My Memories of Steve Jobs

I wasn’t looking forward to this day, but after certain pictures, I knew it was coming. The world has lost one of the most significant figures of the last century. Everyone will write their tributes. This is mine.

I first heard the name Steve Jobs in my teen years, when my high school and better-off friends all began acquiring these neat new computers called the Apple IIe. Unlike the clumsy interface of the TRS-80s I’d put up with in earlier classes, the Apple, with AppleDOS, was a breath of fresh air. Plus, it had graphics. Games! What computer geek in their 40s does not know the meaning of “Tiltowait?

Along with the computer came the legend of the two Steves, Jobs and Wozniak, who created the computer in their garage. Suddenly, those 150-in-1 electronics kits from Radio Shack seemed like a good idea. Oh, we had no clue…

As time went on and the Mac appeared, I was initially put off by the black-and-white screen. Apple upgraded the IIe with the IIgs and I made the upgrade, but the writing was on the wall for the IIgs as ISVs were abandoning it like mad. I grew up in Rhode Island, where we had a really aggressive computer store pushing this new computer called the Amiga. So from 1988 to 1993, I was an Amiga-man.

The Amiga was run into the ground by the monstrous incompetence of Commodore’s management, and at that point, Apple was hitting the skids and not an option. It was 1993, I found myself on the PC side. The Steves weren’t running Apple, it was turning over CEOs, the Mac was outrageously expensive and there was no software for it. Half the product line was still black-and-white and they were using the same 68030 processor that my Amiga used. I became a PC user.

Fast forward a few years. It’s 1995, I live in the Boston area and work for PC Week (now eWeek) as their application development tools reporter. One of my regular gossip mongers tells me that Jobs, now running a company called NeXT Software, was considering selling off his firm to Oracle.

You all know NeXT had started out as a computer company, and when that failed, it shifted into being an operating system and development tools company, since the OpenStep development environment was considered much more advanced than anything else on the market. Oracle, as a database company with its own developer tools, was a logical choice.

I poked around a bit, made some calls, but came up with nothing but flat denials. I informed my editor there was nothing to the story and intended to drop it and move on. A few days later, my phone rings.

“ANDY, THIS IS STEVE JOBS. WHAT ARE THESE STORIES I’M HEARING ABOUT YOU ASKING AROUND ABOUT MY COMPANY?!?!”

Now imagine this. I’m in Medford, Mass., north of Boston. He’s in California, 2,500 miles away. And I’m backpedalling away from my phone in my chair so fast the headset was almost yanked off.

Thankfully, Jobs didn’t keep yelling. He demanded an answer and waited. Fortunately, I recovered quickly enough to give an answer: yes, I’d heard rumors, so I looked into them, but I found them to be untrue and I had dropped the story and had moved on.

“Oh, ok,” he said, and calmed down.

Fortunately, I was quick on my feet a second time. “Hey, while I got you on the phone, can I ask you a few questions?”

And I’m sorry but I don’t remember the details, and don’t have my old back issues any more to check. I know that I asked about his OpenStep strategy. I was deep into the FPS gaming world and id Software’s programming wiz kid John Carmack was loudly singing the praises of OpenStep at the time.

The call ended pleasantly with an invitation to visit the company’s Redwood City office, which I took a few months later on a west coast trip. Unfortunately, Jobs was busy so I met with a VP. But I’ll never forget that floating staircase that had no visible support.

Back around this time, two companies that competed with NeXT Software, Smalltalk developers ParcPlace and Digitalk, announced their merger. Steve had a devastating insult worthy of his buddy Larry Ellison: “Two stones tied together sink faster than they do apart.” It became a running joke between me and my editor at my last full-time gig, who also remembered that insult. I lost count of the number of merger announcements where the two of us would look at each other and say “Two stones” and laugh.

These days, I own a pair of Apple products now, an iPod Classic (which, sadly, seems headed for the glue factory) and an iPhone 4. Sorry, no Macs. I like building my own PC and have never owned a branded PC, and this is not the time for a PC-vs-Mac debate.

For 30 years, Steve Jobs was an interesting part of my life in one way or another. Knowing how awful a pancreatic cancer death can be, I’m just glad he is finally out of pain. Right about now I’d kill to have an Apple IIe and a Wizardry disk just for the trip down memory lane.

Thank you for everything, Steve. Even for bawling me out.