Apple turned out to be the most influential computer company since IBM and it continues. So while we celebrate its 50th year, we need to take amount to recognize the genius of the man who was responsible for that, Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs entered my life in 1982 and remained a recurring presence—sometimes directly, sometimes at a distance until his death in 2011. Apple’s 50th anniversary prompted me to revisit a post I wrote years ago called “30 Years of Not Being Steve Jobs.” https://twothirdsdone.com/2015/04/11/34-years-of-not-becoming-steve-jobs/
Apple was founded in 1976. Its story has been told many times and doesn’t need repeating here. I became aware of the company after joining Digital Equipment Corporation in 1979, three years after Apple’s founding. Within a year, I was promoted to group manager for professional computer which was our term for what the world was beginning to be call personal computers.
The computers my group was developing were far more sophisticated than Apple’s Apple II. We were building, what we believed, the future of computing would look like but we were wrong at least in the short term. At that time Apple wasn’t my primary concern. IBM, who had just introduced its PC, was.
Palm Springs, 1982
I met Jobs for the first time at the second annual PC Forum in Palm Springs in 1982. I flew in from Boston on a Learjet, fresh off the announcement of Digital’s Professional Series computers, full of confidence and convinced I was about to help reshape the computer industry. I had no idea I was also walking toward one of the more significant failures of my career.
That evening, I attended a dinner that included Bill Gates, whom I had met the year before, and Steve Jobs. They were both 27, 10 years younger than I me.
The next day, during a presentation, Jobs sat down next to me. I already knew his reputation. I remember hoping he wouldn’t try to recruit me. He was known for his charisma, and I didn’t want to be tempted. Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, and I had been promoted four times in two years. I was, as they say, a rising star who in just a few years would crash. As it turned out, Jobs showed no interest in me.
(altro…)