Stewart Brand once said that the difference between east coast and west coast intellectuals is that on the east coast an intellectual is someone who says things, writes things and the product is usually a book. Out here on the west coast, he said, we do that too, but we also build things.
If there was something that epitomized Steve Jobs, it was an incredibly ferocious drive to build things that were fiercely intentional. In that, he was a West Coast intellectual and Maker who left a stamp on the world.
I never worked at Apple or met Steve in person though we saw him occasionally in and around Palo Alto. My earliest memory of him was reading about Wozniak and Jobs in Newsweek as Apple went public in the late 70s. I was in India then without any real hands-on sense of what a personal computer was but the story of these two young guys on this crazy adventure struck in my imagination though and seeded the siren call of Silicon Valley.
When Apple launched the first Macintosh, I was in Florida and spent hours at the Sears store ("Test Drive a Macintosh") and was blown away in relation to the IBM PCs, Symbolics and Prime Workstations I was working with. While never a fanboy, I admired the thought and craftsmanship that went into the many Apple products I owned over the years (MacSE, Powerbook 180 etc.) - as great blends of form and function - not perfect but definitely intentional compared to the "absent-minded, after-thought" design of the alternatives. A few products came close - the Go Tablet, the early RIM devices, IBM ThinkPads but most of those lost their way and slowed down.
Jobs was one of the many colorful characters that inhabited a very small ten square miles in Silicon Valley that I arrived into in the mid-80s and I count myself lucky to have lived, worked with and around people like him who blended their craft with counter-culture (in AI, Security and User Interfaces). John Markoff's book: "What the Dormouse Said" captures nicely some of the early influences that might have touched people like Steve as they grew up in the valley.
As a young engineer I read many of the early books about startups in Silicon Valley to puzzle out the culture and trying to understand what it took to build a startup from scratch. Of the many pieces of wisdom, this one from Steve stuck with me and gave me the courage to trust my instincts with thousands of little decisions you make in bootstrapping startups where analytics are little help and can be paralyzing.
"You make a lot of decisions based on the fragrance or odor of where you think things are going" - Steve Jobs, 1984 in "The Little Kingdom" by Mike Moritz talking about building the early Apple. RIP Steve, I'm sure you'll be tinkering around whereever you are.
*Credit to rbanffy at tweetlevel for the unhappy mac image
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