Count me among the millions influenced by Steve Jobs.

I can’t ever remember tearing up over the death of a CEO I didn’t know. Learning of Steve Jobs’ death last night (an instant message from my daughter appeared on my iPhone) was a shock but not a surprise.

Like learning about the passing of a relative who has been seriously ill, the jolt of Jobs’ death was cause to ponder the larger questions in life. Here’s a reminder: this is going to happen to me someday. As Jobs once said, “live your life like today will be your last and someday you’ll be right.”

Like thousands of others now expressing their sadness at his death, Jobs had an impact on my life in a big way.

Many years ago at my former job in radio, I earned a $6,000 bonus for exceeding my quota of signing radio stations to carry Atlanta Hawks radio broadcasts. What to do with all that money?

Personal computers were new and I knew little about them except that small businesses were beginning to use them. I asked my WGST radio colleague Mike Lawing, an engineer at the station, what to buy and he said, “Oh, you want a Mac.”

So I took my checkbook to a computer store in Cobb County called BusinessLand and bought a Mac SE and an Apple dot matrix printer. It took almost all of my $6,000. When I got home, my wife was on the phone, which allowed me to sneak the boxes in without her seeing them until she hung up.

I grinned and said, “Look what we got!” She responded, “Alright, and what are we going to do with that?” “I don’t know.”

The machine sat in our home office for almost a year before the idea for a business of my own kicked in. That Mac SE, the one with a 20 meg hard drive and 1 meg of RAM helped launch the business that fed and clothed our family and dozens of others.

Steve Jobs’ design of that late-‘80s Mac, its intuitive black and white bitmap desktop and software like HyperCard and the Font/DA mover helped What’s Up Interactive get off the ground.

We stayed with the Mac platform in those early years — never a Windows machine even though they were a lot cheaper — moving to a Mac LC, then an SI, then PowerPCs even through the dark times when Jobs wasn’t at Apple. This was the era when Apple was doing so poorly, Michael Dell suggested that Apple be liquidated and cash paid out to stockholders.

At one point in the late ‘90s I was the only one here on a Mac and my IT guy said it was time to standardize on Windows. (“Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.”)

Because I respected Steve Jobs, I went back to BusinessLand and looked over his NeXT computers, but they were way too expensive for what we needed. And when Jobs returned to Apple, things began to hum. We went from System 6 to System 7 to System 8. (Was there ever a 9? I just remember OS X.)

There has always been enough material out there about Jobs and Apple to get a sense of the man. His design brilliance and attention to detail, his disdain for consensus, his arrogance (parking his car diagonally across handicapped parking spaces) and how hard he was to work for, sometimes calling employees “dumb” and creating such tension during development of the first iPhone, an Apple executive slammed her office door so hard it fused shut. They had to use an axe to get her out.

Then, following his illness, his brilliant Stanford University commencement speech addressed his thoughts about the larger questions of faith, career, family and death.

His influence in multiple industries is well documented. Jobs up-ended the music business, disrupting the comfortable lifestyle of wealthy record execs and re-setting the playing field for musicians who had been paid a fraction of their worth. He reinvented movie animation. He re-set the relationship between mobile device manufacturers and major telecom carriers. He reinvented tablet computers, given up for dead, and ignited the product category.

Steve Jobs’ legacy is certainly felt at our house and in our company.

Today we use Final Cut, Adobe’s Mac products and Apple’s awesome Keynote presentation software that puts PowerPoint to shame.

When my daughter Cameron texted me last night that “Steve Jobs died,” I had to stop what I was doing and for the next while, take it in.

Never met the man. But Steve Jobs’ influence helped define the course I’ve taken.