stevenf.com

Steven Frank's website

October 5, 2011

Apple was founded in 1976, a year after I was born.  We grew up together.  In fact, for a little while, we grew up across the street from each other.

Through a completely unrelated-to-Apple twist of events, my family emigrated from England to the US in the early 80’s, and we just so happened to land in an apartment complex off Stevens Creek Blvd, about a mile from Apple’s campus.

I attended Fremont Older elementary school in the Cupertino school district which, I’m sure not by coincidence, had a computer lab with several Apple ][ computers.

As a by-product of the video game boom of the 80’s, I became keenly interested in computers and programming.  At home, I typed BASIC listings out of magazines into our Apple ][+.  At school, I had a curriculum that included “Rocky’s Boots”, educational software which played like a video game, but in fact taught the basic principles of digital electronics.

This is what I mean when I say I grew up with Apple.  It’s not that we just existed at the same time.  Our paths were, except for a very few of my earliest years, inextricably intertwined.

Programming went from being a childhood interest to a college path to some of my first paid work to the company that Cabel and I started.  It’s all because of Apple, and Apple is because of Steve Jobs.

I’m not trying to be dramatic here. My life would be unrecognizable without Steve Jobs.  So that’s why it’s hard for me to even comprehend that now we really are without him. I’ve never known a world without Steve Jobs in it. 

He challenged us all — not just Apple, the whole industry — to make the world better. Not just make a better computer, or a better application, but leverage those tools to really make an impact, to make a difference in people’s lives. 

A few weeks ago, our baby daughter started walking around the house for the first time, with the aid of a little red walker wagon. I shot a few minutes of HD video on my iPhone of her joyous face as she pushed it around the living room.  

Shortly, I’d edited the video in iMovie down into a little one-minute montage, with theatrical-quality transitions, backed by “Here Comes My Baby”, then exported it directly to YouTube, and had people around the world (including family back in England) watching it within minutes. It took maybe half an hour at most. Did I ever imagine I’d have an HD non-linear video editing station with instantaneous worldwide distribution in my home?  Never. 

But Steve did. 

I joked to my wife, “what we just did with that video was straight out of an Apple commercial.”  That’s the funny thing about Apple commercials, though. They’re not sci-fi pipe dreams selling you a promise of a future that might be. They really built that stuff, and you can do it right now.  Steve understood that a computer by itself wasn’t much more exciting than a hammer. Wouldn’t it be great, to borrow his phrase, if that hammer could help you build something world-class without you needing decades of carpentry experience?

I don’t know how you thank the person who brings that kind of sea change to your life, to the whole world.  I’m not sure I can find the words or assemble them in the right order.

Instead I’ll do what I can to keep aspiring to Steve’s level of passion for making the greatest possible stuff we can make for the benefit of others. He may be gone, but that’s with us forever. 

— Sent from my iPad