October 6, 2011-by John Blair, valleywatch.net editor
I really was saddened to hear about the death, at far too young an age, of Steve Jobs, the man who shares my desk everyday. His visionary innovations have made life better for all of us by thinking past the obvious and informing designs that remain the awe of his competitors.
I bought my first Mac in 1987. It was a MacPlus with a single megabyte of memory and so small that it was considered portable by one of my friends who carried his around with him wherever he went.
At that time, personal computing was just getting started and a competitive fight between Apple with the MacIntosh platform and IBM with their new partner Microsoft were fighting for supremacy long held by IBM. It turned out that IBM won that round and the Windows operating system seemed to prevail.
Jobs ended up losing his job as founder and CEO of Apple because his uncompromising, perfectionist manner. His ouster, lucky for Apple and the world, lasted just a few years while IBM and Microsoft gained huge market share.
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Jobs’ return to Apple was an epiphany moment in technological history.
EMacs, IMacs, PowerBooks, PowerMacs all out performed and were easier to use than those of other manufacturers. And the advances in processing chip technology, getting smaller and faster led to innovations in differing modes like IPhone, IPad and MacBook Air.
Of course there are also the software that Apple introduced that made even dummies like me capable of using those hardware innovations with ease and integration.
When I heard of Jobs’ death yesterday at the age of 56, I paused to say thanks to a man who had made my life both simpler and more complicated, more artful and more informed.
Jobs’ death also strikes another chord in me. My father, only 55 when he died, lived a modest and entrepreneurial life but never gained riches or fame. He died of lung cancer due mainly to his sickening Lucky Strike habit.
To think that someone so intelligent, rich and capable as Steve Jobs could only live a single year longer than my father struck me in an esoteric way. Cancer, it seems, has no socio-economic bounds. It matters little how much wealth one has when cancer comes calling because the human body is not adept at fending off the many intrusions that our toxic society insidiously offers each of us every day.
All we can do is try to reduce the crap that makes us sick and avoid, as best we can, exposure to environmental toxins that surround us. Today, we grieve for Steve Jobs, victim of pancreatic cancer. Who will die tomorrow because the environment in which they lived was too toxic to survive?
Well Said.