50 years ago today, two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) in their 20s and a 41-year-old named Ron Wayne founded Apple Computer Co. Wayne left almost immediately. The two Steves built one of the most valuable companies the world has ever seen. And four years after, I was born with no idea how much it would matter to me.

When I was a kid my mom went back to college to become a teacher. She’d drag me along and park me in the computer lab while she went to class. That’s where I first touched a computer: an Apple IIe with a green phosphor monitor and a floppy drive that clunked when you used it. I was hooked.

A few years later my mom bought me a used Apple IIgs. I played Matterhorn Screamer on it and spent hours typing in BASIC programs from computer magazines, hunting for the typo that kept them from running.

By middle school I’d moved on to a used 386 PC, and it would be a long time before I came back to Apple. But it didn’t matter what logo was on the box. That IIe in the computer lab had already done its work. It turned me into the kind of kid who wanted to know how the machine actually worked.

I would not be a software developer today if my mom hadn’t sat me at that computer while she went to class. She was trying to build a better life for us. She ended up building my whole career.

Happy birthday, Apple. And thanks, Mom.