We should endeavor to improve the lives of as many people as possible in a lasting and significant way, making the most of our own skills in the process.

Should we aim to affect as many people as possible? My heroes have tended to please themselves first, and to please everybody else by accident. When Steve Wozniak set out to invent the Apple personal computer, he did it for himself, and perhaps to show off for a few nerdy friends at the computer club. Noam Chomsky wrote generally about languages and grammars, and was allegedly annoyed when his research happened to lay the groundwork for major fields of computer science. I doubt many of history’s great advancements happened according to the plan of the geniuses who were responsible for them.

As a self-employed business owner, I want to improve the lives of my customers. And, yes, I would like to have a lot of customers. But Payne’s measure of success is too lofty. Rather than aim incompetently and uncertainly for a massive impact, I focus on a small area that I understand and that I care deeply about. I please a small subset of all people, but I please them greatly. Focusing on what I know and appreciate is the balance that keeps me self-funded, intellectually stimulated, and productive. Who knows, maybe I’ll turn out to be an accidental genius, as well.

Ambition to influence or change the world is, on its own, relatively useless. Pursuit of truth and understanding, on one’s own terms, is the noblest of endeavors. If you’ve found something you can work on all day for weeks, months, or years, don’t let anybody tell you it’s not worth doing.

I was lucky to join one of the most cavalier and competent teams in the company: the Mac OS system integration team. In a nutshell, we were in charge of the Mac OS System File, “System Enabler,” and other crucial bits that made your Mac a Mac. Whoo-hoo! Power! We made or broke your Mac experience, hopefully making more than breaking. I took my new job seriously and stepped carefully with every change. It felt great, and I cherished every contribution I made.

Later, I moved to the Mac OS X team and did similar work on the infrastructure of Mac OS X. In particular, with how it deals with older applications that rely on the “Carbon” framework. After years of using a custom Mac-only environment called MPW, I was using standard UNIX tools and building UNIX libraries. This felt awesome! I had grown up using an Amiga, then switched to Sun OS, where I spent a lot of time getting familiar with UNIX. There I was, and Apple decides to put the best UI in the world on top of Unix. I was in heaven.

While I was at Apple I saw a lot of failure. I saw the Newton fail. I saw Pippin fail. I saw PowerTalk fail. I saw Cyberdog fail. I saw Apple desperate to sell even a few hundred thousand Macs in a quarter. I saw the press lambast us and declare us dead. “Beleaguered” became an unfortunately common word in our office life.

But I kept looking around me, and I saw nothing but signs of success. I marveled at QuickTime, speech recognition, networking technologies like ZeroConf (Bonjour), and other things that have never seen the light of day. This company is awesome! I want to work here! They’re going to change the world!

Of course, they already had changed the world with the Apple II and the Macintosh, but as a young 20 year old, I was anticipating future growth. It was a bad time for Apple: competitors and the press were declaring our obsolescence. Michael Dell said we should give the money back to the shareholders and close the company. We persisted on a wing and a prayer, driven by Steve Jobs’s admonition that we could beat Dell. I believed in that mission, and I believe in it still.

In 2005, I wrote boldly about the end of Dell, and I have to confess I was a little over-ambitious. I could see a path where Apple would take Dell down faster than they have. I was wrong. Dell is still a strong  company. But that will change soon.

I joined Apple because they were threatening to change the world. I stayed on at Apple because they were changing the world. And I remain loyal to that company because, in spite of my absence, they have changed the world. In more ways than I can imagine, they’re inventing the future. And I’m along for the ride.

Dell is not changing the world, Microsoft is not changing the world. Hewlett-Packard is not changing the world.

Apple is changing the world, and damn it feels good to be part-Apple today.

He taught me to love computers. When I was 5 and living alone with my Mom, he brought me a copy of a BASIC programming magazine, and a Timex Sinclair computer. He tried to talk through the logic of control flow with me. Of course, it flew over my head, but it taught me enough to know that my dad’s finger could move across the rules on a piece of paper, and the rules dictated where his finger would go.

A few years later he and my Mom got back together and we all moved back in together. He bought me a Commodore 64, and set me up with some fun games. I didn’t program anything, I was too busy playing Little League baseball and trying to be a normal kid. Sometimes he played catch with me. On Father’s day we would drive to San Francisco to see the Giants. He didn’t even like baseball, but he did a good job faking it for me. He bought me frozen Carnation malts.

My Dad had gone back to school in his 30′s to earn a computer science degree. When we moved back in with him, he was starting his late-blooming career at IBM, where he worked for a short time. He moved on to Digital Research and worked on GEM, a graphical windowing system not terribly unlike the Mac. Later he joined MetaWare, where he worked as a compiler engineer with the same group of people for almost 20 years.

When I was 17, a friend of mine got into legal trouble, and I could have snitched on him and made it worse. I asked my dad for help, so he took me to a lawyer and paid for it. He didn’t judge me for wanting to protect my friend. He made it possible for me to be a loyal friend, even to somebody who may not have earned my Dad’s respect.

After I graduated from college and left the house, the years seem to rush by like a blur. I did my thing in San Francisco, working at Apple, meeting my (now) wife, and going back to school for a second degree. Meanwhile, I saw my Dad a few times a year. We always expressed our love for each other, but there was a lingering anxiety and awkwardness. Our relationship had frozen somewhat in the form we had left it in my teens: each of us struggling to come to terms with our significantly differing political and metaphysical beliefs. After my wife and I moved to Boston in 2005, I saw even less of my family, sometimes only once or twice a year.

He always expressed great pride about the career path I followed. He was impressed that I had graduated from University, found a great job at Apple, and then founded my own business, all after dropping out of high school (against his wishes!). He let me know so often of his pride, that he gave me the gift of never having to worry particularly that I might have disappointed him. I think this helped me to pursue my dreams more freely than ever.

His satisfaction with my career turned him slowly but surely from an Apple-hater into one of its biggest fans. A few years ago he lost his long-time job as a compiler engineer, and reoriented himself towards the Mac, starting a business of his own, and feeling his way towards a niche. He became certified in all manner of OS X support technician programs, and even decided to attend WWDC a couple years ago. Some of you will probably remember having met him there.

His business never really took off, and a sequence of unfortunate events handed him some serious blows. Life didn’t hand him a perfect hand, but he managed to leave some beauty here with us, and I am grateful for that. I would have loved to have seen what would have become of the rest of his life, and how my own young family would have fit into it.

The circumstances of his death are sad, and personal. We barely spoke over the past year, but I had a good conversation with him at my Grandmother’s funeral in November. Suffice to say, he died too young. I miss you, Dad.