My Apple ][+ was a critical rung on the ladder that took me from working class kid to college professor. My mother and oldest brother never graduated high school, let alone college. To buy that computer I literally dug ditches alongside my father, who worked installing cable TV. My Apple was a conduit for opportunity, a channel for creativity. I never had to dig ditches again. I wrote and sold software in high school. I graduated in 1984, bought one of the first Mac 128k machines, and headed to college, the first in my family to attend. I’d scurry around campus carrying my Mac in an enormous pack on my back, Ghostbusters-style.
I came home weekends to work in an Apple dealership – climbing more rungs. I wrote and sold Mac software to automate a belt buckle factory and a penny stock brokerage. The cash let me transfer from state school to Boston College. I learned about BC because the Apple dealership I’d worked at received a publication edited by one of its professors called “Wheels for the Mind” – a catalog highlighting the Mac’s use in education. I met my wife at BC. We’ll be married twenty years this December.
In industry I wrote & deployed code on Macs worldwide. I dragged one of the first Mac portables with me to Moscow during the last days of the Soviet Union. There was a period where I didn’t use Apple – the dark days of Cupertino without Steve – but that changed at the turn of the century. As a professor I’ve had the enormous privilege to bring my students to all of Steve Jobs’ final MacWorld keynotes starting in 2005. We saw history being made. We saw genius at work.
Today my 11-year-old codes on his Mac laptop. My 1st grader learns math on that same machine. My two year old learned her alphabet on the iPad. Rungs on the ladder, all.
When I met Steve Jobs I said just one sentence “thank you for your work”. There are others who have climbed to greater heights than I, those who have done greater things. But it’s not an understatement to say that Steve Jobs’ work, his vision, his inspiration, and the products that he helped lead and design propelled this one adopted son of working class immigrants from a generation that dug ditches and toiled the night shift in a plastics factory to one that has had vastly greater opportunity.
Steve – thank you for your work.
—
Prof. John Gallaugher
Carroll School of Management
Boston College
Oct. 6, 2011