We Weren't Always This Way

This morning I turned on my Macbook at home, sent a quick email. Then I came into work, turned on my Mac with its big wide screen and its shiny silver base. And then there's my sleek little iPod and the iPhone that I'm planning to get soon. I thought back to the first Mac I used, a MacPlus was it? It was the computer Tom bought before we were married. I had used a computer very little before. The Mac was my first computer and for most of my computing life it is been the only kind of computer I've used.

Which is all to say that Steve Jobs is in my life, as he is in so many lives, and that when I heard the news last night that he had died of cancer, I felt like something big had shifted in our world.

I also noticed, when reading Jobs' obituary this morning in the Washington Post, how many of his inventions — items that now seem like they've been around forever — are very new. The iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010.

We have not been digitized and Mac-ified forever. Only in the last few years have we been buying our gadgets in stores without counters and walls. Like any good idea, Jobs' ideas have been so elegant and significant that they've erased the memory of what came before.