by Rod D. Martin
October 5, 2011
The world has been changed many times over by the brilliance of Steve Jobs. I could not begin in these short moments after his death to estimate his impact on me and mine. But a few thoughts deserve jotting down.
I first encountered Jobs in the pages of Fortune magazine, in 1982, wherein I first saw the Apple Lisa. I fell in love. Truly. It didn't hurt that the girl I was utterly infatuated with (I was 12 at the time) shared its name. But that was a minor point, even then.
The Lisa was a vision, both in and of itself -- she was beautiful -- and of a world that was about to be. Her lines were elegant, flawless. In an age of black screens and DOS prompts, she seduced with the first commercially-available (for a mere $10,000) graphical user interface. She sported protected memory, cooperative multitasking, 2 megabytes of RAM (almost 10 years later the average PC would still have just 64K), and this amazing new thing called a mouse.
But the details we…
