  Steve Jobs Taught Me How to “Click”   Death is life’s change
agentSteve Jobs  I grew up as someone who loved words — first
German words, then English words. Of course,  I also loved
people. Weirdly, I got into writing about technology not to
cover gadgets, or what makes them tick, but to write about the
people who make gadgets tick. To me, Dungeons and Dragons were
relics from the dark ages, “ping” and “Pong” were elements of a
diplomacy that opened doors to China.  In short, I never
considered myself a nerd.  Still, growing up in the 60s and 70s,
when vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, and computers
remained rare islands of bountiful mysteries requiring air
conditioned comfort and precision tooling, I never realized that
some of my contemporaries were on to something.  I’ve written
before about how the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 changed
all that for me. Writing about technology helped me meet some
interesting people.  Steve Jobs was one of those.  I was focused
on Microsoft for most of my techni