Steve Jobs is dead, and while he’s already been memorialized by minds far greater and more important than my own, his passing has really made me think about the impact a single man can have on this world, and on an individual life within it.
My mom brought home our first family computer, a Macintosh, when I was about 8 years old. I’m sure that I must have seen other computers by this point, at school or at friends’ houses, but for the life of me this Macintosh is the first computer I remember sitting down in front of and really exploring. And I remember it vividly, in the little makeshift office my dad set up in the landing at the top of our stairs, I sat there excitedly testing out this new machine, knowing nothing about what it could do or what it was for, but somehow certain that it represented something extremely important.
I guess my mom must have gotten the computer second-hand, from someone at work probably, because she also brought home two boxes of random programs and applications copied onto floppy disks. While I couldn’t understand why they were called floppy disks (as they were sturdy, solid cartridges), I sat there for hours putting each disk into the drive to see what it would do (mostly trying to determine whether or not it was a game). The image of that smiling Macintosh desktop folder, and clicking each new disk image like I was opening a Christmas present, is still somehow seared into my brain (and I will NEVER forget how our Macintosh had this super close-up low-res pixelated portrait of Mel Gibson’s face as the desktop wallpaper - apparently mom was a fan).
It’s been almost 25 years since then, and outside of a brief flirtation with a cheap PC during high school, I’ve been a pretty loyal Apple user (and if I’m honest with myself, an Apple gadget fanboy). It may seem stupid or materialistic to view a computer brand as an extension of one’s identity, but I am among the many people of this generation who made a career and a life for themselves using the incomprehensibly powerful new tools that would evolve from that first Macintosh my mom brought home. And now every day, all around me, is the manifestation of a future I could not see, but absolutely felt, as a curious 8 year-old child naively clicking disk images on Mel Gibson’s pixelated face in search of the kinds of magic and power that I would come to take for granted in only a few short years.
For better or worse, the vision of Steve Jobs gave us this future. I happen to believe it’s for the better.
