Today, I am wearing a charcoal gray long sleeve pullover shirt and blue jeans. It's not a black mock turtleneck, but it's the closest thing my wardrobe had to offer. It's just my way of honoring Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday, October 5, 2011, at the age of 56.
Ironically, his passing comes almost exactly 20 years to the day after I took delivery of my first Macintosh computer--a Mac Classic with two megabytes of RAM and a 40-megabyte hard drive. It came with a monochrome StyleWriter ink jet printer and I felt like I was ready to take on the world. Two decades, 10 Macs and two iPods later, I still consider myself among
the Apple faithful, grateful to Jobs, his early partner Steve Wozniak,
and their vision that has so greatly changed our world. I'm not going to recount his exploits and accomplishments. That's been done to death (sorry, bad pun). Instead, I'll concentrate on how Jobs' vision has impacted my own life.
At the time I got that first Mac, Jobs was in the midst of his exile from Apple and the company was heading into its darkest days. I was just beginning graduate school. The Humanities Computer Lab at N.C. State University had a whole bunch of IBM PCs with green screen monitors sporting WordPerfect 5.1 on DOS, but in the back were four or five Macs. They were the original all-in-ones with nine-inch black-and-white screens, but sitting down at one of those was a whole different experience. I knew within minutes of touching one for the first time that it was the computer for me. Less than a month later, I ordered one from the campus bookstore and I haven't looked back.
Having a Mac back in the early '90s made me feel like I was part of the cool kids' club, something I've seldom experienced in my life. For once in my life, I was the one with the cool toys, especially compared to the DOS-based PCs most people had. But more than that, I had a machine that would allow me to unlock my creative side in a way that I had never before been able to do.
Although to be completely honest, had I started graduate school a year
later, I might well have settled blithely into the world of Windows as
those DOS PCs were replaced in the lab the following year with newer
Windows models. Instead, I've always seen Windows for the derivative work it is. Microsoft developed Windows after getting a look at the Mac operating system's source code in order to create Word, which was originally a Mac application.
Of course, the graphical user interface didn't originate with Apple. Legend has it Apple stole the design from Xerox after examining Alto, a prototype project developed at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The more accurate version of the story, as told by Steve Wozniak in his autobiography iWoz, is that Apple adapted the graphical interface first to the Lisa and then the Macintosh with Xerox's blessing because unlike the upstarts from Apple, they didn't see it as having any commercial viability. Jobs, on the other hand said he realized almost instantly that he was seeing the very future of computing. It was that laser focused vision, the ability to see what the market wanted before the market even knew it existed, that will be sorely be missed at Apple and in the technology industry as a whole.
That's why I show my tech writing students a YouTube video of how Jobs crafted his presentations when we talk about oral communication. I want to expose them to a little of that passion and vision so that maybe, just maybe, one of them will catch the spark and do something insanely great with his or her life. That would be the highest tribute anyone could pay Steve--or me.
Update--Shortly after I posted this, I went out to run some errands and found myself at a nearby thrift shop. My only purchase was a black turtleneck shirt.
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