Back in the DOS days, Apple’s GUI (graphical user interface)* was a fantastic plus, but the price that Jobs insisted on extracting from it—basically demanding that America grant him a monopoly covering both software and hardware—contrasted perfectly with the hilarious “1984” ad which gave America the glorious news that we could stop buying all our computer shit from Bill Watson at IBM and start buying all of it from Steve.
It was a friendly federal judge who put the kibosh on Steve’s power play, deciding that the GUI was not an “idea” that could be patented. In fact, I suspect the real basis for the judge’s decision was that GUI was “too good an idea” to be patented. It was simply unwise to give one man so much control over so important an industry—even a total computer illiterate could see how important computers were going to become—particularly when that one man was so obviously determined to make every piece of hard and soft ware run through the eye of his needle.
Few people have refuted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dictum “there are no second acts in American lives” more thoroughly than Jobs. Steve’s early computers were too underpowered, too expensive, and too cute. It was only when he started thinking outside the box that he had his real impact. Everyone was talking about going beyond desktops and laptops, but Jobs did it, with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. It’s no accident that these were fashion statements you could carry around with you. Sure, that cantaloupe iMac looked sharp sitting in your dorm room, but with an iPod you could let the whole world know you were cool.
Comments about the “real Steve” sound very much like comments made by people run over by other obsessive-compulsive software billionaires in a hurry, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, four-eyed hard-chargers who made Vince Lombardi look like a pussy. Ones and zeroes seem to bring out the blood lust in man in a way that even Xs and Os cannot match.
Jobs was quintessential California and quintessential Sixties—he licensed the Apple name from the Beatles, the ultimate Sixties gods, and he naturally worshipped at the shrine of Bob Dylan. To be as cool as Dylan! The aloof, mysterious, untouchable Bob! So impossible to catch! You reach out for him, and he disappears! And when he’s gone, he reappears, in a new guise, as fresh and alluring and mysterious as the old! And, like Dylan, when you did get to know him, kind of a prick. Which, maybe, is why he didn’t want you to get to know him.
Afterwords
Jobs is also reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright, obsessed with both freedom and control, and who also showed a remarkable capacity for re-invention. Wright not only designed houses, but also all the furniture, not to mention the silverware, dishes, placemats, napkins, etc., to go in the individual houses he built. I met an architect who told me that for one house Wright even designed the stationery. When he visited houses he built and found that the owners had re-arranged the furniture, he would arrange it back, the way it should be. Wright was very short, and didn’t like to have tall people working with him, because they spoiled the perspective.
*It’s fairly well-known that Jobs did not invent the GUI but rather licensed it from Xerox. Back in the eighties I worked for a non-profit that had the original Xerox “STAR” computers, which featured 19-inch black and white cathode ray screens and GUI—mailboxes (for intra-office mail only), printers, pretty much everything we have today.
