As uninterested as I am in trying to piggyback on the misfortune of another, I feel compelled to write something about a person whom I’ve never met, yet who has fundamentally changed who I have become: Steve Jobs.

My Apple journey started in 1983. I was taking one of my final courses at San Francisco State University learning how to program in Basic. I created a program that was aimed at teaching very young children the difference between interacting with a keyboard and just mashing all of the keys. My goal was to complete this final course and graduate with my B.A. in Industrial Arts. But what resulted was a lifelong fascination with technology, its uses, and misuses.

Part of that class experience resulted in my accidentally erasing all 4,000 lines of my newly finished code by using the wrong DOS command. As painful as it was to spend three hours retyping all 4,000 lines referencing a paper printout, not graduating by failing my last class would have been worse. I counted myself lucky, but learned an important lesson the hard way about the benefits of good user interface. 

Some months later, I decided I needed to know more about computers from personal experience and therefore visited my local Beneficial Finance location (i.e. legal loan shark) and took out a $3,200 loan to buy an Apple IIe personal computer. The IIe was Apple’s third offering, and many Macintosh faithful forget that it lasted in the market until 1993, a full nine years after the Mac was introduced. From my perspective, the IIe didn’t really do much. The applications were few at that time, and without anything more than an Apple dot matrix printer, the output was less than exciting to say the least. I would say that the biggest benefit the Apple IIe brought to me was an insatiable curiosity about the potential of computers.

In 1984, I started a job where I had access to an Alpha Micro mainframe that the company used to run its business. This was eventually replaced by an IBM AS400 mainframe, but the most interesting work came out of a Taiwanese clone of an IBM AT PC (interestingly, branded the “Orange” PC) that the CEO brought back with him from a trip to Asia. I talked him into allowing the marketing and engineering departments to use it and we set up “the computer room” in a closet that made it easy for us to share the one PC and its daisywheel printer.

As the weeks went by, I was struggling to learn Microsoft DOS (disk operating system for those of you reading this who are under 40 years old) with its arcane command line interface, configsys files and autoexec bat files. Suffice it to say that the learning curve was steep. Still, using the Wordstar word processing program and Calcstar spreadsheet application beat the heck out of typing into our secretary’s IBM Selectric. The engineers and I later graduated to Lotus 1-2-3 and Jazz and really got good use out of the PC.

However, a daisywheel printer was not so useful as an output device for marketing materials that needed to look professionally produced. And anyway, my immediate problem was struggling to maintain a tight marketing budget while needing to produce multiple dealer and distributor price lists which cost $3,000 each to have typeset before printing. The frequent updates of these documents was eating my budget inside-out. So, after a few years, I convinced the CEO to send me to a desktop publishing seminar to learn more about whether we should buy a new computer to contain prepress costs. What I learned gave me the ammunition I needed to propose that the company should buy a Macintosh. I created a proposal, and in a week got the funds and was soon thereafter the proud user of a Macintosh IIci with 13” color Apple RGB monitor, Apple Scanner, and most importantly, Apple LaserWriter printer. This setup with Aldus PageMaker and Adobe Illustrator 88 cost the company a cool $14,000, but amazingly, it paid for itself in other reduced costs in only 1.5 years. 

But another more amazing thing happened, having a WYSIWYG system, from screen to 400dpi paper output, empowered me as a budding designer to be freed from the tyranny of budget constraints and vendor capabilities. It allowed me to be as creative and skillful as I wanted to be. My kids today take for granted that the world’s information is at their fingertips and that if they can dream up something, they can realize it on paper, on disk, or onscreen. It wasn’t that way 25 years ago. Realizing a creative vision only happened if you had the budget and business connections to translate your idea into reality. And putting a creative design on paper meant someone cutting rubylith, and burning halftones, and setting type. Needless to say, I went crazy. I worked ceaseless hours learning how to use my new software and the graphical Mac OS. Luckily, it was all logical and easy to use. The Mac was living up to its hype as the computer “for the rest of us.”

The desktop publishing revolution was precisely that…a revolution. It empowered people to express their own ideas while getting rid of many of the obstacles that were previously in the way. It also empowered a lot of bad design in the process. A good hammer does not a carpenter make, and after all, the Mac was just a better hammer. It didn’t turn people into good designers. But it empowered me to be the best that I could be and provided the opportunity for me to create much higher value for my employer. That coupled with concurrent post-graduate education in design made for a powerful combination.

The subsequent years saw me buy my own Mac SE30 which I carried with me to trade shows in the airplane’s overhead compartment. It was my original “laptop” and the employees at Kinko’s around the country knew me on a first name basis. I used my Macs to create 24-page price lists, 80-page full-color catalogs, magazine advertisements, multi-media slide presentations, tradeshow exhibits, product instruction manuals, illustrations, patent abstracts…you name it. The Mac allowed me to leverage my design and software skill to put me ahead of others in my field, providing high value to my employers, and advancing my career in ways that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. 

Who knew then that a subsequent job would see me leading a team of almost 80 people including 18 graphic designers, 28 marketers, 10 product managers, and 20 engineers—all who used Macs to create thousands of new products every year. My teams absolutely relied on the productivity that was enabled by the Macintosh to create ideas, share them, make decisions, and then realize them. We could not have done what we did, with the time to market we achieved, if it wasn’t for the Macintosh. Years later, that same team applied its efforts into creating accessories for the iPod which became the fastest selling products in company history at that time. But this was just the next step in my brush with the fruit of Steve Jobs’ labors.

For each successive job change I made from then on, I made a condition of my employment that I was given the best Apple laptop available. I didn’t do this from a sense of entitlement. I did it because I believed so deeply that the value and productivity it would allow me to provide was a proven and prudent investment. A few times, I had to argue with my new employers, promising them that I would provide my own tech support and in the process making no friends with their IT support staff. But in the end, my decision was correct. The value I brought as a worker was greatly enhanced as a result of the way I used the Mac platform to push the boundaries of productivity and creativity.

And it is this same ethos that drove me to have my children only use Macs at home. I’m happy to say that my daughter is a visual genius whose artwork is empowered through her use of her MacBook Pro, and that my older son is a likewise musical genius who has already self-produced, recorded, engineered and distributed his original music all on his MacMini. My youngest son is also a Mac guru at 12 and I see just as bright of a creative future for him.

Being CEO of a venture-backed company in Silicon Valley, I know many people who worked with, or for, Steve Jobs directly. I was once sitting in the lobby of Apple’s headquarters (what they call the “mothership”) waiting for a job interview when Steve Jobs walked in the front door 20 feet away from me. Although this was my closest brush with the man, I have spent the past 28 years sharing his vision and using the tools he provided.

Am I merely a fanboy? Perhaps. Do I think Steve Jobs was a great human being? I’ve heard enough stories about his own dark side to make that a question for others to answer. But what I do know—without question—is that my life has been substantially improved through the adoption of Steve’s vision of a technology tool made for regular people. 

One more thing…Thank you, Steve Jobs, for making my world a better place, and for helping me to be a better me.

Peter Radsliff
CEO, Presto Services Inc.