Steve Jobs, Visionary, Dies at 56

Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro.<5> Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.<6> During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988.<5> While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.<7> Steve Jobs was responsible for more magic than anyone can imagine. The things we take for granted are because Steve Jobs knew what we wanted before we knew what we wanted. Today is a sad day indeed. Yesterday Apple released their latest version of the iPhone and it’s latest trick is that it everyone will soon have their own personal assistant. Ask the phone what the weather is and the phone verbally responds back with not only the temperature, but if it is sunny, raining, cloudy and so forth. Many were disappointed it wasn’t named the iPhone 5. But the iPhone 4S will sell millions (my guess the 5 was delayed due to NFC technology issues and delay of the iCloud). No doubt Jobs will be with us for at least the next 2-3 years when we see new Apple innovations. What happens afterwards is now up to Tim Cook and the Apple team. But like Einstein, Edison, and Disney, Apple without Steve Jobs will never be the same. At least we have the Mac and all the iTools he helped create. And like Joplin playing “Bye Bye Baby,” we too will play songs, text, watch video and TV and live our lives thanking Steve Jobs each and every day. If Joplin were alive today, she could have updated her song to “Bye Bye Steve.” Sad Thursday.