Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Two days ago, the world's innovation light dimmed slightly when the legendary Steve Jobs passed away. The well-known story of this creative genius has been repeated in many websites and news items over the past days, so I will not go into it again here. Instead let me relate a bit of my own experience with Apple.

My first real personal computer, which I got in 1980, was an Apple II Plus and it played a big part in getting me through my Computer Science degree when I was in London. After my first year working with mainframes and minicomputers which I found frustratingly cryptic and unfriendly, it was refreshing to encounter the Apple II microcomputer. I remember the beige unit came with a green monitor screen (default 40 characters wide unless you bought the additional 80-character card), two 5.25"  floppy disk drives, and 64Kbytes of RAM. As a student I could not afford the newly released Winchester external hard drive which could hold a "massive" 1 Mbyte of data.

Yet on this humble platform, hundreds of innovative software applications were born. Some of you old foggies may remember programs like Visicalc, Apple Writer, Wordstar, Harvard Business Graphics, Accounting Plus and PERTMaster (a project management software I was quite good at). And then there were games like Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, Astroids and Olympic Decathlon.

Here's a rare photo of me from 1980 ...

I was a true Apple fan back then. I attended almost every Apple show. I belonged to an Apple User Group in London. My 3rd year project was developed on the Apple II Plus. I even had a white sweatshirt with a huge Apple logo (the old rainbow striped one), which I often proudly wore.

It's been 30 years since those heady days, but being the hoarder that I am, I still have my original Apple II Plus computer stashed somewhere in our storeroom. I doubt it works any more, and even if the hardware does function, most of my floppy disks would be mold-infested by now. Maybe one day I can auction it off as a collector's item.

Steve Jobs may have had a relatively short life (by today's longevity standards) but he has touched millions of lives and his company Apple will likely continue to be a huge creative force for many years to come.

The ending words of Steve Jobs' convocation speech at Stanford in 2005 resonate with me: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." It is in essence a caution against complacency and arrogance. I believe it will help all of us in our careers and our lives if we heed these words. R.I.P. Steve.