Thirty years ago today, a 28-year-old man with floppish long hair, wearing a bowtie and a double-breasted suit, introduced to the world a new machine that ended up changing how we interact with computers.
The man was Steve Jobs, and the machine was the Macintosh, and the many in the tech world deemed it insanely great.
Steven Levy of Wired reminisced about the birth of the Macintosh, including his first meeting with Steve Jobs:
He was also wildly dramatic about what he might do if the world didn’t understand the excellence of his creation — perhaps go to Italy and ride motorcycles, he said. He also talked about the future of Apple, sharing its dream that it would grow to be worth $10 billion. But, he said, he hoped it would be a $10 billion company that did not lose its soul.
It was the first of many conversations I would have with Jobs over next few decades, up to the year he died. But it was perhaps the most unforgettable, simply because it was all so new. The computer. The team. Steve. The whole package was, in a nutshell, the essence of the seismic shift about to occur, one that would indeed, as I heard it said that day, put a dent in the universe.
Universe, consider yourself dented. In 2014, IBM doesn’t even make PCs. Apple is not a $10 billion company, it is a half a trillion dollar company. Jobs is gone, but he left us after having had rebuilt the company beyond its previous glory, satisfied that he’d restored its soul.
Read the rest over at Wired