Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Telly Halkias, an award-winning freelance journalist. It was first published in the Bennington Banner.
The passing this week of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs at age 56 to cancer had me asking how to assess the legacies of those with an acute sense of the future. Do we count their dollars? Do we weigh their creations against those of competitors? Do we consider their personal lives or look strictly at output?
In 1991, I bought my first and only Macintosh, but never thought much about the man behind the box. Aside from the story of Mr. Jobs and Steve Wozniak starting up their enterprise in a garage, and later making billions, the irony was that I nearly didn’t get that Mac.
After the Gulf War, I redeployed to the U.S. as an anonymous California grad student who didn’t have to worry about a Scud missile landing on his head.
Living on the West Coast, I had to be frugal and didn’t need to buy a computer of my own. In the decade prior, I had already owned a Commodore, used mostly for gaming, and a Zenith, great with word processing. Since the military was one of the first organizations to automate, I had used computers at work for years.
So I felt confident to use library computer banks and keep my pockets from emptying. On the first week of classes, I went to work on some assignments and noticed that every computer in that particular room was a Macintosh, to include several of the original 1984 versions with their 9-inch screen, keyboard and mouse.
To say I was blind sided is an understatement. I knew graphic user interfaces from the early Windows-based PCs but never had a chance to see their granddaddy in action. Once clicking the mouse, I was hooked, and decided I had to have one.
A drawback of Mr. Jobs’ products was that they’ve always been pricier than their competition. In the world of commerce, that could be a killer, and probably points to an early fault in both Apple’s and Microsoft’s proprietary approach to operating systems.
Rather than grasping that interchangeable and shared platforms would be good business for everyone, in those years one needed separate software to run Windows with a Mac, or the Mac OS on a PC. Calling those packages rudimentary would be far too kind.
Nevertheless, after weeks of angst, window shopping and demos (this was not the era of Best Buy; one had to go to an “egghead” store for computers), I chose the newly released Mac IIsi. My annual student’s budget buckled under the weight of its price.
Oh, but it turned out to be well worth it. For the next five years, Mr. Jobs’ baby was my only choice for home computing. Even when I made the move to owning a Windows-based PC to ensure seamless workplace compatibility, the Mac remained a stalwart for another half decade, if only for the joy, in the autumn of its life, of playing retro games.
Eventually, the Mac went into attic storage like so much of our hardware the last 30 years. Recently, I decided to exhume the computer graveyard and properly dispose of its corpses. Interestingly, the Mac was the only machine that still had life. It drew interest for parts from computer repair technicians and hobby enthusiasts; every one of its pieces was reused in some capacity.
And that’s what I recalled of Mr. Jobs when reports of his death hit the news. While useless as a whole, a 20-year-old relic of his technology revolution was still in demand to someone, even if piecemeal. That wasn’t the case with any of my other six retired PCs.
Could this possibly be the elusive measure of an innovator?
Like his computer parts, people will draw on elements of Steve Jobs’ vision long after he’s gone. That’s because he took his life’s work and focused on what was vital, not what made everyone around him feel good.
As he put it at Stanford University’s 2005 commencement, a year after his first diagnosis and treatment for cancer: “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”
