Steve Jobs: An impartial look at the early days

By the time I had graduated from university, Steve Jobs was becoming a household name. He managed to have a sociological impact on the American public for reasons which I shall explore below.

Before going into these, I should like to explain that I wasn’t actually going to discuss Jobs’s death. However, having read too many effusive, extreme eulogies, I could no longer contain myself.

My father died when he was only a year older than Steve Jobs — at age 57, just a week short of his 58th birthday. I was 19 at the time.  Experiencing parental death at a relatively early age does take the sentimentality out of subsequent deaths.  It’s the same with Spouse Mouse, who went through the same loss at a similar age and often says, ‘People die’. Having said that, every time someone dies, we are cognisant that someone else has lost a beloved spouse, a devoted parent, a cherished child, a trusted confidant, a best friend, a loyal colleague.

The point I’m making is that we shouldn’t keep falling into the 1997 Princess Diana Death syndrome, which was mawkish in the extreme.  We also would not wish to have people weeping uncontrollably over us.

Back to Steve Jobs, though. The post that took the biscuit — which I didn’t bookmark, by the way — was one from a theonomist (a Christian sharia promoter) who said that Steve Jobs was a ‘man of dominion’.  Give over!  Steve Jobs was a Buddhist and a successful entrepreneur, nothing more!  He was certainly not out selling iPads for the glory of Christ!

It would appear from the news articles that not many remember Jobs’s early days from the 1970s and 1980s.  This was the time which I best remember and share with you below.

Steve Jobs’s accomplishments were tripartite, in my view.  This is not something which you will read anywhere else, but I believe that they were significant for American society and business as a whole.

The rise of the non-WASP American inventor

The two young co-founders of Apple came from a non-WASP background. (Ronald Wayne was the third co-founder.) Jobs had Swiss-German-Syrian ancestry (although he was adopted by the Jobs family). Steve Wozniak is of Polish descent. This is something which Americans from non-WASP backgrounds noted immediately.  It was a big buzz around their dinner tables and at drinks parties.

This non-WASP innovation would have happened sooner or later, but these guys seemed to have come from nowhere with no military engineering or university research IT experience, the kind one associates with such inventions and innovations.

Over three decades later, we are now accustomed to seeing a variety of names linked to computing and technology companies.  A number of them, like Sergey Brin, have emigrated from other countries to head their own ventures in the United States.  Because Jobs was first on the scene to market IT to the masses (see below), he opened up the playing field to outsiders, especially those who were less (or not at all) connected to the military-industrial complex but were simply ordinary guys who loved technology and dabbling in development.

Furthermore, he indirectly interested women in IT.  I knew a girl at the time who was attending university.  She said, ‘When I graduate, I want to be Steve Jobs.’  Although she hardly achieved Jobs’s status, she did have a very successful career working for Andersen Consulting, then freelancing.

Two decades earlier, I remember as a child lamenting to my Catholic parents in the 1960s that I could never become an inventor or an innovator.  They were aghast: ‘Why not?’ I replied, ‘Because you have to be a Protestant and English or Scottish in order to invent anything!’  They concluded, ‘Churchmouse, all you need to do is … build a better mousetrap!’

Ow!

The decline of the IT geek

Until Jobs came along, accounting and IT were really realms of what  Americans used to call the ‘pencil-necked geek’.  They had to be the least sexy professions around and carried a certain stigma for anyone under the age of 25.  Accounting was dry and IT was just, well, weird.  However, whereas accountants were financially savvy and generally retired on a comfortable cushion of cash, only the awkward and friendless went into IT.

Or so we thought.

In the early 1980s, Steve Jobs suddenly transformed the geek into sex god overnight.  He appeared on the cover of or in feature articles of magazines which the general public bought: Time, Newsweek and People.  Suddenly, teenage girls and female university students saw this handsome man and said, ‘I wanna marry Steve Jobs! He’s sooo foxy!’  The apple in the picture was a clincher.  So suggestive, so evocative.   Steve drew the heretofore unheard-of links between technology, manhood and sex.  He had liberated geeks forever!

He had a knack for posing for the camera. Who can forget the many photos of him wearing his bow tie? C’mon, who wore bow ties back then, except one’s grandfather?  For Jobs, though, this was an idea with which he was comfortable. When everyone else was wearing faded lumberjack shirts and jeans to high school in the early 1970s, even for class photos, here’s Steve Jobs’s yearbook picture from Homestead High School in Cupertino, California.  And what is he wearing but a conventional bow tie!  The only time any boy wore a bow tie in the 1970s was at prom night, with one of those outsized papillons which came with the rented tux (or ‘DJ’, for my European readers)!

Making technology appealing

On a serious note, Jobs’s ability to present himself as sartorially elegant, technologically savvy and self-promoting made Apple products appealing. He presented himself and Apple to the American public as an ordinary person would have. He seemed amenable and he made his computers sound interesting.  People wanted to know more about this new, powerful (relatively speaking) machine you could easily use in the office and maybe, if you had enough money, at home.

