Greatness, insane or otherwise

I've got to admit I was a lot more affected by Steve Jobs's death last week than I expected. If you asked me a few months ago, I would've figured I'd be bummed out for an afternoon and then obsess about AAPL's stock price for the next few days. The only other public figure that actually saddened me tremendously when he died was author David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in August of 2008 at the age of 46, after battling depression for years. Both were figures that died in the prime of their careers, succumbing to afflictions they had struggled with even as they produced some of their greatest work.

While it might be understandable to feel such emotion for an artist or writer, many remarked at the time at how unusual it was to see such emotion for a high-tech CEO. We know intuitively such a glib descrīption doesn't do service or respect to what Mr. Jobs accomplished. But it did make me wonder why I don't expect to feel the same intensity of emotion when such other larger-than-life figures in the tech industry pass on, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, or even to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. No doubt many like myself will express their respects for their great achievements and how much better the world is for their work. But I doubt we'll see quite the outpouring we saw last Thursday.

Speaking for myself, I flashed back almost immediately to my first experience on a computer that I actually wanted to use, the Macintosh at my friend's house back in 5th grade. He insisted I head over to his place after school one day to play on his dad's new computer. Up until then, that generally meant me sitting around fiddling with Transformers while my friend fumbled around with a computer for about two hours, be it a C64 or DOS, loading several floppies or tapes, screwing something up, flipping through manuals, starting over, rebooting, and so on before we finally could play, say, Pirates or maybe some text game for maybe half an hour before it was time to go home for dinner and then miss my TV show because my homework wasn't done. It wasn't anything I even remotely had any kind of interest in.

The Mac changed all that. We played lots of games (we spent weeks on "Deja Vu"), of course, but oddly enough it didn't stop there. We would eventually just start messing around with the computer itself, messing with settings, desktop patterns, and then eventually playing around with text in word processing apps, trying to draw in paint programs and so on. I was always the artistic kid (boy has that changed), and spent tons of time in MacPaint and was the only guy brave enough to try the 'Draw' (vector) programs and have any kind of success with them. After we got my own, even my writing improved as I started keeping a Doogie-style journal and gagging at how awful my writing was upon review a few months later.

It was a powerful experience, and no technology quite matched it for some time (though Unix came close in college). I didn't know about the 1984 ad, I didn't know about Steve Jobs, I just know this thing was awesome and made me want to understand things like hard drives and memory and processing speeds. My enthusiasm for the Mac and the knowledge that resulted has been responsible for many positive development in my career, from my first job as a computer lab geek at UC Santa Cruz to my first job at ILM as (and many are surprised at this) a Macintosh Technician.

I only first learned about Steve Jobs in sort of the past tense as I entered college, because he was long gone from Apple by the early 90s. Lacking the vast archives of the internet, it was amazing what a strong impression he was still able to make as people spoke of him reverently while simultaneously keeping him at arm's length because of the rather volatile reputation he had earned in the early years. Even as Apple showed all the signs of a failing company after nearly a decade of mismanagement since his departure, people were wary of bringing him back in 1997.

The rest is history, of course, but it didn't take long for me to see a very direct connection between that amazing piece of technology I first used as a kid in 1985 and the amazing individual who drove its creation and resurrection while envisioning with near clairvoyance the role it would assume today, and possibly for some years to come. We're reminded nearly every day of how much his work has improved the world. I have no doubt that I would not be where I am today without him.

Thanks, Steve.