“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is no longer the same river … and he is no longer the same man.” — Heraclitus

As a professional news writer, I have spent much of the last five days thinking about — and writing about — the death of Steve Jobs. My friends sent me condolence notices as though I’d lost a member of my family, or forwarded the delightful Onion tributes “Apple User Acting Like His Dad Just Died” and “Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Passes Away.” Those were some much-needed moments of levity in the hours and first days after the sudden news.

I’ve certainly shed a few tears since the news broke, but I was much more upset when Steve resigned as CEO — because it was back then, in August, when I knew the end was near. Steve Jobs didn’t want to give up that job for anything; he loved it like crazy, second only to his family. For him to write that letter was an admission that there was no hope left; that this time, unlike his previous two brushes with death, there was to be no escape.

In most of the tributes I’ve read since his passing, the emphasis has been on the devices he helped invent, the direction and revitalisation he gave Apple, the money he made and the personal touch that went into Apple’s products, which was why so many of them engendered such love, devotion and popularity. Most of them, however, miss the bigger picture. Steve Jobs was a unique and successful CEO, sure — but it was his influence on most facets of modern life, not his Apple products themselves, that made him an important person in the lives of so many. As Josh Weinstein so brilliantly put it, “I just realized I don’t have a second-favorite CEO.”

The reason your personal computer — no matter which brand you have — uses a mouse and a file/folder metaphor is because Steve Jobs thought that was a better idea than a command line. Indeed, the reason you have a personal computer at all is because Jobs and Wozniak thought computers shouldn’t just be for highly-paid specialists and academics, and worked to make them operable by untrained, regular people. If you want to see what we would have ended up with if not for Jobs and Woz, have a look at Linux sometime.*

*If you’re a nerd, you might like Linux, so let me rephrase that as “show your Mom or Grandma Linux sometime.” Sorry, nerds.

It was Steve Jobs’ creation of NeXT that helped spawn the modern, graphical Internet. It was Apple’s push for USB and ubiquitous Wi-Fi that made those things mainstream. It was Steve Jobs that figured out how to make a tablet computer useful instead of a crappy PC, and it was Steve Jobs and his executive team that looked at cell phones and said “these suck, let’s make some that don’t.”

Fundamentally, almost everything a modern person does during their waking hours that involves any form of electronics has been touched at least in some fashion by Steve Jobs. This is why the public has been moved by his death even if the only Apple product they own — if any — is an iPod. Because people intuitively understand that Jobs was very much the architect of modern living, cruelly taken away before we’d even gotten half-way to where he wanted us to be. Of all the companies out there doing cool stuff — and there are lots of them — when the public think of who is out there “inventing the future,” they think of Apple every time.

In 10 years or maybe less, most computers won’t even use the file/folder/mouse paradigm, or indeed be much like the ones we use now. Why? Because having created something, Steve was the sort of person who would be the first to blow it up and start over. His vision for the iPad is what started him down that path — and ended up defining what a post-PC era would look like, the next great platform on which marvels anew will be built. And oh, by the way, here’s what a cell phone ought to be like — just as an afterthought.

I consider myself very lucky to have been born just long ago enough that I remember the pre-computer, pre-Internet world. I was in high school when “personal” computers came to market, but at first I had little interest in them — I was planning on being an actor or performer, with a degree in communications or perhaps Liberal Arts some day. I had a clear idea of my future in television (probably video editing) or radio, with a fallback to performing — maybe doing some teaching to pay the bills. It was a good plan. It would have been a good life.

I had been doing some writing in high school, but my heart was on the stage — while in college, I become frustrated by the poor quality of the reviews in the school paper, so I marched down and offered myself as the arts critic. While there, I discovered that my talent for running my mouth also translated into being able to swiftly express ideas on paper — or should I say the monochrome screens of early word processors, followed quickly by TRS-80s (along with a few Apple IIs).

Before I knew it, my path had changed to becoming a journalist. Along the way, I learned how to diagnose software issues and train others and generally became a computer geek, but still — for me, computers were the next step beyond typewriters for the most part, albeit typewriters that could also play games when the work was done. I was nearly finished with college and my nascent training in journalism when my professor and I attended a demo that quite literally changed both of our lives — a Mac 512k hooked up to an Apple Laserwriter, demonstrating Aldus PageMaker 1.0. The presenters designed, wrote and produced an entire page of newsprint on the spot — we both looked at each other and realised that much of what he had spent teaching — and I had spent learning — about newspaper production had just become obsolete.

So I stayed in school a bit longer than I should have, re-learning my new-found trade, almost all of it on a Macintosh. Each new OS release and model year gave us new abilities — and more importantly, possibilities — to work with. After school I became a professional writer, Mac trainer and graphic designer: all skills I had picked up in the last half of my college career, all made into a profession by Apple.

Not only did Apple provide us with incredible machines, it also became one of the very few corporations that was consistently and incredible tasteful. Apple celebrated art and life, it told you what its products could do for you, and it never ever needed to shout about it. Most other companies — particularly tech companies — looked like used-car salesmen by comparison. The original Think Different ad, called “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” an unaired version of which was narrated (and written) by Jobs himself, is a gallery of elegance, an elegy to genius, an ode to non-conformity. It is completely splendid.

I worked for Apple myself, for a brief time. When the iMac was announced I was so enthralled with the idea of it that I volunteered my weekends hanging out at the CompUSA, demoing the machines for people because the sales staff didn’t have a clue. My evangelism got noticed, I was offered a paid job, first with Apple directly and then with their marketing firm. I eventually become a trainer, teaching others all over the state of Florida as Apple’s hold on retail grew. The pinnacle of that time, I remember, was me laying out to a senior manager at Apple my vision for the then-forthcoming Apple Stores — at the end I told them it was important that people who had already bought Macs should feel as welcome as people who were buying a Mac for the first time. “That’s exactly what Steve said,” the guy from Apple replied, and I was over the moon.

When Apple started their own retail stores, I was offered a position — but told I’d have to give up writing for Mac magazines and blogs and other publications. I reluctantly parted ways with Apple in favour of writing, but continued to espouse the Macintosh Way to anyone who would listen. I would modestly guess that I sold as many Macs to people as any of their average paid salesman in those early days. Compare an Apple retail store to almost any PC store if you want to see the difference between Apple and its competitors — the very best the other guys can do, after 10 years, is rip-off Apple retail ideas — poorly.

As the century ended, I became a tech journalist for many of the early Mac websites. I got sent to MacWorld in New York, and it was there that I met Steve Jobs at last. I attended one of his legendary keynotes, and at the end he told the audience that everyone would get a free Pro Mouse, which were being handed out at the back of the hall. Everyone raced to the back, while I raced to the front — sure I wanted a mouse, but there was Steve, and Avie Tevanian, and Jon Rubinstein and the rest of the team.

I said hello to each of them, shook their hand, complimented the show. When I got to Steve I made sure to tell him what a difference his work had made in my own life. He smiled and said thanks. I told him that everyone thought the prize was in the back of the room, but that I had come up because I thought the real prize was up front — the entire executive team of Apple, an enormous pool of incredible talent. He liked that line and agreed with it, and I left them to their business. I also got the free mouse.

On the occasion of Apple’s 30th anniversary, I wrote Steve a short note about how the company had changed my life and thanking him and the rest of the people at Apple for the incredible job they had done in saving the company. I got a two-word reply: “Thanks! Steve.” This was often as much as anyone got, I found out later, but it didn’t matter what he had said: what mattered was that he had actually seen it.

This year, on March 24th — the 10th anniversary of Mac OS X — I wrote him another note. By this time, I had learned how to talk to Steve Jobs. “Steve: Regarding Mac OS X — you were right,” I wrote. Another “Thanks!” crossed my inbox the next day.

Steve never finished college in the traditional sense; instead, he invented his own college, with its own courses. From visiting an ashram in India to selling soda bottles for food money to becoming a billionaire before he was 30 to getting himself canned from a company he started, Steve experienced a very wide range of life’s offerings and took all of it on-board. That’s what made him the man he became; the CEO who resonated with the common man, the head of a multi-billion-dollar corporation that seemed to have a soul that people responded to.

Steve was a genius, even when he was young, but he wasn’t yet ready to lead the company where he wanted it to go. The “secret” to his later success is actually pretty obvious: it was the result of living a life open to new ideas, making mistakes, and gathering the widest variety of experiences possible, and then learning from all that. That’s only a “secret” to people who haven’t travelled enough, who have never been broke, who haven’t failed spectacularly, who haven’t lived enough. Regular people know this instinctively; business elites rarely get it.

The Steve that ran Apple from 1997 on wasn’t the same man that got fired in 1986. And the Apple he came back to wasn’t the same company he had created. They were both changed by their experiences.

Without Steve at Apple, things will by definition be different. But death is nature’s change agent, as Steve himself once said. The Walt Disney Company has done plenty of good stuff since Walt died; Ford has put out lots of fine cars since Henry died. It wasn’t the same as it would have been if they were still here, but that’s okay.

I think Steve built an executive team that understands his philosophy and methodology, so when some product at Apple fails to do what they company had hoped some day — and this will happen, just as it did when Steve was running the place — I think they’ll follow his example as with his own numerous missteps, and use it as an opportunity to learn. That’s why I think Apple will carry on just fine for a long time to come.

Kids in the future will marvel at stories of a world where you had to sit at a desk to use a computer — in fact, the term “computer” will probably fall out of the lexicon before long — along with the notion that the internet, at one time, wasn’t available nearly everywhere you wanted it to be. Or that music once came on disc-shaped things you needed special equipment to hear that didn’t do anything else but play music. Or that people used to drive to a store to rent videos. Or that you used to have to send an e-mail or call someone if you wanted to talk to them. And a hundred other things.

I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like today without Steve Jobs and Apple — the future I could have had if a few different decisions had been made. I’m sure I would have found other causes to champion, and a profession I enjoyed. But for over 25 years, since that fateful day in 1985, Apple has been around to constantly surprise me and usually delight me. To this day I’m still astounded at the cleverness that flows out of Cupertino, the impact it has on the world, and how often it makes me re-think, re-consider, and re-direct my own life.

There’s no easy way to express all the gratitude I have for Steve and everything the company accomplished with and without him. Together, they gave me many of the tools I used to build my own future — how can you ever repay something like that? All I know is that I am not the same man I would have been — and the world is not the same as it once was.

Thanks, Steve.

Charles Martin
Victoria BC