The first and only time I met Steve Jobs was late in the summer of 1976 at a Southern California Computer Society meeting. Among the exhibits there was a table with two hirsute young men behind it. On the table was a circuit board, a power supply, a 9 inch black-and-white monitor, a keyboard, and ribbon cables connecting them together. The two young men, both of them called Steve, demonstrated the power of their scattered–component computer on the 9 inch monitor. They said they were about to begin production of the system. I ask them what they called it. They said it was the Apple I. I told him that they would have to package the parts in a more attractive case if they wanted to sell very many of them.

The rest, as they say, is history. From that humble beginning, in a garage in Northern California, arose one of the world’s most dominant technology firms. Also, that Computer Society meeting inspired me to take a close look at the future of personal computers. A year later I had secured a grant from the National Science Foundation to perform a technology assessment of the personal computer. That assessment, completed in 1978, forecast a rapid expansion of acceptance of personal computers and a concomitant, pervasive impact on almost every aspect of modern society (although with some hitches, as in education).

This was also the beginning of the contest between open and closed personal computer systems. Steve Jobs was among the foremost proponents of closed systems—where the hardware and software were intimately interconnected and designed as a single entity. “It just works.” Continue reading The future after Jobs →