Back in the olden days, Steve Jobs couldn’t get the attention of most journalists.
We were all too busy following the wonderful developments in video cassette technology and digital watches and electronic calculators to bother with the skinny kid who was pestering us about something he called a “home” computer.
That’s what we called it — not “personal” computer.
Steve was a floppy-haired Californian, not the beach bum type but a guy who, if he had been a few years older, would have fit in nicely at a UC Berkeley protest.
But Jobs had his own cause — personal computing. We’d all someday own one of those bulky machines that he carried around in a satchel. We would all need one, he would say.
“Sure, Steve, sure,” I was thinking as he prattled on, trying hard to get away from his clutches at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show. I’m certain my feelings echoed those of older journalists who were covering an industry that was going in many directions at once.
Steve and I were about the same age, but technology-wise we were from different eras. Back then, I was in charge of consumer electronic coverage for an industry paper called Electronic News. But in truth, I barely knew how to work a camcorder. Jobs was seeing far into the future and planning to change the world. And he did.
I remember buying Steve coffee pretty often at industry events. And I always paid because my various electronics publications could afford the tab far more easily than Steve could. Jobs was always walking these shows looking for a friendly ear to bend — and an investor who’d finance his dreams.
As the years went on, Steve and I didn’t talk a lot — except at the shows. But I do remember him being a source of mine for a few years, even after I stopped exclusively covering electronics.
Companies like IBM entered the personal computer business and then all of us “experts” got excited. Apple, the shoestring company Jobs founded in his garage in 1977 with some friends — would surely be put out of business by the mainframe computer giant, I thought.
Not so much, it turned out.
Who would have guessed? Certainly not me, who could have bought into Apple back then for not a whole lot more than those cups of coffee cost me.