Thank You, Steve

It's hard for me to remember what year it was, but I must have been around 10 years old, when my dad brought home our first Macintosh - the Mac 512K or "Fat Mac" as it was called. We were already an Apple household, having an Apple IIe which my brother and I used from the very beginning of memory. But the Mac was different and incredible – and in my case, life changing.

27 years later, I'm sitting in front of my MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM (vs. the 0.0005 GB of RAM of the Fat Mac) writing this, having woken in London to the news of Steve's passing (which I read on an iPhone with one of my twins in my lap). For me, however, the impact of Steve's passing is more than just a "I read it on a device he invented," like many. He's defined my life and set the trajectory for my career, this company, and lives of dozens of employees who have worked for me in the last 19 years.

As a kid, I was learning everything that I knew about technology from that Mac 512 and the Apple IIe, two of Steve's original inventions. I learned how to program. I learned how we could create logic that mimicked the human brain on little floppy disks. I learned about how computers were supposed to interact with people - in natural and inspiring ways. I also learned a thing or two about fixing them, installing an overclocking chip to make a Mac faster and adding hard drives (20MBs!) and printers to other Macs that we would later acquire. I learned the difference between software and hardware; the difference between RAM and storage; and how to determine the speed of a modem connection based on the sounds that it made.

A few years later, I started at a summer job in a little Apple shop in Birmingham, AL called Village Computers. I found myself helping the sales guys on the sales floor and the service manager fix Apples and Macs. And whenever I saw a new model of Mac, I would get excited like today's teenagers with a new iPhone. The Mac IIx - the most powerful computer I had ever put my hands on. The SE/30 - more power in a compact package. Wow. It's was a little geek's dream. One which to this day hasn't stopped.

When I moved to Boston to go to college, I was on my way to become an Aeronautical Engineer (i.e. Rocket Scientist). Steve was long gone from Apple by this time, and the Mac was just a bit player in the world of IBM PC clones. Even so, the Mac was part of my blood and I started Tech Superpowers as a freshman in a dorm room, helping customers who we still have today (Thanks Jerome!) get Macs working in their businesses.

By 1995, I was just a semester into graduate school, I knew something was wrong. My mind just wasn't into my studies. I didn't want to talk about thermodynamics and propulsion systems, I wanted to talk about megabytes and megahertz. So just a few months later, much to the dismay of my parents, I left the protected environment of MIT and started my first full-time job working for myself in a small room on Newbury Street.

By any criteria, that was an insane decision. Graduates from the #1-ranked Aero/Astro program did extremely well in the world, and Apple was not doing well at all. Within a few months, the famous Business Week article "The Fall of An American Icon" would come out, putting my business plan of providing Mac support to businesses in real question.

In the last paragraph of the Business Week article, Rebello and Burrows ask, "Can Apple help itself out of this jam?" The answer was clearly: "No, but Steve Jobs can."

In the 4 years that followed, Apple began the turnaround of the century, and we rode the wave. As the iMac was released, Tech Superpowers was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America. And today, while we do less sales in a year than the average Apple Store does in a month, we employ 25 people in New England and London and help hundreds of businesses and professionals to live their lives in peace with technology.

So thank you, Steve. Thank you for inspiring me as a kid. Thank you for creating my career. Thank you for showing me a path for a life where I love what I do. Thank you for helping me to work with some of the best people in the world. The rest of my life I owe in part to you, and that's neither exaggeration nor playing for the cameras – it's truth. Technology will always change and all of your inventions will work their way into a museum, but what you've done to help people like me to find their place in the world will go on forever.

Michael Oh
President and Founder,
Tech Superpowers, Inc.

Image credit to Kuo Design

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	Thank You, Steve oh's blog Login or register to post comments It's hard for me to remember what year it was, but I must have been around 10 years old, when my dad brought home our first Macintosh - the Mac 512K or "Fat Mac" as it was called. We were already an Apple household, having an Apple IIe which my brother and I used from the very beginning of memory. But the Mac was different and incredible – and in my case, life changing. 27 years later, I'm sitting in front of my MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM (vs. the 0.0005 GB of RAM of the Fat Mac) writing this, having woken in London to the news of Steve's passing (which I read on an iPhone with one of my twins in my lap). For me, however, the impact of Steve's passing is more than just a "I read it on a device he invented," like many. He's defined my life and set the trajectory for my career, this company, and lives of dozens of employees who have worked for me in the last 19 years. As a kid, I was learning everything that I knew about technology from that Mac 512 and the Apple IIe, two of Steve's original inventions. I learned how to program. I learned how we could create logic that mimicked the human brain on little floppy disks. I learned about how computers were supposed to interact with people - in natural and inspiring ways. I also learned a thing or two about fixing them, installing an overclocking chip to make a Mac faster and adding hard drives (20MBs!) and printers to other Macs that we would later acquire. I learned the difference between software and hardware; the difference between RAM and storage; and how to determine the speed of a modem connection based on the sounds that it made. A few years later, I started at a summer job in a little Apple shop in Birmingham, AL called Village Computers. I found myself helping the sales guys on the sales floor and the service manager fix Apples and Macs. And whenever I saw a new model of Mac, I would get excited like today's teenagers with a new iPhone. The Mac IIx - the most powerful computer I had ever put my hands on. The SE/30 - more power in a compact package. Wow. It's was a little geek's dream. One which to this day hasn't stopped. When I moved to Boston to go to college, I was on my way to become an Aeronautical Engineer (i.e. Rocket Scientist). Steve was long gone from Apple by this time, and the Mac was just a bit player in the world of IBM PC clones. Even so, the Mac was part of my blood and I started Tech Superpowers as a freshman in a dorm room, helping customers who we still have today (Thanks Jerome!) get Macs working in their businesses. By 1995, I was just a semester into graduate school, I knew something was wrong. My mind just wasn't into my studies. I didn't want to talk about thermodynamics and propulsion systems, I wanted to talk about megabytes and megahertz. So just a few months later, much to the dismay of my parents, I left the protected environment of MIT and started my first full-time job working for myself in a small room on Newbury Street. By any criteria, that was an insane decision. Graduates from the #1-ranked Aero/Astro program did extremely well in the world, and Apple was not doing well at all. Within a few months, the famous Business Week article "The Fall of An American Icon" would come out, putting my business plan of providing Mac support to businesses in real question. In the last paragraph of the Business Week article, Rebello and Burrows ask, "Can Apple help itself out of this jam?" The answer was clearly: "No, but Steve Jobs can." In the 4 years that followed, Apple began the turnaround of the century, and we rode the wave. As the iMac was released, Tech Superpowers was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America. And today, while we do less sales in a year than the average Apple Store does in a month, we employ 25 people in New England and London and help hundreds of businesses and professionals to live their lives in peace with technology. So thank you, Steve. Thank you for inspiring me as a kid. Thank you for creating my career. Thank you for showing me a path for a life where I love what I do. Thank you for helping me to work with some of the best people in the world. The rest of my life I owe in part to you, and that's neither exaggeration nor playing for the cameras – it's truth. Technology will always change and all of your inventions will work their way into a museum, but what you've done to help people like me to find their place in the world will go on forever. Michael Oh President and Founder, Tech Superpowers, Inc. Image credit to Kuo Design Submitted by oh on Fri, 10/21/2011 - 08:04 Public Content