Since I became active in fandom, I have called myself Sailor Mac. It was a name I chose on impulse, but it's one I've worn with pride. It's always been a tribute to the two people whose visions had a big hand in shaping my life – Naoko Takeuchi and Steve Jobs.
When I heard Steve Jobs had passed on, I did something I rarely do when I hear about celebrity deaths – I teared up. Because we lost more than an American businessman – we lost one of the founding fathers of geekdom.
Other people have already said how Steve Jobs transformed music (with the iPod), telecommunications (with the iPhone) and mobile computing (with the iPad). And, yes, as I write this, all three of them are sitting next to me, along with my Mac Mini. (This desk I'm sitting at has sported several other Macs in the past, starting with a pizza box-like Performa 475 way back in the early '90s).
But what they haven't said is how the Mac brought technology to the level of the average American, made them comfortable with it . . . and, as such, allowed geek culture to flourish. Before the Macintosh, home computers were scary, ugly, complex affairs, sporting screens that glowed a harsh orange or green and lines of complex DOS code. The Mac changed everything, by putting a user-friendly interface on all that code, making technology not-so-scary anymore.
Yes, it was Windows that eventually put a PC in everyone's house. But Windows wouldn't have come along if the Mac hadn't kicked the door open first. And once everyone had hold of that user-friendly technology, the Internet flourished along with it. It was through the Internet that geeks, once clustered in small, lonely groups, came together, and connected, and built a culture all their own.
And geeks continue to build their culture on Apple's inventions. You download J-rock mp3 to your iPod, watch the latest My Little Pony or read comics on your iPad, use an iPhone app to catalogue your enormous Star Wars memorabilia collection – often without thinking much about it.
If you're in geekery, you've been touched by Apple's influence even if you've never owned an Apple product. Even if your laptop is Windows, your phone an Android, your tablet a veteran of the HP fire sale, your music player a Zune . . . none of them would have existed if Apple hadn't been there first. It's probably not stretching it a lot to say that Jobs, and Apple, built the modern, geeky world.
Well done, Steve. You can rest peacefully now – you did what you set out to do, and then some. – Bonnie Walling