A Letter to Steve.

Dear Steve,

You were my friend. In a we-never-met-and-you-probably-woudn't-have-wanted-to-be-friends-if-we-had sort of way.  But I like to think that doesn't matter.

We had an Apple IIe and it was kept in the spare room of the house.  We had to use a transformer to get the right voltage running through it.  Right next to the power switch on the back of the Apple IIe, there was a screw.  That screw would electrocute the living day lights out of you if you touched it. I hated that f*cking screw.

But I loved the Apple IIe.  I loved writing basic, i loved the discs, i loved the monochrome screen. It was magic, pure and simple. I remember the day we upgraded to colour. It was like christmas had come early. And Santa Claus looked a bit like Steve Jobs. 

One day, I switched on my Apple IIe and smoke started coming out from the back.  It had died.  It died from what I assumed was the computer equivalent of heart-failure.  God rest it's soul.  Steve, do computers have souls? You seemed to think so.

Which brings me neatly to the Mac SE. The MacSE that can still run, even in this day of apex predator cat operating systems.  Getting the internet to work on it was a challenge. But I made it happen. So help me, I did.

I had to tell all my Amiga-loving friends that they were idiots. Fools. Barbarians.  So what, if they had 56 colours on screen at any time and I only had two. My two colours were in high resolution.  I laughed at their pathetic 512k of RAM, for I had 4MB. That's right. Four real life EMBEES.  Fools, curse them. They didn't believe, Steve. They didn't believe. But a time would come when they would. Everyone would.

Time passed and I needed colour. So I got the LCII, a very pretty little pizza box of a computer. I had thousands of colours now. Where were the Amiga users? I called to them, but their company was dying. I mocked them. Mocked them hard.  I didn't know, Steve. I didn't know that the PC users were now giving me weird looks.  Their computers started having megahertz in the triple digits.  I was afraid. I didn't know what to do. I told them their operating system sucked. That they were all thieves, begotten from thieves.  I believed it.  It was true. Not even my PowerMac 9500 could hold them back. Nothing could.

Windows got better, and we were alone.  I huddled together with other mac users for warmth, but one by one they died.  Turning into zombies, living in windows made with the glass of false hope.

You were gone! What was I supposed to do. You tell me!?  I started experimenting.  I bought…. a  …. a PC. … but just for programming. Because I needed a Java compiler.. I really needed one. The one for Apple sucked and ran a long deprecated version of Java.  I was sad.  I started running YellowDog on my Mac.  I needed to find a way out.

But then you came back.  You came back and we saw that it was good.  The light shone through the pages of MacFormat, telling me that it was good.  You told us that everything was going to be fine. And just to prove it, you made people by the original iMac just because it looked good. … at least we thought so at the time.

I bought a G4, with OS10.0 … Cheetah as it would have been known. Though it was slower than cold honey.  I turned to other users and said " BEHOLD!!! posix compliant with a great GUI?! What say you Linus? what say you Bill?" . My friends kept asking me who I was talking to.

I dreamt of a phone. We all did. We waited, we waited. The streets were full of white headphones by now. And we wanted, nay, needed a phone.  I dreamt. Then one day I dreamt no more.

They all use Apple now.  They all do.  We were your army. Zealots fighting for an ideology. Fighting for beauty, for art, for creativity, for identity, for magic.  And in my mind, I tell myself "relax, it's just a tool, just a tool"… 

But that's just it, it isn't. It never was. It was always more. That's what made it special.

Goodbye, Steve.  If heaven has electronics, they're gonna start looking a lot better.