Hopefully no one out there has Space Quest II on their RSS readers; I'm going to archive all of the "building a PC" articles here so they form something approaching a narrative. We'll start with the Steve Jobs memorial post that kicked everything off. Like anything I've ever written, I'm not altogether happy with it on reflection... but I also think it's best not to go back and edit such things.
I tried to string together a few words to send to the Apple memorial address, so I'll repost that:
Days before I was born, my father--who was an ER nurse at the time--went out and bought an Apple II+. He used it to teach himself about computers, to make a better life for his family. In a few years he was a top database developer. That was Steve's genius: discovering how technology could be used to improve life. In a few days the wags are going to start pointing out that he didn't really invent the PC or the phone or the animated movie... but he figured out how to elevate these things, to give them a meaning and a value that no one else could.
You wanted to imagine a different end to this story. We all knew this was coming but... needed to believe that something magical would happen, that there would be some deserved recompense pointing to a fair universe. I don't think that Apple needs Steve to keep innovating, but you wanted so much to imagine an end to his story where he would have been able to look back at the world he changed ten or twenty years on.
And of course Steve knew what was happening better than any of us, which is why the narrative that now emerges is so compelling. We come to realize that faced with his own death he lived his philosophy in a way that most people can't. He fought to spend his final years working on things that would change how we communicate instead of stepping back at all. That's astonishing to me.
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