Steve Jobs

What I did know about Steve Jobs growing up was the imaginative spirit of one of the most creative minds the world had ever seen. In school, the first “cool” computer was an Apple II. My first venture on the Internet was on an Apple PowerMac. I used to watch C-Net with John C. Dvorak early mornings and late nights like a geek waiting to see what Macs would come out with next. I was upset when we got our first computer because it was a PC. Even the vast amounts of Solitaire and Minesweeper couldn’t relieve me from the anguish of knowing that I couldn’t get a machine that felt so intuitive and so natural. I owe a major part of why I became a computer science major to two men: Shigeru Miyamoto and Steve Jobs. The former believed my childhood was a vast playland of imagination; the latter believed I could extend that child-like imagination well into childhood.

The crazy thing is that, in the last few years, he’s exactly the type of person I could never admire presently. His education stance alone almost made me smack my iPod Touch in the screen. The stories about his callousness and iron-fisted management style turned me off to him even more so. At the root of this character, though, was this idea of singularity. All the neurons firing in his brain led to a carefully driven set of ideas that changed the way we live. He had a oneness with the things he generated that others constantly fail to emulate. He put whole industries under his thumb and blew people’s minds every six months or so.

In my youth, I wanted to cheer him on because he had the greater of the two products. As he found a way to finally win, he slowly began to lose himself. He may be the answer to the question of whether a company that large can survive without the company’s mind. One can only wonder if one of his latest inventions, the iCloud, was the forecast of his impending passing away, the gifts he shared with the world pushed into a place that only people like him understood.

Mr. Vilson, who has an iPod Touch, a Macbook Pro, and an iPad, with an iMac on the way …