RIP Steve Jobs

[julesjones]

I awoke this morning to the news that Steve Jobs had died, far too young. It was no surprise -- the man had visibly been living on borrowed time for months if not years. It still made me sad.

I'm no Apple fangirl. The last time I used an Apple product was playing games on a friend's Apple IIe. There are plenty of criticisms I can and indeed have made of Apple and of Jobs. But even though I've never owned an Apple product, Steve Jobs made my life better. He saw useful technology around him, and how it could be used more widely, and found a way to enthuse other people. He didn't create the original Apple -- that was Steve Wozniak. He didn't invent the mouse, or the GUI -- that was the Xerox PARC team. But he sold those ideas to the public at large, and the machine I'm typing this on is a direct result of that, even if it's a Wintel machine. This was his gift, to see what ordinary people might do with information technology, and show them his vision.

Steve Jobs changed the world. We are the poorer for his passing.

Comments

[predatrix.livejournal.com]

Indeed. He got the whole thing running. Woz would have created a brilliant machine for hackers and engineers, while Gates created a machine for business and Xerox PARC made something good but AFAIK used it internally.

The fact that ordinary people use graphics and GUIs on ordinary computers (whether Wintel or Macintel) nowadays does owe quite a bit to Jobs.

[julesjones]

Are you going to use your Mac a bit more now that you have usable intarwebz again?