Robert Scoble’s got a touching video on his blog today. He’s outside Apple’s Cupertino HQ and talking about his first encounter with an Apple computer. He talks about unboxing an Apple IIGS, the last in the line of pre-Mac Apples and a hugely influential machine in its time. He says:
That was the time I knew my life was going to be different from my dad’s
Robert Scoble on Steve Jobs
And I cried as he said it because I recognise that experience. I unboxed my first Mac in my student flat in Camberwell in 1985 (having basically browbeaten my own father into buying it for me). And that was my giant fork in the road. I’m wondering how many other lives forked radically with the arrival of one of Mr Jobs’ products and whether you could calculate the cumulative value of all those huge, personal changes of direction? What kind of number would that be? An incalculably large one, I should think.