In the week of tributes to Steve Jobs

October 08, 2011 Warning: This is a rambling sort of post. My first job out of my MBA program in 1994 was with a company making Macintosh compatible RAID (redundant array of inexpensive storage devices) system and memory products. This was during Jobs' absence from Apple and you could sense a category in confusion at the annual Macworld conferences. Macworld 1995 actually gave me my one of my favorite success stories of all time. It involved meeting a fellow Louisianian in the Starbucks outside Moscone to find out 10 minutes later that he was the trade show floor foreman. Never before has a 12-station networked booth gone up so quickly in Moscone. What should have been a three-day set-up was accomplished in six hours freeing me up to wander around and see the technology options. 1995 was a long time ago in technology speak. The RAID systems that I was marketing were probably 500MB (megabytes) back when optical storage devices were still being used for backup and floppies still existed. Apple and the technology he pushed for helped us move forward. Not everyone had e-mail in 1995; people still faxed; I had a marketing firm in Connecticut still doing "boards" for creative before putting in layouts electronically; Adobe Creative Suite was not quite what it is today. I am only 42 and I can remember life before e-mail. My music was on CD in 1995. My 1TB hard drive fits in the pocket of my briefcase. My book and music collection are stored on that drive. My life is better thanks to that technology. I can run a productive marketing consulting firm from anywhere in the world -- all while listening to iTunes. That is my rambling way of saying: Steve Jobs impacted my life and yours too if you think carefully.