Steve Jobs 1955-2011

I saw the news last night that Steve Jobs, co-founder and former CEO of Apple, had died after struggling with pancreatic cancer for years. Like many people whose lives have been greatly changed by the products he helped innovate and bring to market, I was saddened to hear of this… even though, with the reports of his health issues over the last couple of years, it didn't come as a complete surprise.

I think I became a "Mac Guy" sometime back around 1989 or so. I had been using an Atari ST computer for several years, and was pretty happy with it. Then my friend Rob, who was doing graphic arts work at a small design company across the parking lot from the new Mirage offices, showed me this thing called "Photoshop" -- I think it was version 1.5 or something, still only handling black and white and greyscale images -- running on the Mac IIfx (at that time the "hot rod" Mac) he was using.

After picking my jaw up off the floor, I knew I had to get with the program (literally!) and become a Mac user. It wasn't long -- probably a couple of weeks -- before I had my own Mac, a IIfx model with a gigantic 250 megabyte hard drive, running Macintosh operating system version 6, I believe. I still have it, though it hasn't sounded its happy start-up chime for many years. It sits on a table in my barn, beige case slowly yellowing with time.

But it was the start of a love affair with the Mac platform which is still going strong. I'm typing this blog entry right now on a MacBook Pro laptop, which is so much more powerful and capable and compact than that first Mac IIfx that comparisons such as horse and carriage to automobile come to mind. But the key elements that made the Mac so appealing to me from the day I tried one -- and these are elements which, I think, can be directly attributed to Steve Jobs' influence -- are still there: the ease of use, the directness of the interface, the sense that this was a computer made for people to use for work and play without getting in their way.

I remember being somewhat flabbergasted when, after Jobs had come back to Apple after going off and starting his own computer company called NeXT (yes, I bought one of those too, and the less said about that the better), and one of the first new versions of the Mac that came out after he'd returned was the first iMac, a kind of cool-looking all-in-one gizmo which -- SHOCK!!! -- did away with the floppy disk drive, and -- perhaps even more profoundly influential, eventually -- got rid of the SCSI and Appletalk and ADB connectors in favor of a relatively new connection technology called "USB". I wondered how I would cope without floppy disks… and discovered pretty rapidly that life without them was not so bad. Better, in fact. And USB became well-loved, especially for those of us who had fretted and fumed while dealing with SCSI and its frustrating quirks over the years. Now, it's hard to find a computer or electronic device which doesn't use some form of USB.

It's been said the the iMac was the computer that saved Apple, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. It was certainly a huge hit, and led directly to the models which we enjoy today.

Obviously, Steve Jobs didn't do it all. There were a lot of talented people working at Apple who helped to bring these amazing products to market. But it is telling to remember what Apple products were like during the time when Jobs was not at the company, and what they were like after he returned. It was really night and day. Without him, and his innovative ways of thinking about these things, life with Macs would have been greatly different.

I hope the people who now run Apple have learned enough over the years from Jobs that the company will continue to surprise and delight us with amazing things like the MacBook Air, the iPhone and the iPad, to name a few. I guess we'll have to wait and see. -- PL

(The image I used at the top of this entry is one I found at

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=13485403#post13485403

this morning when I was reading various testimonials about Steve Jobs. There were a lot of different photos of him and graphic tributes to him, but this one seemed the most poignant, for some reason. I don't know who created it. -- PL)

UPDATE 10-07-11: Now I know who created that moving visual -- a gent by the name of Ben Hughes. He left a comment on this post, as follows:

"Hey there!

It looks as if you didn't know where the original image in your post came from. FYI, I created it and originally posted it to my Tumblr. Feel free to link back to the original posting! http://obh.me/pmz6QT

Thanks for including my work in your memory of Steve."

Thanks, Ben... great work! -- PL