RIP Steve Jobs – Thanks for the career.
A friend texted me last night with three short words. "Steve Jobs died"
Suddenly I saw my life play itself back, paralleled to a track of products his company built. I never thought about it before, at least not at this level, but Steve Jobs is one of the greatest influencers in my life.
It all started on a field trip to Austin in 6th grade. My friend David Brooks' parents had bought an Apple II Plus. He brought along a white spiral bound manual on Applesoft Basic otherwise known as Float Point Basic. I had no idea what a floating point was, but I knew it was vastly better than those myopic old numbers from Integer Basic. By the time we hit LBJ's ranch I was hooked.
I couldn't wait to get back to Dallas and actually play on a computer. Just waiting there was this magical device that if I told it what to do in the right way, it would actually do it. Quite an inspiring concept for a pre-teen – and the language made a whole lot more sense than Spanish.
I spent my time creating adventure text games, trying to get a high-res guy with a jet pack to mimic real world physics, and even making music with the 8 bit sound output. I still remember the day David's Apple stopped working. We ran a diagnostic which identified the errant IC. Popped it out of the mother board, biked down to Radio Shack got a replacement, popped the replacement in and presto, it whirred back to life. How times have changed.
I somehow talked my parents into getting me an Apple IIe complete with green screen and dual floppies for my 15th birthday. I spent untold hours rearranging code with line numbers, GOTO statements and PEEK & POKE commands. For my high school senior thesis I finally graduated to doing serious work with my first word processor and an envelope sized upgrade card to take my stalwart IIe from 64K to 128K.
My freshman year of college I got my first Mac, a Mac SE. Despite the 9" black and white screen it was obvious that GUIs were the revolution that would make computers main stream. Copy and paste was the greatest thing since sliced bread. (Ironically, most of the power mac users I know now spend most of their time in the command line.) The possibilities were endless. I still have the fake ID I created with Mac Paint. Bless you, Steve Jobs.
With the Mac came a whole other world of programming. I graduated from Basic to C and Pascal. I poured over the seven volumes of developer documentation for the Mac OS. The UI was transformational. The Mac, even in the OS 6.01 days, started my love affair with usability and human factors engineering.
Before I knew it I had a suite of beerware Mac apps posted to bullentin board systems so anyone in the world could download them. Revolutionary! Of course, we now write open source software that people actually do download.
By my Junior year I got my first color Mac, a IIsi. Neither of the Steves where at Apple at this point. Interestingly, at the same time my roommate got a shinny new NeXT computer and endlessly extolled the benefits of Unix and its want to be GUI. It seemed too techie to ever be the base of a popular OS. Who knew?
I got my first professional programming gig at our medical school. We worked on converting a radiology reporting system to HyperCard. The setup was a Mac IIci complete with a 19" touch screen. I was sure that within 5 years all computers would use touch screens. Still working on that one.
I went portable in '93 with my first Mac laptop, the PowerBook 100. I bought my last Mac in '95 a Preforma 6220CD.
Then I had to grow up, get a real job. Grown ups back in the day used Windows machines or if you were lucky IBM OS/2. Yeah, Windows for Workgroups 3.1. Like adding the Workgroups thing made it OK to build a clunker of an OS. I was in professional hell. At least it wasn't too long before Window 95 came out, because Windows 95 = Mac 84.
The knock on Macs were they were built to be cute. Too slow, premium priced, not enough expandability and a fraction of the available software. Why didn't everybody get how cool they were?
As much as I despised Windows, I could never find the time to invest to go back to Apple. Then I did. I got an iPod in '07. Then an iPhone in '09 and an iPad a few months ago. Most of our office is now Macs. Steve Jobs finally pulled off his vision. Macs were both slick and technically elite – at least for *NIX based web development. Apple now made all kinds of other cool gadgets that people really wanted – the Newton was avenged. Steve Jobs was a Phoenix.
RIP Steve. We thank you.
