This is the look of (I’m guessing) all of Apple Inc.’s web pages today; at least the U.S. and Japan Apple sites have this look. We learned this morning that Steve Jobs, founder and leader of Apple Computer and now Apple Inc. passed away from his fight with pancreatic cancer and its aftermath.

I have been a long-time Mac user, since the first Macintosh in 1984. That machine had 128KHz (that’s a k, as in kilobytes) and a one-sided floppy (but not so floppy) disk drive with 400k of storage. I later upgraded it to a Fat Mac with a double-sided drive and 512k of memory. I’m looking at the numbers on the MacBook Pro I’m using now and it has 2.8 GHz; that’s 7,000 times more processing speed, and I’m not even sure those numbers can be compared. I carry an iPhone, I use an iPad, and, based on Apple’s cool presentation of the new iPod Nano watch faces yesterday, I have one of those on the way to strap onto my wrist.

Virtually 1/2 of my life has Steve Jobs’ imprint on it. He truly was a genius. I am in shock, and I am sad about his death. Thank you for all your hard work, Steve. You are going to be sorely missed. Rest in peace…