End of an i-Era

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To consumers he's likely to be remembered as the turtle-necked entrepreneur who brought gadget lust to a fevered-pitch with all things "i"—and who first sold the world on user-friendly. To engineers and techies he's a master marketer who bent technology, resources, and very often the will of engineers, to meet his aesthetic vision.

With the sad news of Steve Jobs' recent passing, the story of the Steve Jobs Era is slowly being formed. Would the masses be so conveniently equipped with their pads, pods, and breezy computers if Jobs had never taken (and re-taken) the reins at Apple? If yes, certainly not so soon and not so beautifully. To achieve his aesthetic of gorgeous ease of use, Jobs had to push his engineers to find the edge of what's possible.

Steve Jobs

From the first Apple II, Jobs understood that a computer should be operable to users who knew nothing of its inner workings and were not inclined to learn a programming language nor memorize a dictionary of commands. No stereo user had ever needed to understand its components to start and stop (in those days) a cassette, and the same demographic should be able to make use of a motherboard without knowing anything about it or the operating system that it supported.

Now, perhaps, such statements seem almost laughably obvious. But, Jobs felt, just as important as a computer's or gadget's ease of use, was the package it came in. "It looked like a typewriter, a finished product as opposed to the hobbyist things that came before it," says Al Kossow, the Robert N. Miner Software Curator of the Computer History Museum, of the Apple II. Kossow also spent 20 years as a software engineer at Apple. "Steve was always focused on the user experience and aesthetics," he says. "He was concerned about the box, the way it looked in the store. Woz [Steve Wozniak] designed the circuit boards and made the products work. Steve was the marketeer and purveyor of taste."

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs with Apple I.
Photo courtesy of Melena Joe

Jobs himself was not an engineer and his vision of what was possible, or what should be, could fly in the face what might seem feasible, wise, or easy, to an engineer. This was most observably true of the big picture—the mouse seemed a weird and unnecessary appendage in the early eighties, and what tech-savvy individual did not raise an eyebrow when first hearing, in 1998, that the iMac would have no floppy drive. But Jobs's determination to bend engineering to his will extended to every detail as well.

The guts of the G4 iMac, for instance, were housed in a white hemisphere. The shell itself was easy enough to design and fabricate, but a circular circuit board with connectors arranged in an arc was a thorny prospect for engineers. The design software for printed circuit boards required connectors to line up across a straight edge.

The Apple I was Apple’s first product, and went on sale in July 1976 at the distinctly unsettling price of $666.66. Only 200 units were produced, and unlike many other computers of the day, the Apple I came as a fully assembled circuit board containing around 30 chips.

Another example can be found on the G5 tower. A mesh screen of circular holes covers the front and top, with a characteristic rounded corner. Usually, if you bend a sheet of metal with holes, the holes turn to ovals. "They had to work out a process where the holes would become circular when bent," says Kossow. "You don't even think about it when looking at the box. That's his level of detail—things have to be really nice looking."

Occasionally, of course, Jobs's will could run up against real boundaries. A power button on the G4 cube was not to mar its smooth surface. So the capacitive touch sensor, sunk behind a quarter inch of Plexiglas, proved unreliable on the finished product. The transparent bondi-blue of the first iMacs (engineered to be both transparent and heat resistant) revealed the guts of the machine. Jobs wanted the revealed circuitry to look a certain way. The layout he had in mind, however, would not have produced a working computer.

Perhaps Jobs' biggest legacy—to engineers—will be the very erosion of the idea that there need be a tug-of-war between aesthetic-minded visionaries and hard-core engineers. More and more, graduating engineers share the aesthetic for the sleek and the lustrous. "The young engineers of today have all used these machines for the last 20 years. They've grown up with them—they don't even have to think about the difficulty of using computers before," says Kossow. "Values have absolutely changed because of him."

Michael Abrams is an independent writer.

Steve was always focused on the user experience and aesthetics. He was concerned about the box, the way it looked in the store. Robert N. Miner, software curator, Computer History Museum, and former Apple software engineer

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