Thinking different

I've never used a Windows PC more than occasionally.  I wrote my PhD thesis on a DOS machine, where each chapter took up 5 1/4 floppy and everything ran from a command line. Fortunately, the lab down the hall,which had just purchased a new-fangled Macintosh, helped me do my graphics. It's hard to explain to my students today what a change it was to go from laboriously hand-drawing figures to making clean, crisp computer-generated line drawings, and ultimately digital images.

When I was  a postdoc, we shared a bunch of angular early Macintoshes, and accessed my email through a dumb terminal to the Oxford University VAX.  For the average person outside of academe, the world wide web did not yet exist.  We hung out on internet bulletin boards and learned the minimal amount of UNIX required to navigate the mainframe.  And the Macintoshes continued to get better. Soon, we didn't need the dumb terminal.  The Mac was online.

I'm a molecular biologist, and my field has always been very Mac heavy, in part because of our heavy use of graphics and imaging.  Additionally, most molecular biologists are not computer geeks;  they want things that are fast to learn, and intuitive to use.   And I think scientists have a natural resistance to conforming.

I remember my first very-own Mac, when I got my first faculty position (a Centris 650, in 1993).  I remember the first web browsers when there wasn't really a web yet.  Because I do have a streak of geek, I started writing HTML code by hand, and put up my first web page in 1995 -- still running, though redesigned a few times!  I hung on to Macs when things looked bad in the 90s, and felt relief when Steve came back to Apple. I spent time correcting people who erroneously reported that Microsoft Word didn't run on Macs (it always has).  When I go to meetings, Macs make up at least half of the machines in use, and often more.  

Macs last a long time, and are easy to maintain, which justifies their expense.  In my lab, until recently a first-generation gumdrop iMac sat next to our sleek Apple multi-terabyte RAID array enterprise grade server.

I think I still have my first generation iPod, a clunky little hard drive.  These days, I use an iPhone, a slim little MacBook Air when I travel, and a fast MacBook Pro which I plug into a big monitor on my desk.  My old computers have been cycled down to the kids or my lab. 

“We’re here to put a dent in the universe!"
Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs made these tools democratic, quirky, and available. He also made them simple,  elegant, and a pleasure to use.  Whether you use a PC or not, you've been touched by his vision. The interface on your computer, the internet, the music market, the smartphone, even movies would not be the same without his contributions.  And he "got it":  a technical visionary who understood from a hippy youth that life is what you make of it. How sad he died so young.
 
But what a wonderful legacy he left us, this child of unmarried parents, college drop out, Buddhist, non-conformist....

Here's a quote from a commencement address Steve Jobs gave at Stanford in 2005 .  This was a reflective address from a man who was facing mortality and imparting his own spiritual wisdom.  (You can see the whole address here on Youtube, or read the text)

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

He accomplished what he did not because he followed the rules, but because he followed his heart.  As a famous Apple campaign put it,

Think different.

Susan Forsburg, SPC blogmaster