A Tribute

I know that all the news reports about the passing of Steve Jobs (I really can’t use the word death because it’s impossible to think of him as having done anything more than gone away) have probably left many non-Apple freaks feeling like this is way overblown. After all, he was just a man who ran a computer company.

And they would be sort of right. He didn’t bring peace to the world. He didn’t cure cancer. He didn’t rescue anyone from a burning building.

But he did something that is amazing enough — at least in my world. He changed it. For those who know me now but not before, it will come as a surprise to hear that I wasn’t always a geek. I was once just an English teacher. The most technology I used was an overhead. I did once take an audio-visual course as I was preparing to graduate, figuring it was important to know how to use things like a projector. I did okay, but the first year I taught, I still had to have the AV “boy” (assigned by the library to inept teachers) come run my projector the few times I used it.

In 1984, that changed. It actually wasn’t a Mac though that came into my world. Instead, I rescued five or six orphaned computers that had been stuck in a closet in the junior high. I had decided that MY students were going to have a writing lab, and I’d make it happen. No one wanted these donated machines so it was easy to acquire them. I figured out how to make them work and got software that would work most of the time. Most of the time meant that  you had to be careful saving because if you tried to save twice, it crashed the program and all work went away. This was NOT a good way to make students think technology was a solution. I even found a printer that I coerced into playing nice. Dot matrix, of course, which used sheets of papers with holes along the side to align the feed into the machine. You are thinking now, yeah sure. And you weren’t a geek! Well, let’s just say the hidden geek in me was beginning to surface.

I spent hours at school making all this happen. Meanwhile I’d seen my first Mac. Can you say “love.” As a matter of fact, I was so enamored that Gene warned me that I could NOT buy one. Astonished, I replied, “I’ve never bought anything in my life on impulse that cost that kind of money. Why would you think I’d start now?” His reply was, “I’ve never seen that look in your eye before.” I reassured him that I was not about to send us down the path of financial ruin. Those things cost a fortune.

One day I came home to find kids dancing in the hall in excited anticipation. “Mom, come see!!” I could not imagine what was driving such enthusiasm until I walked into Gene’s office. There sat a bright shiny Mac 128 fresh from its ever so cool box. One slot for a floppy. No hard drive. Less memory than I have on the flash drive hanging from my key chain. And it was beautiful.

To say I was astonished doesn’t begin to describe the emotion. All I could repeat was, “Gene! You said we couldn’t afford this.” His logical reply was, “I know, but I figured if you were ever coming home again, we needed a computer.”

In typical kid fashion, our children were ready to use it the moment it was turned on while we adults kept cautioning that we needed to read the instructions first. We didn’t want to do anything wrong.

We had to pay it off in monthly installments which was not our usual method of financing things. We figured, though, that a one-time important purchase like this was a good reason. Little did we know that this was only going to be the start. I can remember commenting to someone at a later date that we’d soon have to have a second computer to prevent bloodshed at our house, and they looked at me like I had suggested we needed a second moon. But we were a hooked family.

That little Mac earned its keep. It was always being used by one person or another. We eventually upgraded it by cracking the case (a verboten action that voided any warranty) and hand soldering in additional memory bringing it to 512. A friend of mine had done this to his own machine and he acted as midwife. My heart was in my throat the whole time, but it taught us that we had power and could use it.

We learned how to use software and how to figure out how to make things work. We joined a users group to exchange information since manuals only began to touch on software functions. We’d come home after every meeting excited to try our new skills. And we learned how to eject and insert disk after disk because software was on disk rather than a hard drive. You’d put in the software disk, get the program started, eject the disk, and then insert another disk on which to store your information. It seemed the normal way to function. Today, we’d laugh ourselves silly, but hey, we developed great wrist strength.

And that’s only the beginning of what Steve Jobs did for me, my family, and my students. For along the way (to be told in the next blog), my students became part of the equation also.

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