End of an era – thank you, Steve

MacDailyNews:

“The end of an astonishing era and the beginning of a new one.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs for everything you have done in an amazing, legendary career. What you have engineered will go down in history as one of the greatest success stories of all time.

Good luck to Mr. Jobs, Chairman of the Board, and to Mr. Cook, Apple Inc.’s new CEO!”

Steve Jobs and his wife after his final keynote, June, 2011

Steve, you have inspired me without ceasing since that spell-binding commercial during the Super Bowl in 1984. At the time I was a high school science teacher telling my students that their lives would be changed by the coming of the Information Age. In that commercial I saw it writ large. I can’t remember anything about the game itself, but I have never forgotten that compelling manifesto which proclaimed that the computer revolution is always meant to be for the people rather than the machine, for humanity rather than technique, personalizing rather than enslaving, uplifting rather than demoralizing:

Steve, you changed the world. You threw the hammer. You created the future. You transformed my life. Thank you.

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Updates:

• MacDailyNews
• Om Malik, GigaOm
• Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal.
  Other WSJ: Steve Jobs quotes; video: “Steve Jobs through the years.”
• Horace Dediu, Asymco
• M.G. Siegler, TechCrunch
• “Reactions and Remembrances” – Tidbits
• Jean Louis Gassée
• Nathan Evans
• Lisen Stromberg, “My Neighbor, Steve Jobs”
• Dan Pallotta, Harvard Business Review

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Steve Jobs, CEO:

• 1976: Apple – personal computing for people (Apple II, 1976); mouse, windows and graphical user interface (Mac, 1984).
• 1985: NeXt – the NeXTSTEP operating system, the basis of what would become OS X and iOS. (The WWW was invented on a NeXt computer.)
• 1986: Pixar – the most technological creative company.
• 1997: Apple – the most creative technology company (iMac, MacBooks, iPod, iPhone, iPad).
• Jobs pioneered the three major advances of my lifetime in user interfaces: mouse and windows in the 1984 Mac; gesture in the iPhone and iPad as well as Mac OS Lion; and natural voice (Siri’s artificial intelligence in iOS 5).

Here’s Jonathan Mann, from Song for the Day, on Steve Jobs (from a previous post):

More from Jonathan Mann.

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