The first personal computer I ever touched was an Apple //e. No, not Roman numerals - slashes. By today's standards it was inelegant, non-ergonomic and a poor tool for keeping the books for a small business. The disks were, indeed, floppy, and needed to be swapped out minute by minute. After two months, I persuaded the boss to let me shop for something better. The IBM PC had just been released and the aethsetic contrast was dramatic, but on one shopping foray to Nashvile I was introduced to the Apple Lisa. That was a revelation. It had a mouse. It had a graphic interface. It would have been crap as a bookkeeping tool, but it looked like the future.
I knew nothing about the background of Apple, nor of Jobs and the Woz, but when I moved to California in 1983 to work on the Whole Earth Software Catalog I learned the whole story. I never met Steve, but I did meet some of his team at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. I began to see the innovators of the digital world as pioneering heros. I got to test all of the early Apples right up to the first Mac. From then on, Macs were the darlings of the creative, the artistic, the non-conforming.
Then, inconceivably, Jobs and Woz were out at Apple. The vibes changed and the company almost - but not quite - seemed to lose its magic. And when Jobs returned to run the company and run Pixar, the magic returned and flared.
We've all followed the story through this past decade and it comes as no surpirise that Steve's resignation meant that his condition was deteriorating. We never expect, though, that there will come a point when a great person is actually gone.
Steve's gone. Thanks, Steve.