Steve Jobs: Rest In Peace

There are few people at any given time that can truly be said to have changed the course of civilization by themselves. Steve Jobs, the founder of both Apple and Pixar, was one of those few, and his death today at the too young age of 56 truly marks the end of an era that he, in many ways, helped to create.

The first computer I ever worked on was an Apple II+ that was kept in a coat closet in the back room of our Calculus class in high school, in Peoria, IL in the mid-1970s. It was on this machine that I first learned to program, in Applesoft Basic and later C and Pascal, exploring the intricacies of registers and screen graphics. I would regularly skip lunch to get the chance to work on that computer, later supplanted by an Apple IIe. By the time I was in college I was writing 6502 assembler code in the new Mathematics Computer Lab (the same lab where the Mosaic browser was first created a few years later), and even into grad school I was working on the new Macintoshes with their sad faces when things went awry, learning the intricacies of multimedia, postscript graphics, WYSIWYG text editing and even creating rotating four and five dimensional hyperhedra in Objective C and Pascal.

By the time I had graduated, Apple had gone into its decline as Steve Jobs had taken his spark elsewhere, to Pixar where he turned the computer from being a creator of special effects to a tool for building complete worlds, effectively setting the stage for the rapid evolution of 3d computer graphics. Apple was not the same without him, and I suspect that his absence from the company may have been what allowed Linux to gain the foothold that it did in computing, and in many respects it was that legacy that ultimately helped fueled the Android revolution. I stopped using Apple products about the time that Jobs had left, fully convinced that putting the manufacture of some of the most cutting edge hardware products on the planet into the hands of a man who sold soda water was a profound mistake, and its really only been with the introduction of the iPad that I've seriously thought about coming back.

When Jobs himself came back to Apple, he changed gears again - rethinking the notion of music delivery with the iPod, challenging our notions of what a "phone" should be with the iPhone, and finally managing what others had tried to do and failed - creating a real tablet, one that would alter the very way that we think of computers. I'm not sure that in the end it will be Apple that owns this market - Google has managed to create a very compelling alternative, and it remains to be seen whether Apple post Steve will be as nimble and ... outlandish perhaps is the word ... as it was with him at the helm, but there is no question that as a final legacy, re-thinking the nature of computing three times in a lifetime is hard to beat.

Good night, Mr. Jobs. The reality distortion field is dimmer today, and you will be missed.