Dear Steve,

Hi, my name is Andrew. I never knew you. In fact, I never actually owned one of your products. In fact, I hated them. I relished the fact that I could hate them. I hated the fact that you turned something so mediocre into the most trendy thing on this planet. I hated the fact that your products created a group of elitist assholes who followed you like a cult. I laughed very hard when you told people they were holding the iPhone 4 wrong, mostly at your expense.

These aren't things I would have admitted to you...far from it. If we had met, and discussed your company's policies, I would have said I disagreed with them. I would have given you my very well thought out reasons why. I'm sure you would have corrected me on a few points. You did, after all, help pave the way for new technologies, as everyone has admitted. You brought to the mainstream something that we nerds were hoarding all to ourselves. What you tried to do was right. Some of your execution was a little poor. I like to believe that your heart was in the right place.

All this though...this isn't really my point. The point I want to make is about the iMac and OSX. The original OSX. You see, Steve, you're the reason I'm a computer programmer. And because of that, I've never been truly able to hate you.

When I was in high school my freshman year, my school had purchased a whole new computer lab full of iMacs. These were the first version that still looked like old eMacs, only in all white. Most people don't realize this, but these machines were the first to pave the way for an entire decade of design for apple products. They didn't quite have the touch screen buttons on the monitor. That was a couple years away. But they had OSX. And OSX was built like unix. It had a unix style command line. And this, in my first computer science class, was how I was introduced to programming.

I would love to say that I was introduced to it through linux, as some of my colleagues can claim. I wasn't. I originally took that class because I liked video games. I was very surprised to learn how hard programming was. It took a level of abstract though. However, the one thing that I understood very quickly was the idea of compiling on a command line. OSX did NOT make it easy. In fact, it was just as hard as linux. I had trouble with the basics of programming then. But I never had trouble with my efforts trying to make it work. That was the first time I had to admit that Apple did something better than Microsoft.

Over the years, it has been a struggle for me to do determine which operating system is the best. It took me a while to realize the correct answer: there isn't one (and it sure as hell isn't Solaris). The real answer is that there isn't a best. Each one is catered to something different. And you catered yours to something special, and you did it well.

I like to tell a story about how I got into computers. I fixed my parents computer when I wasn't supposed to, and my mom grounded me for it. It's true. And that is what first got me into computers. However, because of your company, Steve, I became interested in programming. And that shaped the rest of my life. I'm a software developer now. I work for a very successful investment bank that hired me for my programming abilities. I leverage them every day (though I will never leverage it for your stuff. I would have loved to ask you what the hell your developers were thinking when they though objective C was a good idea for the iPhone). And I owe a small bit of that to you.

I'm sure in a few days I'll go back to hating your company for it's pioneering in the terribleness of DRM, privacy violations, and the like. But I still have to recognize the part you have played in my life, even though I abhorred touching anything your company produced.

So thank you, Steve Jobs. I wouldn't be here today without you, in as much as you have helped. I would like to think you passed on satisfied with your work on this Earth. I just hope the rest of us can say that we did even a sliver as much. God speed.