Fox had pretty heavy coverage of his passing. That's where I found out.
That's quite something about Twitter.
I would've never thought I'd be so sad about this...I haven't even "graduated" to a smartphone yet. But my very, very first computer was an old Apple IIc, and a lot of good memories were formed and a lot of things learned working and playing games on that thing.
I've only ever owned Macs myself, all the way back to 1993, when I bought my first from Sears when they sold the Centris under the Performa name, again in 1995 with the Power Macintosh 7200, in 1997 with the Power Macintosh 8600. We're a 4-iPod family, and am about to pick up a Mac Mini as a Home Theater PC so I can put the Apple TV in the bedroom.
He really did achieve a lot in his life, not the least of which start a company at 20 as a college drop-out in his garage, grow it, get kicked out of his own company, go away, start another computer company (NEXT), return to his original company when they wanted to buy the OS his second company made, turn that company around over the next 14 years to where, for a brief moment in the summer of 2011, they were the 2nd most highly valued company (2nd only to an OIL company!).
As a lot of others have observed, he didn't invent a lot (in the beginning, it was Woz who was the bigger geek), but he found ways to make those inventions accessible to a lot of people who otherwise would have had no use for computing. Where Woz loved to tinker and play with the technology, it was Steve who kept pushing to have it get out of the user's way.
He really did make technology "for the rest of us", when the rest of us were the non-geeks, the muggles, so to speak. And he's always been able to surround himself with people who could design and create the ideas he had in his head, most lately Jonny Ive. Tim Cook replacing him wasn't a split-second decision. Tim came back with him when Apple bought NEXT, so he's been there all the past decade and a half, the two of them growing together.
It's amazing from a business standpoint when you consider that the majority of their money is made from product categories that didn't exist for them 4 years ago (the iPhone and iPad). They were not a phone company, but they found a way not only to survive in that cutthroat space, but to dominate it. With regard to the iPad, they reinvigorated a category that everyone else in the PC space (including Microsoft) had largely written off. They did smartphones RIGHT. They did tablet PCs right. They OWN music downloads and have for the past decade. They did App Stores right, their "walled garden" model running roughshod over their competitors' "wild west" models.
So, for Steve Jobs, a big, fat, motherfuckin' bucket of win!
