BEFORE Steve Jobs, there were already computers, the first ones the size of a football field; they were used to break the Nazi code and a young and handsome Alan Turing gets the credit for them. Instead, he was forced by the country he saved to take injections to cure him of homosexuality so that he swelled like a bladder and died looking like a freak.
Then computers were much reduced to the size of a building floor. They were for Nasa scientists to escape the earth and missile telemetry to destroy.
They were popularized and made portable—the size of a kitchen range and further reduced to the size of a washing machine.
About the time Steve Jobs started working in a garage, there were desktop computers in every office, mostly for accountants. Later newsmen used them alongside the more dependable typewriter. They made green text. They were quiet, which was unnerving, like you were not getting anything done; just typing on air; and it could all turn to that if you failed to save. Once gone—forever lost.
Then Steve Jobs came along with the first Apple computer. I had one. It was like the fruit in the Garden of Eden but not forbidding; it was reasonably priced.
Once you bit that apple, especially the sharp yet sweet Macintosh variety, a world of knowledge and power, a sphere of art with an unprecedented facility for expression, opened up for you.
Between you and your writing—or even arranging music like my best friend in the CIA did by inventing his own program for the next evolution of the Apple, the Classic—the last barrier dropped between the act of expressing and what felt at every moment like the final expression; a seamless connection was established between writer and writing, a connection as fluid as a fountain pen but making writing faster and consistently beautiful.
Steve Jobs said he came up with the Apple because of a fondness for calligraphy. He wanted the writing on a computer to be as beautiful as the printed page. He lifted writing on a computer from backroom encoding in green against a black backdrop, to the standard of monastic illuminated manuscript, if you like, or the printing of 16th century masters of typography like Bodoni and the other typographies so carefully preserved in the fine editions of Willa Cather put out by Alfred A. Knopf. But for the privilege of seeing your writing in print of such quality, you needed to be an established master yourself. Few enjoyed that privilege; I could never hope for it.
Still, I miss hammering out a draft on the clackety-clack keyboard of an iron typewriter. But the loss is amply compensated by the crisp writing that instantly on a clean white screen that could pass for the pages of the finest printed edition by barely touching the keys of a Mac, where I had been punching out drafts on a typewriter.
What this did to my writing, I can best convey by saying that Cory Aquino’s most beautiful utterances came from one Mac after another, which, starting with the Classic, I had a small servant carry around like what would become the laptop in an especially made black canvas bag, wherever I traveled in the world. I wanted them both as compact and unobtrusive as possible. And so it went with every variation of the Mac that followed, for better or worse, like a wife.
Then Steve Jobs put out the Powerbook and unleashed the book-like yet portable power of laptop writing with the allure of lap dancing. Creating and creation, writing and the written piece, one smooth seamless act and experience that could be as swiftly be revised and refined until the writing flowed with credence and clear water.
By this time, Steve Jobs had opened another portal to a wider world than the act of creation, and that was access to an infinite wealth of knowledge—some shallow, some deep, some useless, some useful, all entertaining. But everything there is to know about life and the world is there with a light touch and the soft slide of the finger across the screen. He opened both doors. Then stepped aside to let us in, promising only that those doors would widen, those portals would swing with every innovation of his company, faster, easier, wider to the world of knowledge, creation and other people.
He had created a new way of relating between people as instantly and as real as the “real” thing. You could even see each other as you heard each other talk. It was not air travel abolished distance; because every two-hour trip takes six to accomplish if you add waiting time at departure and destination. It was Steve Jobs’s e-mail and Skype and its unceasing improvements. He had added another open portal to the one between minds to another between feelings.
And finally he said he was opening one more door; this one to his grave, with just one unoriginal message: Live each day as if it is your last because one day it will be.
He was dying. Going where even an Air Mac cannot reach. Steve Jobs, who created the Mac, died two weeks ago, leaving a world totally different from the one before, and leaving us to face a future we still cannot know but which we will not have without him.
It was just like Steve Jobs to leave as a parting offering, not a new version of the iPhone 4 but a vast improvement upon it yet not enough to merit, in his view, a separate name of its own. Instead of launching iPhone 5, he just added an “S” to mark the vast improvements he had made to make the iPhone 4S.
He wasn’t going out with a bang if, by his high standards, it merited at best the whisper of small but key refinements. That was all that was called for, at the moment.
In that way, he left a big challenge to his successor, not just to tweak an old product and pass it off as new, but to make a big and real difference with the next product before calling it new. Anything less would not be new but just better.
This was modesty in a man with so much to be proud of and smart business sense, as well.
Modest because he would not offer customers more than he was giving, at the moment merely key refinements. And smart because he meant to say that the company he was leaving behind had not closed a chapter in, or for that matter, closed the book on one life with his passing. It was merely turning a page in the same book with many more pages yet to be turned. “Pages” is the name of his writing program for the new Macs.
Steve Jobs, most eulogies say, was not an inventor. We think he was, he invented a whole new way to use computers and make them a part of, and a profound enhancement of life. True, he worked with material mostly already at hand—the basic computer—yet he made it do things it had never done before and changed the way it looked and functioned. He made clean and beautiful things that did things never done before and not just things that worked better. He believed and proved his belief that better means more beautiful and more beautiful means better and even something new.
He showed that to be a great artist, it is not enough to be poor and hungry like he was but one had to be smart and striving all the time. The smart was up to God and genes. The striving was up to us.
Unlike his other eulogists, I do not believe there is anything to learn from Steve Jobs, either his life or his achievements, because smart as we might be and hard though we may strive, we won’t attain the level of his achievements, never.
We are fooling ourselves that there is a Steve Jobs among us, among 100 million Filipinos and more coming, among the 6 billion people on earth.
He was here; he is gone. There is no promise that what he did can be done by those who succeed him.
Living each day as if it were your last will not make you the Steve Jobs of whatever it is you are doing, which is probably very little or nothing of any value to yourself or the world.
No, the wiser lesson is the one that Jobs could not say because his family and friends have equity in Apple that must be preserved.
The wiser lesson of loss—of an admirable or a loved one—is that it is irretrievable, irreplaceable, irredeemable and permanent.
And for the lost one, it is that the prospect of extinction, whether it flares up a feeling of appreciation for the current day or panic if there will be a tomorrow, the lesson is just to have no regrets, if you can avoid. If you cannot, it won’t matter; you will be dead. But there was never any other way of living your life other than the way you lived it or you would not be the person pondering his imminent end as you are doing.
