A working class hero is something to be

I was surprised at how taken aback I was at the news of the death of Steve Jobs. I mean, it wasn’t like we didn’t know he was sick.

But now that he’s gone, I realize I haven’t been this emotionally impacted by a celebrity death since Johnny Cash.

And what the two have in common is I can’t believe I walked the earth at the same time as these two giants.

Leaving Johnny Cash aside for the moment in the interest of brevity…

In the wave of media attention following Jobs’s death, the full scope of his contributions to popular culture is being tallied. The standard fonts—I mean standard, having shipped with every Mac since God-knows-when—were his innovation, and he named them himself after favorite cities. Chicago. Monaco. Geneva. He did that.

Before that, only graphic-artist monkeys like me had any idea what the hell a font was. Today, everybody’s a damn expert.

In his short life, he lived long enough to render many of his own seismic innovations obsolete, the mouse and the iPod being the first couple that come to mind. I refuse to even consider the changes he might have wrought, had he lived another 30 years, the approximate average lifespan these days.

What a loss.

I came to the Mac party late, securing a newspaper production position in the summer of ’89 and barely surviving a crash course in all things computer. You have to understand, just a couple months before working on my first Mac, I was using a punch-tape Mergenthaler for typesetting and a light table, t-square and Exacto knife for paste-up. Back then “cut” and “paste” weren’t computer functions, they were activities I performed manually.

I remember the papers’ first server boasting a whopping 40 megs of storage capacity! Quark and Illustrator were still just babies and the internet was a series of tubes that only a few dedicated early-adapters had discovered.

I was given two weeks to go from zero to running two newspapers completely by Mac. My employers were nuts to hire me. By Wednesday of the second week, I was only just beginning to “get” it. But if I had been given the same timeframe to master the PCs of that era, I’d probably be flipping burgers at McDonald’s today.

And during Jobs’ exile from Apple in the mid ’80s, he revolutionized animated filmmaking by founding Pixar. This tectonic shifting of the motion-picture paradigm was side-work for the guy while he waited for Apple to come calling again.

According to the media coverage, Jobs never graduated college. He wasn’t an inventor per se, but he was the visionary who kept the inventors’ paychecks coming. He wasn’t the genius who wrote the code and put the guts of the communications revolution together, but he was the futurist who was always ten steps ahead of everybody else in ways to apply the fruits of the eggheads’ labor.

He took a complicated, ugly workplace workhorse and made it into a sleek, sexy fashion accessory, in many circles a necessity by the time of his death. He took other peoples’ ideas and improved them, and integrated them in novel, commercially bold ways.

He took the stuff of science fiction and made them household staples. Like the famous Kennedy quote, he really did look at the future and say, “Why not?”

He didn’t ask “What’s next?,” he determined it.

And by and large, we live in a better, more connected world because of him. When the history of the communications revolution is taught a hundred years from now, Steve Jobs will be the Irving Thalberg of the tale; the indispensable innovator who laid the foundation for the industry that would change the world in the wake of his premature passing.

It’s a damned shame that that we’re still living in Steve Jobs’ world, but he isn’t.