Steve RIP

[mrlynn]

Posted this on a HotAir thread,

http://hotair.com/archives/2011/10/05/br...ead-at-56/

which (as usual) has both laudatory and snarky comments:

I bought my first Mac on release day in 1984. Steve Jobs will go down as one of America’s greatest inventors, and joins the ranks of Bell, Edison and Singer. Long live Apple.
Jocundus on October 5, 2011 at 9:02 PM

Agree entirely.

We had an IBM PC-XT in the office where I worked back in 1984. I could not for the life of me fathom what was going on in the thing, which had to be accessed with arcane white-letter commands on a green screen.

Then in 1987 a new employee insisted on a Macintosh SE. She knew a ‘Mac designer’ who could do layouts and typography on the screen, without pasteboards and Linotronic typesetters. Even a used SE at that time was quite expensive, but we got one, with a 20 MB hard drive. It was a revelation to me; the Graphical User Interface opened the door to me with the desktop metaphor, on which one could see the various drives and their hierarchical contents. I never looked back, getting more SEs, toting one in a large shoulder bag on trips. I learned desktop publishing, spreadsheets, and databases, and of course abandoned my typewriters; I ran a small business on that computer, later graduating to Mac IIs and the others to come. I’m writing this on my gorgeous iMac 27", running Snow Leopard.

Yes, Steve and company borrowed ideas for the Macintosh from a Xerox lab, but the team that developed the Mac under his direction produced innovation after innovation. Read Steven Levy’s Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything.

Steve Jobs changed everything for me.

/Mr Lynn