I used an Apple II early in my career, when Jobs was making the mainstream media rounds. The logo it bore is at the top of the post. That, to me, is the Apple logo.  It doesn’t matter what came before (a funky 70s design) or after (a rather boring silhouette).  Yes, the machine was easy to use.

It became a bit of a conversation piece when I would meet up with family during the holidays.  Someone would say, ‘Churchmouse uses one of those computers — you know, the ones that Steve Jobs makes.’

‘Really? What’s it like?  They say we’ll all be using those someday.  Gee …‘

I kid you not. I’m recalling things from the early 1980s. Windows was still several years off from becoming mainstream.  IBM PCs were super expensive (not that Apple II’s were cheap).  Most offices were moving to the word processor for general correspondence, but the typewriter and telex were still in use. (The telex was the email of its day — a large roll of tape with tiny holes of code in it was the memory.  Lose the telex printout and you recovered it by feeding the tape through the reader — an arduous process; there were hundreds of messages on one roll.  One labelled the tapes with dates. Heaven forbid that someone tore the tape!) The telefax was starting to appear more and more but was still relatively new.

This new technology — comprising the word processor, Apple II and the telefax — was all big news.  Prior to the Apple II, I’d worked (as a user) on a mainframe using a large CRT (cathode ray tube) — a large ‘terminal’ or a monitor — now a flat screen.

For my younger readers, this will seem unimaginable, but when I was their age, it was nothing short of revolutionary.

Speaking of mainframes, when I was a nipper in the early 1960s, mainframes were huge, gigantic.  The Sperry UNIVAC was a mysterious techological leviathan that few people saw in their lifetimes.  Only qualified professionals could operate and use it.  Things moved on from there.  When I was six or seven, I saw a mainframe up close.  It, too, filled the space of a UNIVAC although I think it was an IBM.  One of my aunts was a comptroller of a large hospital and took a few of us family members on a tour, which included a huge computer room.  That would have been in 1966, if I remember rightly.  There were the men operating and programming it and a few privileged women — ex-secretaries –  running punchcards through with hospital patient records on them.  It was incredible.  But, I digress.

After my Apple II experience, I left that job for another.

Then, something horrible happened.

I got sucked into the dreaded finance-accounting-IT vortex, where I would stay for the next 13 – 14 years. (Back then, IT was under the aegis of the Finance Department.) In the mid-1990s, I was able to segue into a new profession, although still one closely linked to IT.  And, even once I finally made it into marketing full time, it was still IT-related.  Since then, I have been unable to do any creative writing whatsoever.  It has to be strictly factual, otherwise I cannot get it to work.  My creative, fictional juices have been squeezed out by too much logical thought.  On the other hand, my work did pay the bills throughout those many years!

It was around the time I entered this thankless vortex that the press featured articles about disagreements between Jobs and Steve Wozniak.  The people of Polish descent (already 3rd and 4th generation Americans) whom I knew started railing against Steve Jobs.  ‘How dare he pick on Wozniak.  He’s the brains behind Apple! Jobs just swans about the place.’

I had been too busy at work to keep up with all of this and, frankly, at the end of the day, all these products are tools as far as I’m concerned.  So, I asked one of my colleagues — a WASC (White Anglo-Saxon Catholic) — who said, ‘Churchmouse, where have you been?  Everyone knows that Steve Wozniak is the genius.  Jobs is merely the front man drawing people to the product!’

And, lo, shortly afterward, somewhere I read the following quotes, which you can now find on the Apple History page, faithfully compiled by Mac user Markus Ehrenfried. I highly recommend it to those who have no memory of Jobs pre-1995.  Take a look at these:

‘He was the only person I met who knew more about electronics than me.’  — Steve Jobs about Steve Wozniak

‘Steve didn’t know very much about electronics.’ — Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs

There might have been some humility in Wozniak’s statement, but that was pretty much it for me — and many others — as far as Steve Jobs was concerned.  Jobs’s statement should have ended ‘than I’, the grammatical test being, ‘than I knew about electronics’.

One other thing Steve Wozniak did accomplish, albeit unintentionally, was to put an end to Polish jokes in the United States.  These were simple, often silly, Q-and A-two-liners which Poles told against themselves in a light-hearted, self-effacing manner. For the most part, they were for children, but adults of Polish descent often got a rise out of the jibes, too.  However, Wozniak’s genius status put paid to them, thank goodness.

Conclusion: Steve Jobs was a great front man, a shrewd businessman and on the cutting edge of technological advancement.  However, although he co-developed and owned patents, he cannot be likened to — and, yes, these comparisons have all been made in the past week — Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Johannes Gutenberg, Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison.

Steve Jobs — memorable, driven, canny.  He’s helped to leave his technological thumbprint on the world. May he rest in peace.

But let’s stop idolising him.