A recent and rare trip to my attic revealed a time capsule of sorts — one that I hoped was there. Since the passing of Steve Jobs, Apple Computer’s founder and leader, I had wondered what had happened to the old Macintosh.

There stored in an original “Mac Pack” were the computer, hard drive, keyboard, mouse and all connecting wires.

Whether you listen to Itunes, use an Iphone, Ipad, Imac, or Iwhatever, this man changed the course of my world and probably yours.

While many posthumous tributes have been written about his contributions, my thought is that the man had vision to match computer technology with practical applications, and —long before Windows — dumbed the computer down so that a novice like me could use it. You just pointed to pictures and clicked.

Making the jump from manual typewriter to a Mac computer was a big step. Friends and classmates, many of whom were on the dean’s good list, would consistently complain about their computer classes in college where they studied DOSS and BASIC computer language.  The university had only one or two in the early 1970s and getting time on them meant standing in line until the wee hours.

A course in computer programming later in the 1980s taught me that I needed to be a computer user, not a computer programmer. I didn’t need to know how or why they worked, I just needed them to work.

That’s when the first Macintosh computer came to The Panolian office. The one little table-top model could do 10 times what our then state-of-the-art sophisticated phototypesetting equipment could do and do it much faster and print it out on plain paper instead of expensive photographic paper.

Soon, all employees were using some version of Apple computers and technology in the printing industry had taken another giant step.

When we plugged the old Macintosh up this week, it began began to hum—just like it did 20 some odd years ago when it was retired from service at our office.

Its memory included a file of my old columns which I’d thought to be lost. And after re-reading them, I now wish they were. Also there was a file of ads prepared for then-supervisor Dub Wilson.

Our son had a file that contained different games that he had enjoyed. Of course the graphics were all black and white and would now be considered primitive.

That computer was replaced and more generations of Macs have come and gone. Probably someone would have come along with a system that did what we needed in time. But Jobs came when he did and blessed us with user-friendly technology reshaping the way I do what I do, even as I write this on an antiquainted MacBook.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs.