drucker.ca

I entered a world in which Steve Jobs had already been born, and was 5 years old. He and I had dif­fer­ent upbring­ing, but I sus­pect that many of our cul­tural touch-points were sim­i­lar. We both first started tak­ing note of the world around us when tele­vi­sion made the leap from black and white to ‘liv­ing colour’ as the ads would say. We both saw a man land on the moon, and prob­a­bly remem­ber where we were when John Lennon was shot (I was in col­lege, he had by that time started Apple Com­puter, Inc.) We both were lovers of music and cal­lig­ra­phy. In some ways, I like to think that our tastes were sim­i­lar; we both fans of a sort of mod­ernist sim­plic­ity in design. I fell in love with ele­gant indus­trial design early. I used to pore over the ads to Bang and Olufsen Hi Fi sets in New Yorker mag­a­zines while await­ing my piano lesson.

The Bang and Olufson Beogram 4004 Turntable, one of the first remote-controlled stereo components.

I also remem­ber my grand­fa­ther get­ting me a dig­i­tal LED watch by Fairchild, one of the early expen­sive ones. You had to press a key to dis­play the time, but its gor­geous and ele­gant dark black cir­cu­lar bezel was a true thing of beauty.

The Fairchild LED Watch, one of the beau­ti­ful but imprac­ti­cal LED watches of the 70s

The imprac­ti­cal thing about LED watches was that you had to press a but­ton to see the time. In fact, I remem­ber Sat­ur­day Night Live doing a par­ody on these watches that required another per­son to push­ing a sec­ond but­ton for you see the time, forc­ing you to get help to see the dis­play. “It’s like ask­ing a stranger for the time” was the slo­gan. Yes, but the ele­gance of this screen, with no clut­ter, and even this par­tic­u­lar one with these lovely near-circle framed by a bit of chrome in a sim­i­larly grace­ful shape was just irre­sistable to me.

For me, the Salton home appli­ances of that same period where also exam­ples of great indus­trial design. They included hot plates, a peanut but­ter mill, and a ther­mo­sta­t­i­cally con­trolled  yogurt maker:

The Salton Yogurt Maker, another exam­ple of what I con­sid­ered beau­ti­ful indus­trial design. Notice the use of Helvetica.

None of these arti­facts was cre­ated by Steve Jobs or Apple, but I like to think that well designed con­sumer mer­chan­dise was not unknown to us nor did it not exist apart from Apple.

This part of Apple and Steve Jobs we (and I) could have sur­vived if they never existed. How­ever, it’s the rest of it, the soft­ware, that I can’t imag­ine a world with­out. My entry into this world began when I was in my 2os.

I got my first com­puter in 1985, while attend­ing the East­man School of Music in Rochester. In a guest bed­room in my landlady’s house, I set up a glass table (with 2 red metal sawhorses) where a Mac­in­tosh 512 sat, con­nected to the tele­phone line via a 1200 baud modem. The floppy dri­ves fre­quently purred, and I used it to print my papers, as well as con­nect to the school’s DEC PDP-11 com­puter in order to edit the files for a piece of music I was work­ing on at the time called ‘Spin­cy­cle’. It was a lovely machine. I loved the shape of it, the way the front was can­tilevered so that the key­board seemed to fit under it.  The beau­ti­ful angle at the back, echo­ing the shape of the mouse, the slight angle of the front, like a an inclined head, all con­tributed to a beau­ti­ful sense of bal­ance and ele­gance that made this machine some­thing I added to the list of beau­ti­ful things I appreciated.

My first com­puter, a Mac­in­tosh 512K

Up until that point, I had been pretty dis­dain­ful of com­put­ers. They were my brother’s world, and to me were ugly, inhu­man and tacky. They were not for peo­ple con­cerned with the arts or non-mathematical things. This com­puter, and the cas­sette that shipped with it that intro­duced you to its func­tions with joy­ful New Age music — ‘Things with Wings’  by pianist Liz Story as inter­ludes and in the back­ground made it a joy to get to know and even­tu­ally become inti­mately famil­iar with.

One of the early things I did with that Mac was, as I men­tioned, con­nect remotely to another com­puter. I did this to use my Mac’s built-in text edit­ing abil­i­ties to cre­ate long strings of notes (writ­ten like A5 Ds E G As A Fs B C6 etc.)  that I would ‘paste’ into the vi text edi­tor run­ning in a ter­mi­nal. If I did this at a time when many peo­ple were work­ing on the PDP-11, the paste might not work prop­erly; the other com­puter lit­er­ally could’t keep up with past­ing too much data at once if it was busy doing some­thing else.

At any rate, using that com­puter to con­nect soon became a reg­u­lar evening activ­ity. I con­nected to Bul­letin Board sys­tems to down­load new soft­ware. That intro­duced me to a whole new world of User Groups and the soft­ware cre­ation community.

Upon fin­ish­ing my course­work and pass­ing all of my oral and writ­ten exams, I moved out of Rochester (which I had happy to leave, hav­ing bro­ken up with a girl­friend) and move in tem­porar­ily with my brother, who was attend­ing MIT in Boston. I slept on his futon and got my first job with his girlfriend’s for­mer boss, at a small com­puter soft­ware com­pany in Har­vard Square. Using another Mac, I learned how to write soft­ware doc­u­men­ta­tion for pro­gram­mers (mainly explain­ing what small mod­ules of Pas­cal did as part of an online trad­ing sys­tem). Then an enor­mously impor­tant things hap­pened: in 1987 (shortly after Jobs had been forced out of Apple by John Scul­ley), Apple intro­duced (and released in early 1988) a piece of soft­ware called Hyper­Card. The cre­ator of Hyper­Card, Bill Atkin­son, was also the pro­gram­mer of the Mac’s first graph­ics soft­ware, called ‘Mac­Paint’, which shipped with every Mac for a num­ber of years. Atkin­son demon­strated his soft­ware to packed con­fer­ence rooms at the Bay­side Expo­si­tion Cen­ter (and the air-conditioning had gone on the fritz, so it was like a sauna in these rooms). For me, it was love at first sight. Hyper­card was, to put it sim­ply, a soft­ware ‘erec­tor set ‘that would let ordi­nary peo­ple (i.e., not just pro­gram­mers) piece together accept­ably usable and in some cases, ele­gant soft­ware that included graph­ics, sound, motion, and even logic and calculations.

The Hyper­Card Home Screen — tech­ni­cally not the exact one I saw in 1988, but very close.

Using Hyper­Card, any­one with some min­i­mal train­ing could com­mu­ni­cate their ideas or exper­tise in a work­ing appli­ca­tion with­out hav­ing to learn the con­sid­er­able amount of knowl­edge required to get even a sin­gle screen up and work­ing using stan­dard pro­gram­ming tools. These days,  that would include learn­ing the Xcode pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment, the calls to present user inter­face ele­ments like win­dows, but­tons and menus, etc., as well as a knowl­edge of Objective-C and Apple’s ver­sion of it, called Cocoa. It’s worth not­ing that Steve Jobs did not par­tic­u­larly take to Hyper­Card and prod­uct even­tu­ally died out after he returned to Apple. I sus­pect that Jobs didn’t take to Hyper­Card because  it is never an ele­gant thing, at least not in terms of what peo­ple cre­ated with it. For me, though, Hyper­Card was my sand­box, my learn­ing tool, my train­ing wheels, and the path to new career. I wrote a book on the soft­ware in 1992, and even­tu­ally made my liv­ing first as a gen­eral Mac­in­tosh con­sul­tant, and even­tu­ally as a soft­ware user inter­face designer. Work­ing with the soft­ware and teach­ing oth­ers how to use it honed my skills in design, teach­ing, pub­lic speak­ing, writ­ing, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, and a host of other bod­ies of knowl­edge that would sim­ply not have existed if it weren’t for Steve Jobs and the com­pany he created.

These days, in a line of work and econ­omy shaped by Jobs and the com­pany he founded, I con­tinue to live, work, and appre­ci­ate the ele­gance and beauty of well crafted hard­ware and soft­ware. Would I have this life with­out Jobs? I can’t imag­ine it. Will I have one with­out him? Prob­a­bly, but now, with his death at the age of 56 (too damn soon!)  we all head into a future with­out him, even if Apple is still around, at least for the time being. It’s a future that feels just a lit­tle less excit­ing. We are all a lit­tle poorer with­out him, which is prob­a­bly the best thing you can say about any human being. As one of Apple’s ads said about ‘the crazy ones, the square pegs in the round holes…’ He moved the human race forward.