Last night, Raines Cohen, cofounder of the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group, and I hosted a Berkeley Cybersalon to commemorate Steve Jobs. About three dozen of us sat around in a circle at the Hillside Club in Berkeley and talked about how the product lines from Apple had changed our lives.
Most of us had never met Steve Jobs -- although two of our attendees knew him well from Reed College days, when Steve still in search of Steve -- but we felt his presence in his products, and these products had profoundly touched all of our lives, even a pre-teen who attended with her parents and who said she couldn't imagine her life without Apple.
One of those who knew Jobs the best kept saying he acted like an asshole but that there were reasons for it. He had to fight against the behemoths of business who were always trying to keep him and his radical ideas about computing in line. And he had to fight his own demons about having been given away at birth by his own mother and raised by his adopted (albeit loving) parents. And mostly, he wanted to pursue a vision of his: to transform our most basic communication tools into objects of beauty.
Had he lived in the age of the emergent television, tv sets of yore might have become art pieces instead of banal boxes.
Here's what people found through Apple: love, work, passion, respect, friends, comfort, and voice. Kaliya Hamlin, the identity expert, said that before the Macintosh, a computer was just a computer. The Mac is a joy to work with, she said. The beauty of its design and ease of use inspired her to get into computing. Eleanor Freed, who used to work at Apple as a design engineer, said that for the first time in her professional life, no one cared about her gender...they cared about her ideas. And her husband, Adrian Freed, who works at the Center for New Music at UC Berkeley, said that Jobs's interest in perfecting sound -- the NeXT cube had no fan -- led to his collaboration with French musicians in Paris long before the iPod was created.
Rarely do one person's ideas impact the world so powerfully. But as last night's memorial indicated, many of us have been affected profoundly by the beauty that Steve Jobs brought into our lives.
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