Somebody made me aware that I hadn't blogged in a bit, and Steve Jobs recently died, so I figured I'd spout some wordage today. After all, I'm at work, what else should I be doing with my time?
It is impossible to take Steve Jobs out of the equation that equals modern society. Without him, the social networking connectivity that we, like it or not, participate in simply would not exist. He made the sharing of ideas and art simple, accessible, and most importantly, cool.
He was a man of undoubted and unequaled genius. The world/media saw him as a leader and innovator, which he certainly was, but looking back on his life... wow, he was one hell of a showman.
There was once a time, a magical time, known as the 1990s. In it, computers and computing were not cool. Using a computer well and to it's full potential required classroom instruction and a lot of trial and error.
I remember our grade school's fleet of Macintosh II computers. I thought it was super cool when a librarian explained the concept of networking them all in to one dot matrix printer. I remember Oregon Trail on several floppy disks. I could hunt the shit out of everything and anything on Oregon Trial, btw.
I remember being in middle school, and being given a Newton laptop to test, as well as virtually exclusive use of the iMac. While not perfect in their design and execution, they were eons ahead of the PC/Microsoft offerings.
I remember seeing the first iPods slowly infiltrating my highschool, feeling the wheel scroll beneath my fingers and LUSTING for one. I remember a young hip teacher showing us how easy the music synced, automatically the artist, album, and song title were there on the black and greenish screen. I remember the first colored iPods, the U2 edition, and my first iPod, a green Mini purchased my Senior year with money I fried chicken and scrubbed toilets to make.
I remember being walking into an Apple store at 22 and plunking down about 2k for my first Apple desktop, a G4-powered, pornography and Eighties music-storing beauty that still works today. I remember the wireless mouse, and testing it's range. I remember video chats, using it's integrated webcam, with friends in Chicago and around the world after I moved to Denver. I remember using it to write my first serious comedy bits.
I remember reading about Steve Jobs' death on my MacBook Pro last night while I watched videos on YouTube, and read Facebook status updates posted via iPhones from bars and workplaces wired for WiFi.
Steve Jobs was not a perfect man, and Apple is not a perfect company, but both are just. so. cool. Bill Gates may have popularized the personal computing revolution, but Steve Jobs made it col to be an evolving revolutionary.
Long after humanity has killed itself, worn pieces of metal with a not-quite-complete apple on them will litter the landscape. That's a legacy.
BK
