Thursday, October 06, 2011

Steve Jobs bought me a car

When I got to use the mechanincal engineering department's Mac SE's
back in 1988, I was amazed, compared to the vt100 terminals or
DOS box's we had it was beamed in from another world. My parents asked
me what computer to buy in 1998 and I said buy an iMac. Tricky to use
dialup on that, but my young relatives were able to create creepy
speeches using the speech synthesizer. Around 2002/2003 I was sitting in
a cubicle in houston listening to music playing from the adjacent
cubicle, and it never repeated. over days and of music, it was
always different. I finally went around the corner and asked how
are you doing that? and my neighbor showed me his iPod. I saw that
and immediately looked up aapl stock and saw that it had almost as
much cash as market cap. I used the only gambling money I had, which
was the remains of my dot-bomb account on etrade and bought 2k worth
of aapl.

If I had kept more of it longer or bought more I could have been rich, instead
i made enough to buy a car. I'll give myself credit that I can recognize genius when I see something like an ipod for the first time, but true genius is the guy who could create something like an ipod, or iphone (my iphone 1 being stolen still hurts), an ipad or Mac air, and not compromise with the people who must have been there saying
don't spend the money on designing a new interface, just sell what we have
and maintain profitability.

True genius.

Anyway. sad that you are gone, I hope you find peace.

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