Steve Jobs

It’s almost certainly not news to anyone here that Apple co-founder (and Pixar investment angel) Steve Jobs has died. I’m pretty confident that I don’t need to explain the guy’s background.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of his business practices, but it’d be nigh-on impossible for me to try to deny the huge influence Jobs (and Steve Wozniak) have had in my life.

My first computer was an Apple II clone. Okay, maybe that didn’t feed any money into Jobs’ bank account at the time – at least not until Apple sued Franklin and the other clonemakers – but the thing’s lifeblood was Apple II software. I learned to program BASIC and some machine code on an Apple II. I was convinced I was going to start cranking out games on that machine.

As it so happens, I also discovered bulletin board systems on an Apple II, and that’s why you’re reading this here, because that fascination – with reaching out and writing stuff that other folks could read – can be followed straight to the front door of this web site, whose oldest content started out as a series of files handed from BBS to BBS. All written, at least at first, on an Apple II (or a similar facsimile thereof).

During some of my most troubled teenage years, games like Ultima IV and Project Space Station occupied large swaths of my time and kept me out of trouble that I could’ve been getting into at that time (heaven knows I didn’t exactly have a strong parental influence guiding me at the time). Those were made for the Apple (and run by my trusty Franklin ACE) too. Then there was a very early desktop publishing program, The Newsroom, which helped me to further my interest in writing for print. Both my copy of The Newsroom at home and the one at school, ran on an Apple II.

Eventually time, and the diminishing availability of software, caught up with me and I reluctantly retired my Franklin ACEs from active duty and started writing my stuff on a PC instead. Only it was my stepmother’s PC and, as she commonly did, she let me use it and then yanked it out from under me just to cause me grief. All she really did was make me shrug and go back to writing the early LogBook files on a machine compatible with an Apple II.

Ten years ago this time, I was producing TV spots on a Mac-based Avid system, and was cursing its incessant ability to take forever to render, or just completely crash. Let’s skip the Mac. It wasn’t my friend.

The Android tablet that travels with me everywhere is not an Apple product. I’m consistent, if nothing else: it’s kind of like the modern day equivalent to the Franklin ACE. It’s also something that I’m sure nobody would’ve bothered to make if they weren’t trying to get the budget-minded portion of the market for Apple’s iPad. I use it… a lot. I’ve passed on the iPhone revolution, and I sat out several rounds of iPod in favor of a cranky old minidisc player and, more recently, the aforementioned tablet, but one would have to be perilously close to the crazy end of the scale to deny the huge cultural impact of those products. As Variety.com noted, the iTunes Store virtually single-handedly created the paid digital content market at a time when internet piracy was running rampant and outstripping the studios’ and labels’ ability to keep up (let alone comprehend) the changes taking place around them on the media landscape.

Oh, and my kid loves the Toy Story movies. Jobs brokered the deals that made those happen, too, having bought Pixar from George Lucas when Lucas needed a cash infusion in order to – and let’s be honest here – avoid feeling any impact whatsoever from a massive divorce settlement.

Now, to be sure, the hardware that made the Apple II happen was Steve Wozniak’s invention, and the design of the iPod/iPad/iPhone/iEtc. was driven by guidelines laid out and fiercely championed by Jobs, but he didn’t create the machines in either case. Jobs’ genius was that he could stride out into the middle of the American consumer landscape and convince us that, yes, we need personal computers in our homes, and they might as well be Apple IIs. Yes, you need a personal digital music device to replace your CD Walkman, and here’s the iPod. Yes, you need a phone that will grow tendrils that intersect every possible part of your life. Yes, those little flatscreen touchscreen computers they had on Star Trek: The Next Generation? Let’s move the timetable on those up from the 24th century to rightaboutnow. And, oh, by the way, you need one.”

He may well be the most successful carnival barker in history, because everything that Jobs’ company has cranked out since the introduction of the iPod, we’ve needed. Considering how ubiquitous everything since the ‘Pod has become, the man either had a deal with the devil, or he was a stark raving mad genius.

My money’s on the latter. Thanks for being a stark raving mad genius, Steve Jobs. Look at you. You went and changed the world. You made geeks out of everyone, even the folks who swore up and down that they’d never become geeks. And speaking as a fellow nerd… that is the sweetest revenge.

(Tapped out on the onscreen keyboard of my decidedly non-iPad tablet.)