![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
Oct. 9th, 2011 07:00 pmThe title of this post is Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph, but I think it applies equally well to Steve Jobs.
I was going to make this post a personal history. I was going to write about going to the computer store and learning to use the 128k Mac that became our first home computer. (After that, upgrading to a 512K seemed like a huge deal.) About the art I did with MacPaint, and the music notation I learnt by working with ConcertWare, and the term papers I wrote, and the dumbass games-- the games were the best.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
speedlime had one called Despair where there was no score and no timer: the only object was to kill the little stick-figure people that milled aimlessly around your screen. Typing that now, it seems kind of sad, even though I remember how cool it was to discover that if you froze them and then struck them with lightning, they'd explode.
Then I read the obituary thread on MetaFilter, and I realised my story is far from unique. It's my generation's story, at least in America, and possibly Europe too. We were, at the age of anything between five and sixteen, shown a computer that we instantly, instictively, fundamentally understood-- and it made geeks of us. We loved it.
Seriously. The old mainframes and such were sinister things that you could use to contact aliens or hack into the Pentagon or zap the entire world, but the friendly little computer became a much-loved character in a newspaper comic strip. A Mac would never have declined to open the pod bay doors. (Although it might have given you one of those annoying little bomb messages. Remember those? Yeah, they sucked. And OS9 in general was a pile of shit, but let's not dwell on that.)
I know I'm not alone in this, because a few years ago I visitedbadmagic's apartment for the first time, glanced over at the stubby rectangular monitor on a shelf in the corner and cried out "Holy crap! Is that a 128k?" Joe let me know that I was not the first person, nor even the first woman, to say this upon entering his apartment. How many of us hang onto our old PC boxen? The old Mac wasn't even designed to be that beautiful, and yet it's iconic in a way that no other computer of its time is.
One man isn't the company, and Jobs didn't singlehandedly create all those great machines. But he is inextricably linked to all the pieces of hardware that inspire such irrational affection in geeks and others like us. That's our link to him, and that's why the passing of a CEO none of us met feels strangely personal.
Belief in an afterlife is irrelevant, really, because by the time it's going to matter to us we'll be past caring-- but the thought of one is such a good metaphor that there's no way an English-degree wanker like me could pass it up. So, in the metaphorical probably-nonexistent afterlife, I hope that there's a vision of perfection of form and a place to find out all the answers.
Alternatively, there's IKEA. (April Fool's column from 2005, a horribly irreverent note to end on-- but one has to end somewhere.)
I was going to make this post a personal history. I was going to write about going to the computer store and learning to use the 128k Mac that became our first home computer. (After that, upgrading to a 512K seemed like a huge deal.) About the art I did with MacPaint, and the music notation I learnt by working with ConcertWare, and the term papers I wrote, and the dumbass games-- the games were the best.
speedlime had one called Despair where there was no score and no timer: the only object was to kill the little stick-figure people that milled aimlessly around your screen. Typing that now, it seems kind of sad, even though I remember how cool it was to discover that if you froze them and then struck them with lightning, they'd explode.Then I read the obituary thread on MetaFilter, and I realised my story is far from unique. It's my generation's story, at least in America, and possibly Europe too. We were, at the age of anything between five and sixteen, shown a computer that we instantly, instictively, fundamentally understood-- and it made geeks of us. We loved it.
Seriously. The old mainframes and such were sinister things that you could use to contact aliens or hack into the Pentagon or zap the entire world, but the friendly little computer became a much-loved character in a newspaper comic strip. A Mac would never have declined to open the pod bay doors. (Although it might have given you one of those annoying little bomb messages. Remember those? Yeah, they sucked. And OS9 in general was a pile of shit, but let's not dwell on that.)
I know I'm not alone in this, because a few years ago I visited
badmagic's apartment for the first time, glanced over at the stubby rectangular monitor on a shelf in the corner and cried out "Holy crap! Is that a 128k?" Joe let me know that I was not the first person, nor even the first woman, to say this upon entering his apartment. How many of us hang onto our old PC boxen? The old Mac wasn't even designed to be that beautiful, and yet it's iconic in a way that no other computer of its time is.One man isn't the company, and Jobs didn't singlehandedly create all those great machines. But he is inextricably linked to all the pieces of hardware that inspire such irrational affection in geeks and others like us. That's our link to him, and that's why the passing of a CEO none of us met feels strangely personal.
Belief in an afterlife is irrelevant, really, because by the time it's going to matter to us we'll be past caring-- but the thought of one is such a good metaphor that there's no way an English-degree wanker like me could pass it up. So, in the metaphorical probably-nonexistent afterlife, I hope that there's a vision of perfection of form and a place to find out all the answers.
Alternatively, there's IKEA. (April Fool's column from 2005, a horribly irreverent note to end on-- but one has to end somewhere.)