In 1981, I was on a fishing boat chugging from Tulagi to Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, taking the Asian Development Bank auditor to catch his plane. He said to me, “Have you heard of a company called Apple?” Ah, no. “They could change your life”, he said. “Anybody can have a computer now, and just imagine what it could do in your warehouse.” Back then, managing a boat yard in the Solomons involved importing everything from hammers and nails, and nuts and bolts, to the Caterpillar engines that drove the ten tuna pole and line catcher boats we were building. Our warehouse was a big deal, and we kept all our stock records on 5-inch cards. Computers never happened in my time in the Solomons, but when Heather’s business started to crank up I quit boat design, and one of the first things I did was to buy an Apple //e and VisiCalc, and computerise our accounts and order processing. My OP app worked OK, but Apple and accounting didn’t get on in those days, and we had to sleep around a bit. We couldn’t afford the new IBM PC, so I bought a Morrow running CPM and a local accounts package. I liked that machine because when it crashed mid-transaction I could go in and edit the text record manually to balance the books. Those were the days :-) But my heart was already Apple’s. God knows how we saw the Superbowl ad in New Zealand – probably on the news – but I wanted a Macintosh. The 128K was a seductive toy, but when the Macintosh Plus came out, and the Laserwriter, and Pagemaker, I was in like Flynn. We run a Windows and Apple network now, and write cross-platform software, but … my heart belongs to Apple. We’ve stuck with them through thick and thin. I retired from geekdom when Stephen networked our computers back in the day, and now I’m a happy dumb user. Thank you Stephen, Team PJ, Alkesh, Anna B, the lab geeks and the support crew. Today I unpacked my new cinema display at home, plugged in my MB Air, cranked up my Parallels upgrade to make sure it ran with Lion, and sat down to read the Herald online while I ate lunch. The first thing I read was that Steve Jobs had died. I’ve been working at computers for almost thirty years now. Thank you Steve, and SteveW, for empowering the rest of us. What a different place the world is. RIP. Ian