Tech Ed

a frail Steve Jobs

News is circulating tonight that Steve Jobs, the iconic co-founder and current CEO of Apple Computer, is leaving his work to concentrate on addressing ongoing health issues.  Speculation has run rampant for the past year that something serious is wrong with Mr. Jobs, and by all appearances he has become more thin and gaunt with each passing day.  This is a monumental thing for the computer industry as a whole.  Steve Jobs, along with his then partner Steve Wozniak birthed the modern PC revolution back in the late 1970′s with the Apple I.  Millions of geeks, including me, drooled over the amazing computing power and slick packaging of the Apple II — the first true mass market PC.  I’ll never forget writing my first computer program using Apple Basic on the green screen of that then-hippest computer on the planet.  A few years later, I may have actually passed out in a moment of bliss the first time I used a Macintosh.  A mouse-based GUI with WYSIWIG editing capabilities was truly revolutionary!  Apple didn’t invent these things, Xerox did, but Steve Jobs knew how to take cutting edge technology and package it in a way that just felt right, making it accessible to the world at large and forcing us all to “think differently” about how computers could be used.  

Then Mr. Jobs was forced out of Apple… can you imagine? Apple almost died.

While away, he founded NeXT Computer and also acquired Pixar Animation Studios.  Remember “Toy Story”?  It was the first fully computer generated animated feature film.   Not only was the film wildly successful, but Pixar went public and Mr. Jobs became a billionaire as a result.

This success paved the way for a triumphant return to Apple, which had foundered without the creative vision of Steve Jobs while allowing the IBM/Windows PC to take the majority PC market share.  He went to work, breathing life back into the company, upgrading an aging platform with technology developed at NeXT (the pre-cursor to OSX on x86) and brought the vision of converged, multi-media computing and entertainment to the masses with iTunes, the iPod, and more recently, the iPhone.

I grew up with the PC revolution.  Steve Jobs and his sometimes-nemesis Bill Gates are heroes of mine — both have radically impacted the lives of the everyone on the planet through their innovation.  Since Bill Gates recently retired and Steve Jobs is stepping away for health reasons, they are both out of the computer business for the first time in 30+ years.  I have serious misgivings about the viability of Microsoft without Mr. Gates.  I am simply apalled at the notion of Apple without Steve Jobs.  Black turtlenecks and all, he’s the guy who made computing cool and accessible, and forced the rest of the industry to follow his lead.  Get better, Steve and come back soon!