I was initially surprised that I felt emotional at the news of Steve Jobs' passing but actually it does make sense. More than just respect for the man's accomplishments and his character, it just would seem obvious that I should care a lot since I owe a lot of my career and lifestyle to Apple.

I've used a variety of Apple products all the way to the nearly the beginning. My parents bought my brother and I an Apple ][+. Then it became an IIIc, a ][GS and then my father's company acquired a MacSE at about the same time I became interested in computer graphics. I was a big Apple fan right from the start even as other friends and people were acquiring PCs. Of course the first PCs were incomparably crude compared to the existing Apples and first and second-generation Macs. And when the PC revolution suddenly took hold in business, then the bad days of Apple began. My father wrote on his Facebook yesterday that he felt as though he had lost a brother. Extreme, perhaps, but I can see why.

Back when Apple was worth very little, at one time about $300 million, and was run by people such as John Sculley and Gilbert Amelio, I had somehow convinced my Dad to buy some Apple stock. And yes, that was the time to buy (not that anyone is rich, I'm just saying that it was a good thing). At that time, I was in a technical program then using an Mac Quadra 605 (LC475 in the U.S.) and it was the height of the Windows vs MacOS wars. No one then really counted on Apple being anything more than a niche player in PC and certainly not in consumer electronics. Who wanted to invest in that?

I had a sticker on the bumper of Toyota Corolla that said: "Windows 95=Macintosh '88" or something like that. And it was totally true, even though at the time we were already on our second PC, albeit primarily for playing pirated games. Still, on that Quadra, I was making 3D graphics for the first time and that eventually lead me into animation on SGI systems.

Even thinking about that time is like thinking of a halcyon age where people ooed and ahhed over swanky Indigos and Irix servers. As a comparison at that time, Apple was struggling and was considering filling some file server niche and Silicon Graphics had a market capitalization of over seven billion dollars. Fast forward to today and SGI filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006; its headquarters became the Computer History Museum.

In that intervening time I had become a committed PC-user but it is a credit to Jobs that I still was an Apple consumer, as he was responsible for transitioning Apple from being the makers of the Macintosh to the consumer-electronics giant it is today and much of Macintosh influenced obviously Windows, lead to the development of Adobe products which I use daily and for iPhone smartphone development that my company addresses as a solution vector.

Today there are shrines outside of Apple stores and I will forgive people for their sentimentality. I was never part of the cult of Apple but I obviously owe quite a bit to that company and to the man who, to all observers, was its chief architect and visionary.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.