The Impact of Steve Jobs – A Commentary

In 1980, I was a sophomore in high school and I took a class called Computer Programming I.  The classroom that fall was full of  brand new Apple IIs.  We were learning to write programs in BASIC, and the teacher, Mr. Heald, was also the baseball coach.  He helped me write a program that would calculate the earned run average for a pitcher.  On the screen, there were questions.  Innings pitched?  Earned Runs?  I was taking numbers from the Baseball Encyclopedia and plugging them in.  As soon as I hit the enter key, the ERA would show.  Every one matched what was in that book.  I was in love.  I didn’t know who Steve Jobs was.  I didn’t care.  All I knew was my world had changed, and it was all I could talk about at the dinner table that night.

Fast forward 25 years.  Now I’m the teacher.  I’m in a classroom at Apple.  I’m teaching an orientation class to new engineers.  Some are hardware engineers, and some are software engineers.  They are all new college grads, and the orientation class is concerning career development. As part of the program, there is an exercise that asks small groups of people to take a sheet of poster paper and draw a T-shirt that represents their career orientation.  It is supposed to depict the strengths of their particular orientation, as well as the things they need to watch out for if they are to remain successful during their career.  The creativity in the shirt design was amazing, but one thing was consistent around the room.  Each of the shirts was a mock turtleneck.  Steve’s shirt.   At that moment, I thought to myself.  How often does a person in business remain relevant across three decades?  I think the answer is “not often”.  I KNOW the answer when it pertains to technology, is “once”.

So, you see, Steve didn’t just give us stuff.  He gave us stuff that helped us think about and interact with our world differently.  It was never enough to just create a product.  It had to be a product that meant something to the end user.

Steve Jobs and I share two similarities.  We are both Pisces, and we both believe(d) that running shoes are always appropriate attire.  That’s where the similarities end.  Steve wanted to put a dent in the Universe.  I’m just happy if I can keep one particular student awake during one of my lectures at the university.  He made this world a better place, and I hope there are more like him, waiting in the wings.  She or he may be hard to find, but it’s worth our time and energy to develop their potential.

Did Steve Jobs put a dent in the Universe?  I’d say the whole Universe spins funny because of the size of that dent.