10/10/2011 
Quotes from Steve Jobs, as compiled by various sources:
Personal Reflections. I’m 57. I’ve been suckling at the breast of technology since I was an infant. My mother was keypunch operator and self-taught computer programmer (FORTRAN, COBOL) in the 50’s. My first job at 6 years old was operating a monstrous tabulator standing atop a stack of key punch card boxes. At 9 years old I was verifying key punched cards for her earning 10 cents an hour.
In the 60’s, she worked midnights at Ford Motors in rooms filled with mammoth computers, data on platters and huge tape drives. I skipped school a lot to play video games the Ford programmers invented… long before the release of Pong.
Inevitably, I’ve always acquired and attempted to employ new technology before it was ready for prime time.
In the 80’s I purchased what was touted as the FIRST Integrated Multi-Media solution (using my entire inheritance) only to have IBM retract their promotional statement because it completely failed to live up to expectations.
Then in the 90’s after buying the first turnkey digital video editing system, I found out (after 6 months of frustrating glitches and crashes) it was really still a “beta” release.
I’ve spent long hours in the middle of the night struggling to perform online research and international stock trades in China from Los Angeles, laboring with an incredibly slow 5600, or 14.4 kbit/s modem with the constant background screeching.
From the early 00’s throughout this last decade, I’ve attempted to utilize available technologies to develop innovative applications in the International Trade Information Industry. There is still so far to go.
So, in this last half century, I’ve gone from working with 80 column key punch cards, wherein were stored all the batch instructions for a specific data processing job…enduring several minutes for each image to download… to storing and manipulating terabytes of data at lightning speeds across continents.
Back in frontier days, the trail west was paved with the blood of the largely unrecognized pioneers who created the pathways and laid the foundation upon which modern society is built upon.
Steve Jobs is one such guy. Certainly there are lots of people whose combined contributions can and should be credited along with his for the development of the elegant, easy to use, life enhancing technologies that we enjoy today. Notwithstanding, Steve Job’s impact on our world cannot be thus marginalized or minimized. Our technological world is different and better because of him.
We all love our iPods, iTunes, iPhones, iPads, iMacs, iLife, IWork, Macbooks (one and all) as well as the host of accessories and cool devices that Apple has produced over the last several decades.
As a technologist and pioneer, I deeply appreciate and respect the contribution that Steve Jobs has made to my life, our lives and technology in general. RIP Stevie.
World Trade Daily 
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