Thursday, October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs 1955-2011


Back in the early 80s I started using PCs and learned how to program them using DOS (Disk Operating System). I had to type everything, line by line. I typed thousands of lines of code. There was nothing onscreen to point and click on. There was no Mouse or TrackPad. I remember one day in 1984, I was in downtown Santa Rosa California. I walked in Santa Rosa Computer Center to look around to see if they had anything new. I walked up to this small beige box. It had a 9-inch black and white screen with a graphic drawing of a Japanese girl. It had a small keyboard and this other little box with one button and a cable attached to it, I had no idea what it was. The graphic was amazing looking, the detail that it had, I've never seen anything like it on a computer screen before. In those days computers could only display text and the displays came in two colors; Green and Amber. Even though the graphic drawing was in Black and White, I was impressed with how detailed it was. After seeing that first Macintosh computer, I tried to learn everything about it and the company who made it, Apple Computer Inc. I read the history of how the Macintosh became to be. Steve Jobs co-founder of Apple, wanted to create a computer that was as easy to use as a kitchen appliance. He wanted to take the computer code off the screen and have everything in plain english. He wanted to take it a step further and have a pointing device and graphic objects called Icons that you could click on in order to reduce the need for typing. The graphics on the screen were laid out to represent the top of a desk with Icons that looked like sheets of paper and folders. In the bottom right-hand corner of the screen was an Icon of a Trash can. With the mouse, for example, you could click on these Icons and drag them around the screen. You could drag the sheet of paper icon and put it into the folder icon or the Trash icon. I couldn't believe how simple it was to use. It seemed to good to be true! Well, ever since then, I used the Macintosh as much as I could and eventually stopped using DOS altogether. Before the Mac, I never thought a computer could ever be so easy to use. I thought computers had to be complicated because it could do so many things and in order for it to doing anything, you had to tell it what do to using lines of complicated computer code. Steve Jobs will be missed. If it wasn't for Steve's Innovative thinking, companies and consumers around the world wouldn't have the technology we have today.