I remember the first Apple Macintosh I ever saw. It was in 1985, just a year after the first models (named for the McIntosh apple) came out. I had used a few PCs before that. But sitting down to a Mac 512k, that awkward box with its tiny screen, opened a whole new world. I spent hours upon hours playing with the new graphics software--MacPaint especially. Then I got hold of Aldus Pagemaker, taught myself desktop publishing and, without knowing it at the time, changed the course of my life.
When it came time to buy a personal computer a couple of years later, I couldn't afford a Mac. This was the most common complaint about Apple at the time. But I couldn't go back to PC, so I went with the Commodore Amiga because it had moved in the direction of innovation, like Apple, and the Amiga was a hot item in the graphics world for the brief, shiny years of its success.
Well, as the computing gods would have it, that Amiga became a glorified word processor that helped me churn out all those grad school papers. But I found a home in the tiny, mostly unsupported and unknown Mac lab at school as I moved into journalism and became a magazine editor. I got the job because I was only one of a handful of people around who could do desktop publishing. With legions of homegrown digital designers under every rock these days, it seems hard to imagine that I was among a select few a mere 20 years ago.
Upon graduation with my degrees in rhetoric and journalism, I got my first college teaching job and bought a Mac Performa, a monster of a machine around which much of my professional and creative life would evolve for several years. When I came to Lee University in 1995, I helped inaugurate the first Mac lab in Student Publications--three lonely Power Macs on an otherwise entirely PC campus. Now, 15 years later, you can't walk ten feet in any direction around here without bumping into someone with an Apple product.
During those years, I knew little or nothing about Steve Jobs or his saga. In fact, I had become convinced that the Mac could go the way of the Amiga any day--a thought that filled me with sadness. I did not merely like Mac as a brand (that dogged irrational loyalty!), I preferred it as a platform that suited my creative and professional needs, and, yes, my personality. It was hard to explain any of this to my many PC friends who were utterly convinced that a PC could do anything I needed more cheaply and efficiently and, besides that, provide a near unlimited platform for games, even if you had to replace your cheap PC or parts with enough regularity to have paid for a Mac by the time you were done.
In time, I have watched as nearly all my PC friends who once jeered at Apple have acquired IPhones and IPads and, even Mac laptops before I have had the chance to get the latest devices. My PC fans still love their PCs, they just ... don't spend as much time on them as they used to. The flexibility and sheer "coolness" of Apple products finally persuaded them when my shrill evangelism failed.
And while this amazing transformation was taking place, Pixar was creating the best animated features available, other Jobs ideas were integrating with all the latest and greatest technologies, and countless other innovations like IPod and ITunes were taking the world by storm. Yes, Microsoft reigns supreme, like the Emperor in his Death Star, thanks in part to well-known "borrowing" of key Apple ideas long ago. But now, after just a couple of decades, Apple isn't merely a brand, it's a philosophic meme.
All this is because a college dropout named Steve Jobs decided to do what he loved--and to make what he did the best he could possibly make it.
Ayn Rand's myth of the Individual is an elaborate, wistful fraud. But the power of one person to create, and by creating to craft a lever to shift the world, is supported by cases like Steve Jobs'. It's humbling to ponder the extent to which so many of us are indebted to a man whom we will never meet. My own power to create today is, in part, a direct product of his.
Thanks, Steve. We cannot predict how much we will miss you, only that we certainly will.
Here's to the Crazy Ones
