Steve Jobs

So, Steve Jobs is dead. Apparently.  If this was another age there’d be a new religion in the making.  But this is the 21st century, so he’ll have to be content with trending on twitter, and making the front page at google.  As much as you can be content when you die before the iPhone5 comes out.

But anyway, this isn’t an article about Steve Jobs.  There’s enough of them, written by people far more qualified, and with a far greater grasp of the English language.

So instead, this is about me.  At least I should be qualified, even if my grasp of the language still isn’t up to it.

30 years ago, as Steve Jobs was bringing the early Apple computers to market, I was getting my first taste of computing.  It wasn’t on an Apple, but rather on a mainframe at Moorabbin TAFE.  We (a group of grade 4 students) sat in a separate room connected to dumb terminals, while all the heavy lifting was done behind the scenes.  At various times in the history of Steve Jobs and Apple, it would have seemed that the next generation would look at such a setup as both outdated and downright bizarre.  Except today as the next generation speaks into their smartphones, their ‘smart’ terminals send their voice data around the world, to be processed and sent  back to their phones as the text. The heavy lifting is still done behind the scenes.

My next experience of computing (remembering that computers weren’t ‘everywhere’ in the early 80s), was my first taste of desktop computing.  It was during a visit to a local High School and involved the now grade 5 (or was it 6) students, going through the same basic computing instructions as we’d done on the mainframe a year or two earlier but this time on individual TRS80s.  In 2011 it might not seem that exciting to get a computer to generate ‘Hello World’ on the screen, but it really was exciting at the time.  There were no graphical interfaces in those days (unless you count the Xerox interface that Steve Jobs was inspired by), and we were still some way off Apple getting screams of excitement at the Macintosh debut for showing text scrolling across a monochrome screen.

Sometime in the next couple of years I saw my first Apple.  It was a IIe, which was the must have personal computer of the time.  There was one at school, and a couple of my friends also had them.  We played games of sorts on them, but my memory is a bit hazy.

At some point around here, in 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple. And somehow, despite the success of the Mac, I didn’t really come across an Apple product for much of the next decade.  As a high school student I did Computer Science as a subject, thinking that it might come in handy some time.  It might have helped at some stage, but we were working on BBC RISC machines, and I didn’t have a computer at home, so, despite the concepts being useful, putting things in practice was a little difficult in a world that was steadily becoming Microsoft-ised. The most notable thing about this computer class though, was the teacher.  I don’t remember his name, but he was officially the first Apple evangelist that I had met.  (today they might be called fanboys, but it was a bit different then).  As we all tapped away at our BBC machines, trying to get them to do something useful he extolled the virtues of the Mac.  As we worked in our books trying to work out how you make an XOR gate out or ORs and ANDs he extolled the virtues of the Mac.  As we searched through the pile of paper coming out of the printer, and tried to tear off our section of BBC BASIC code, he extolled the virtues of the Mac.  I guess, in hindsight, that he ‘got it’.  And I guess, in hindsight, that I didn’t.  But then again I was a teenager (who hated more parts of the world than he’d care to admit), so understanding anything was pretty unlikely.

So I trudged off to uni.  I didn’t study ‘computer science’, or ‘software engineering’, or ‘information technology’, but there was a solid component of computer skills required.  And the labs were all dominated by x86 machines.  By this stage I had a 286 at home (Amstrad, I think), and it’s fair to say that Microsoft had taken over both my world, and _the_ world.  But the mac evangelists wouldn’t go away.  At uni I met fellow collective apathite russm.  It’s fair to say that he loves a Mac, or anything with an iName.  So despite the prevalence of Bill Gates in my life, the influence of Apple remained.  At parties there’d be discussion or Macs, and PowerMacs and all things Apple.  A Mac fan would be a Mac fan forever it seemed.

Life moved on and there was work to do.  No Macs there either.  Although the heavy lifting wasn’t being done on Microsoft machines, it was being done on Linux boxes with largely text interfaces, and the arguments weren’t Apple vs Microsoft, but emacs vs xemacs.  Yes, it was that sad. And yet there on the desk, of an uber-nerd  was an Apple Newton.  A what?  Yeah, I’d forgotten about it as well.  I think it’s fair to say that if Steve Jobs was still with Apple at the time, the Newton may have looked a little different.

A few years later  Steve Jobs dropped the iPod on the world.  It’s safe to say that things changed.  Well I think they did, although the last decade has gone by so fast I can’t be sure.  Young children, and mortgages and grown up jobs will do that to you.  I’ve never owned an iPod, or bought anything from the iTunes store.  I’ve never had an iPhone.  I have tended not to miss an opportunity to compare the Apple marketing machine of the 00s to the Microsoft marketing machine of the previous decades, and question the fanboys shelling out big $$ for the latest Apple products.

I have still never owned an Apple product.

And yet I still feel a loss today.  Maybe it’s because, in the great connected 21st century, one person’s loss is everyone’s loss.  And a lot of people are feeling a loss today.  Maybe it’s because I feel left out from the #myapplehistory hashtag.  Or maybe it’s because Steve Jobs did actually manage to make things happen, be they graphical interfaces or gesture controls, and that the world will be a poorer place without his vision.  Or maybe it’s because Steve Jobs death highlights my own mortality.  I’ve grown up along with Apple.  And today the man behind that is dead.  That can’t be good.
