As an overachiever himself, Steve had the talent to inspire (or drive) others to overachieve themselves. He had assembled a telented crew to design the Lisa and Mac and the graphical user interface elements that are now common across platforms. All personal computer users have benefitted from this.
In early 1984 I was shopping for a PC, reading Creative Computing to bring myself up to speed on the choices. At this time the IBM PC was primo, and its BIOS hadn’t yet been reverse-engineered, so there was the issue of various degrees of being “IBM compatible”. I figured a solid choice would be an IBM or Apple II, or maybe the DEC Rainbow... and then along came the Mac and I was captured. It was a radical conversion to the GUI. Delightfully, the Mac was the only PC then that didn’t ship with BASIC. Although I could write Fortran, I didn’t want to deal with that sort of thing on a personal machine. Sure was the right choice for me. Thank you, Steve.
In early 1984 I was shopping for a PC, reading Creative Computing to bring myself up to speed on the choices. At this time the IBM PC was primo, and its BIOS hadn’t yet been reverse-engineered, so there was the issue of various degrees of being “IBM compatible”. I figured a solid choice would be an IBM or Apple II, or maybe the DEC Rainbow... and then along came the Mac and I was captured. It was a radical conversion to the GUI. Delightfully, the Mac was the only PC then that didn’t ship with BASIC. Although I could write Fortran, I didn’t want to deal with that sort of thing on a personal machine. Sure was the right choice for me. Thank you, Steve.