisfactory gutter ball when one of the guys said Steve Jobs had died.

My first reaction was to check it myself on a couple of places just to be sure that it wasn’t a hoax in bad taste…but no it was true. We all knew he was very sick and you don’t usually get to
wrestle pancreatic cancer to the mat, but to hear the news was sobering to say the least.

I’m an old guy; Mr. Jobs was a mere five years older than I am now when he died….that’s another very sobering thought. I actually had the pleasure of meeting him a couple of times (meeting is probably too strong, but I did see him present live). Way back in the day back in
the mid eighties I actually had “Apple Evangelist” on my business card. I didn’t work for them but I ran an Apple dealership in London where armed just with MAC IIs Quark Express and a laser writer we pretty much shut down traditional typesetting in London. Three machines wiped out a five hundred year old industry almost overnight. It was a lot of fun. We used to get invited down to Apple’s head quarters some place close Heathrow and see the cool crazy Apple dudes like
Jobs and Kawasaki strut their stuff. It was the wild west of technology and Apple was always the cool sheriff.

Back then I wore Apple Pajamas…Apple was good to me and I was totally in love. Eventually I ended up in a corporate world where Macs were pariahs and finally I caved and went PC….but I resisted until Windows 95 came along (or Mac 84 as we called it) before I turned traitor. Now I couldn’t fly a Mac if my life depended on it….and I’m OK with that because everything is browser anyway.

When the amazing Mr. Jobs returned to Apple to save its smoking ruins he did some amazing things. He may have lost the desktop war (but again in a browser world who cares) but he conquered music…well to be exact he did the very best job of providing the tools to facilitate
the demise of the recording industry then became the biggest seller in what remains of the industry, dominates consumer electronics, made the moribund tablet PC hot and the list goes on.

I’m not going to waste your time droning on about his amazing achievements, all I can say is that I saw him live…he was amazing and I still have the Kool-Aid stains down my Apple polo shirt to prove it.