Steve Jobs, A Year Later

Steve Jobs, A Year LaterCredit to  JOHN BIGGS 

One year later we can’t forget him. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He made computers and phones and MP3 players. He wasn’t a political figure, a missionary, a healer. He was a guy who knew how to put software into hardware and make the whole as desirable to many as air. 

The stories of great men are often intertwined. The great clockmakers of the 1700s all lived together and worked together on the same block, their shops open on the Place Dauphine, a triangular park at the prow of the Île de la Cité. The geniuses of Bletchley Park came together to crack the codes that won the war. The Beats roared through the country looking for love, booze, and enlightenment. 

Their fates, the fates of Breguet, Turing, Kerouac, Ginsberg, depended on their networks the way a spider depends on her web. Jobs was the same. He grew up in a time that was best for what he did. He was born and came of age in an era that led him to see the promise in a bag of microprocessors and cold silicon, but wasn’t born so late as to misunderstand the change that swept through America in the 1960s and left its waterline high on the entrenched establishment. He grew up near Woz, near H-P, near the Homebrew Computer Club, near the cauldron of education, commerce, and risk that, in turn, grew up to become Silicon Valley.

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