Steve Jobs, in many ways, is the foundational myth of Silicon Valley. Along with Woz, bashing together their homebrew computers in the garage, or Hewlett and Packard in that Palo Alto garage, or Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore leading the Traitorous Eight to found Fairchild Semiconductor – what they accomplished is part of our DNA as an industry, part of what we believe about ourselves. This notion that two guys in a garage can take their dream and conquer the world with it. That’s what Silicon Valley is. That’s the dream. And to lose Steve – and lose him early, despite accomplishment enough for two or three lifetimes – well, it feels like we lost a piece of that dream, part of the proof that what we believe about ourselves as an industry is real. It pushed Larry and Sergey at Stanford, it pushed a kid in a Harvard dorm room, it was the 21st-century Thomas Edison-crossed-with-Henry Ford: you can dream the future, make it real, and sell it to the whole world.
And I think for as much as the effusive hyperbole around the iPad launch was mocked, Steve meant every word of it when he said it was “magical and revolutionary.” It was the Dynabook, in every way that mattered. Alan Kay’s original vision, made real after almost forty years. Steve chased that Dynabook from the earliest incarnation of the Macintosh, and you can easily make a case that in 2010, he caught it.
The man dreamed big. We got to dream his dream with him. Lucky us.