Steve Jobs is gone.
In the days since the death of Apple's co-founder, a lot has been written on his vision, his genius, and how he changed the world. It’s all true.
My relationship with Steve is much simpler and more personal. It’s really a relationship with an idea: The Mac. The Mac was designed to be the "computer for the rest of us,” and I was one of them. I became a True Believer the first time I picked up a mouse, and I’ve been one ever since.
My first computer was a Mac 512 plus with – are you ready for this – a hard drive! That was unheard of! I didn’t have a clue on how to write code and didn’t intend to learn. I was totally intimidated by the command line. White letters on a blue screen were hard to read. If you did try to format a document (change fonts, margins, etc.), you didn’t have any idea what the final product was going to look like until you printed it. I’d rather chew off an arm than call tech support. Well, maybe that’s a stretch, but not too much of one.
I had just started a new job at a large state university in the Midwest. Our tech guy, who happened to be a student, provided tech support for our publishing systems. He saw the genius of the Mac, and the impact it would have on our business, and started pushing the printing department toward Macs. And man was he right.
The Mac was intuitive – it made sense, and it didn’t take a lot of training to use. MacDraw and MacWrite came standard. We had a networked Laser Writer II down the hall, and the pages that came out of it looked just like the images on the screen. Imagine that!
The Mac debuted officially at around $2,500. That’s a lot of money now, and it was even more back then. But it was worth it.
Many of us early adopters suffered mightily at the hands of our tech support folks. At that time Macs had a pretty slim market share – 3% to 5% as I recall – so mainstream techies tended to ignore us. By the time I moved to the University of Louisville in the early 1990s, the Mac’s prowess as a desktop publishing tool had been firmly established, and the only reason we were allowed to use them was the absence of a DOS/Windows-based alternative. But man did we catch hell from IT. And don’t even bother to call the Help Desk if you had a problem.
Help Desk: “Hello, this is the Help Desk. How may I help you?
Me: “My screen is showing a Sad Mac.
Help Desk: “Excuse me?”
Me: “I tried to boot my computer but all I see is a Sad Mac”
Help Desk: “You’re kidding, right?” Laughter in the background.
I am not making this up.
I still remember my colleagues – the VP and a fellow Assistant Vice President, making fun of the creative folk because of our Macs. We should get “real” computers, they said. What he really meant was that Macs fell out of IT’s comfort zone, and his staff were having to learn something new. The irony is that these same folks depend on their iPhones today, but that’s another story.
We learned that when we called the Help Desk or tech support and said we were using a Mac, that the one person trained in Macintosh support was out, and we would just have to wait. So most of the design and print units that I know of grew their own, internal tech support.
Everyone has his/her favorite Mac stories. Here’s mine.
At UofL I was a member of the steering team that managed our reaccreditation process. In higher ed, that’s as big as it gets. Nothing is more important than accreditation.
The accreditation process involved multiple teams from all parts of the campus, each working on separate aspects of the project. Each team created a report, and the project leader was responsible for tying them all together. The individual reports could be hundreds of pages in length, and there were dozens of them.
It turns out that we were working on our accreditation about the same time IT was transitioning the campus from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word, and as you may recall, these two platforms did not play well with each other. When IT set up the migration schedule, it didn’t pay a lot of attention to what the folks using word processing software were doing. Like the accreditation process. Most of the reports being generated by the subcommittees were in WordPerfect, but the chair used Word. There were very few apps that would translate WP to Word.
But I had one on my Mac.
So most of UofL’s reaccreditation report was prepared on Windows PCs using WordPerfect and translated to MS Word (Windows) on a Mac. And IT never figured out what we were doing. Of course, Mac to PC cross-platform computing is the norm now, but in 1995 is was way out there. The only alternative would have been to retype each subcommittee report, but we were on a deadline and that was not feasible. So the Mac saved the day.
I understand and appreciate the kudos for Steve’s genius – he did indeed revolutionize computing, telecommunications and the music biz. The iPod, iPhone and iPad helped shape the way the world uses technology. And if you work in the printing business, if you use a mouse, if you enjoy looking at the screen and seeing what your final product will look like, if you use drag and drop, if you remember when WYSIWYG was about as far out as it gets, you owe a lot to Steve Jobs.
But for some of us – the True Believers – Steve’s genius goes a lot deeper than that. Steve, you made a computer for the rest of us. One that even people like me can use. I thank you for that. RIP
Ray Chambers, CGCM, MBA, has invested over 30 years managing and directing printing plants, copy centers, mail centers and award-winning document management facilities in higher education and government.
Most recently, Chambers served as vice president and chief information officer at Juniata College. Chambers is currently a doctoral candidate studying Higher Education Administration at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). His research interests include outsourcing in higher education and its impact on support services in higher education and managing support services. He also consults (Chambers Management Group) with leaders in both the public and private sectors to help them understand and improve in-plant printing and document services operations.