Steve Jobs, R.I.P (1955 - 2011) - Granite Grok

Steve Jobs, R.I.P (1955 – 2011)

An icon, and an iconic era, has just passed on.  And the obligatory "I was there" moment.

Yes – one of those "where were you?" moments that I will always remember the place and the circumstances.  Yes – TMEW and I had purchased an Apple II+ a couple of months after it came out. And it was fun – but not my most favorite Apple moment. And I remember THAT one vividly.

I was working at Wang Labs at the time – the "Towers" in Lowell, MA, 9th floor.  With the other crazies that were building and enhancing the VS Supermini operating system.  One of the ladies had left to go to a start-up (as a lot of folks did back then in the hey-day of the Rt 128 ring) to become the guru of a brand new machine that was coming out from Apple.

She was to be the dudette that was going to be "a Master" programmatically for the machine: the Macintosh. Well, she invited us all over to this little office and unveiled the newest lust object for all geeks everywhere: the Mac!

For the next 30 minutes, she put it through its paces and all of us OS nerds sat there like totally entranced kindergartners as she rolled up all the apps – primitive by today’s standards but when compared to what we worked with everyday.  It was like a blind man seeing for the first time – it was that much of a difference from the life of we programmers had in wrastling our computers to the way she did.

At the end of the 30 minute demo, we just sat there, transfixed. All of us were thinking the same things:

  • she just put it through its apps AND NOT ONCE TOUCHED THE KEYBOARD.
  • computers will never be the same

 

And yes, I bought one of those puppies a year later – a "Fat Mac" as it had the ginormous amout of RAM – 512K.  Yes, that’s a K and not an M.

 

 

Xerox PARC came up with many of the ideas but Steve (and sidekick, Steve Wozniak) made millions from it.  And then Bill Gates built Windows and made Billions.  But Steve had NeXt, then Pixar, back to Apple and did the iPod, the iPhone and then iPad; each creating Profits (well, maybe not NeXt) that bootstrapped the next.

And he was well compensated for those creations during his lifetime – something that Profits create.  Capitalism – all by the voluntary exchange of goods for money with each side getting "a deal".

R.I.P.

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