TRIBUTE:THE FIRST time I saw a Macintosh, it barely seemed possible it could really be a computer.

Telling a PC what to do involved memorising arcane command abbreviations. The Mac was a cute little self-contained box. The screen showed windows of text, text that looked just like a real typefont – and you could change the fonts! You could open several of these windows and layer them. You told it what to do by using a drop-down menu of commands in real English.

And oddest of all, it had a snaking cord at the back, attached to an oblong of plastic. A “mouse”. I’d never seen such a thing. The first time I tried to use it, I rolled it all the way across the table and off the other end. It seemed a very strange way to operate a computer. But I was hooked.

A few years later, my then-boyfriend and I purchased my first Mac. It was horrendously expensive – you could buy two MacBooks plus an iPad now for what it cost then. It didn’t even have a hard drive (an extra $500). Instead, you had to insert a floppy disk with the operating system on it every time your used it.

I adored it. I was an Apple convert.

Only for a short blip, did I ever own PCs instead. Deciding to buy a PC laptop in the late 90s – my first laptop – was actually distressing. But a Jobs-less Apple had been in a seemingly endless tailspin and recent Macs had been glitchy and slow. Still, betrayal tasted sour.

Then, unexpectedly, I found myself working (short term, I thought) as a journalist, covering my secret love, technology. Naturally, I gravitated to the Apple beat – known commonly in the industry as the “deathwatch”, as the company was barely surviving.

Then Jobs returned. I was out in Silicon Valley at the time, and was in the Moscone main auditorium when then-CEO Gil Amelio walked a beaming Jobs onstage. In short order, Amelio was out and Jobs was in at his annual symbolic salary of one dollar a year. Thus began Apple’s resurrection.

Jobs was amazing onstage. He could make a brick seem magical, sell it to you at a premium and make you feel he’d done you a favour. His keynotes were legendary – but so were those products that started coming, one after another. The iMacs that again changed utterly our idea of what a computer should look like and do. The iPod. The iPhone. The iPad. Iconic, beautiful objects that sold not just to the faithful now, but everyone, and would eventually make Apple the second most valuable company on the planet.

Jobs was never an easy person to like. Admire, yes; but like? He had a prickly personality and I once felt his ire as he rudely dismissed my question at a press conference asking why Macs continued to cost more in Europe than the US.

It was poignant to be in the Moscone Center again at the moment I learned of Jobs’s death – the location I most associate with Apple and Jobs, where I’d watched him live so many times, and filed so many Apple stories.

Rest in peace, Steve.