Jobs, Steve Jobs

I just heard that Apple founder and frontman Steve Jobs has passed away. I felt a lump in my throat come and go as the news was broadcast, as Apple has been involved with so many of my years in my life. When I first started working in publishing, the main room was a set of Macs, all rigged up with Pagemaker, along with a slightly more powerful Mac for the graphics. Every week, for three years, we turned out a Radio/Broadcast musical tipsheet on that room full of Apple computers.

When I decided to start my own magazines, I bought an Apple PowerPC. I remember not buying the new One Gigabyte version, thinking "who needs a gigabyte?" That computer lasted me from 1996 until just a few years ago. All the Rubber Rebel and Vulcan America magazines were composed on Apples. And the revolution of scanning...wow. No more huge darkrooms with cameras the size of refrigerators. It meant that I could take the pictures for my own magazines, without having to depend totally on studios and models. All the stories I wrote for my first two books (and much of Skin Tight) were written on an Apple.

So much of my creative life has been devised on machines that Steve Jobs helped invent and, more importantly, design. A recent Newsweek article profiled him, describing him alternately as brilliant and driven, but difficult and autocratically demanding. The chatter on TV behind me as I type is how Jobs The Visionary democratized the computing world. All I know is that he made a huge impact on mine.