I’m sitting in front of my iMac. The ringer on my iPhone is turned to Vibrate so that the theme from How The West Was Won doesn’t distract me while I’m writing. Or Elvis’ “Burning Love”–which is what would ring if my husband called from his job. He works for a company that makes iPhone and iPad accessories. He gets to and from that job in a car with an Apple sticker on it. (That’s the only bumper sticker he’ll allow on our car–ever.)
There isn’t a corner of my life that Steve Jobs hasn’t touched in some roundabout way.
Sometimes I wondered if he wasn’t an alien or someone who came through the Stargate because he impacted the world in a cuckoobananas crazybig way. I smile at people in the grocery store hoping that a bit of kindness will blunt the edges of their world. That’s my version of “impact”, and it makes me feel like a pinch of fines next to the meteor that was Steve Jobs.
And so here I am, writing a sort of eulogy for a person I never met. A person whom I’ll nevertheless miss terribly. I suppose, though, that as long as I listen to music on my iPod and write novels on my iMac and watch movies on the Mac Mini hooked up to my TV some small part of Jobs lives on.
Yeah, but larger than iPods and iMacs, Steve was pretty much the man behind the personal computer in general (in fact he originally lost his job at Apple precisely because he wanted to create a “personal computer” at a time when no body with any sense thought anybody outside of the hi-tech industry could ever have any use for a computer), and the graphical user interface. Pretty much anytime someone sits behind a personal computer, they should thank Steve Jobs; and anytime they interact with it by clicking an icon instead of typing into a command line, they should thank Steve Jobs. After that they can start thanking him for iPods, iPhones, iPads, Pixar, etc.
Steve was pretty much the man behind the personal computer in general
That’s not exactly true. He was both much less and much more than that.
I first started hearing about the possibilities of personal computing (before there were any such things) from friends who had been working on developing some early OSs. Jobs was one of many, many people working on the concept of personal computing, and he wasn’t the first or the one with the most elegant solutions to the OS challenge.
The people I knew from that world all saw PCs as (future) things that would be run by typing in commands, and indeed my first PC was like that: give the DOS command to do this, give the DOS command to do that, give DOS-based commands within each software program to get things done. And it was beautiful, to a nerd (a group in which, for the purposes of this discussion, I include myself). Both the ability to do these things and the way the OS worked. Just beautiful, the way an equation can be beautiful.
But for people who weren’t nerds, the inherent beauty of being able to give precisely the right command is … um, negligible. In fact, learning a new language to make your computer do things seemed like a burden, and the equipment itself was big and clunky. Jobs’s genius was to understand that most people would like it if someone could make the physical beauty of the machine equivalent to the conceptual beauty of the job it was doing, and to make ease, rather than competence, the hallmark of using the machine.
Now, that’s a special kind of genius. And he understood how to make PCs popular (even if Apple actually hasn’t been as successful at that as some other companies; Jobs had the ideas about how to do it), and how to make other electronic accessories popular. But he wasn’t the father of personal computing; he was the father of making personal computing look easy and good.
I do not know of any device that mainstreamed personal computing in an even remotely similar capacity to the Apple II. When I credit Jobs for personal computing, it’s not because he was the first to think of it or the first to build it (and let’s face it, even within Apple, Wozniak was the technical brain), but because he was the first to make it happen. The most life-changing device in the world is pretty much worthless if nobody uses it.
I loved this post Kath. I came to really get Apple in college and when I switched to my new position 6 years ago. It was genius how he got the computer so easy to use, and encouraged all the people around him to think in all different directions. I think his legacy is that he shared his visionary characteristics with so many other good people at apple.