HomeBusinessREMEMBERING STEVE – A memory shared.

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REMEMBERING STEVE – A memory shared. — 2 Comments

  1. John, great story, well told.  🙂

    The part that most interested me of course was his reaction to your smoking.

    And the most striking part of that part was that even a legendary Antismoker didn't notice you were smoking during the whole first part of the conversation standing next to you with your horrible death stick pouring out its pollution while your smoke-filled breath was being directed right in his face as you spoke to him.

    And finally, a part of the entire experience that is interesting in a larger way is the memory of one of the early antismoking efforts based around the whole "It's Destroying Your Computer!" meme, complete with an image of (unless my memory is sorely betraying me) an Apple computer whose insides looked like the insides of a million-year-old cavern with encrusted stalactites and stalagmites (Remember: "c" is for "ceiling"; "g" is for "ground.") of gobs of gory nicotinic goo.

    Oddly enough I am considering getting a new computer at some point soon.  This current one is heading toward its ninth birthday, and its Vista Windows is now used by only about 2% of computer users in America.  The computer has sat here in a fairly small and poorly ventilated room, often with windows plasticked and sealed against cold winters or hot summers as I wrote 500 pages of TobakkoNacht, posted almost 3,000 epistles on smoking to Disqus (See: https://disqus.com/by/MichaelJMcFadden/ if you like), probably close to 10,000 tracts to other news boards, and accumulated, read, and often answered over 80,000 emails in my saved email bin.

    All of which was done while smoking away, often with smoking visitors or housemates wandering around and through the room and wider premises.  According to those propaganda pics, I'd be lucky to even be able to SEE my computer without having to take an ice pick to hack away the accumulated "tar" from all that smoking.

    And yet… the engorged CPU and drives are not only running along just fine, but other than a modest amount of dust (slightly grimy perhaps, but still dust rather than mineralistic deposits) and a somewhat more-than-modest amount of cat hair, there doesn't seem to be a problem.

    Why is that?  Could it be that the publicized picture of the inside of an Apple computer and Apple's infamous "We Won't Fix Your Computer If You Smoke Around It!" screech of several years ago (which screech quieted down a bit after a while — perhaps someone in marketing pointed out a reduction in sales?) was just propaganda?  Maybe it was just propaganda based upon a small nubbin of fact, but outrageously inflated propaganda nonetheless?  Propaganda that was just another brick in the wall of Antismoker Hate (See http://bit.ly/Wall-Of-Hate ) ?

    Back in ye olden days of the mid 1980s American Antismokers launched a similar campaign among the burgeoning population (five to ten million I believe) of Commodore 64 users active on early Internet boards and on AOL's predecessor, Quantum Link.  That campaign focused on the 1541 Commodore disk drives, capable of handling 70 entire kiloybytes at a time on their 5.25" floppy disks, and warned that all those precious kilobytes would themselves go up in a cloud of smoke as disk drives would burn themselves to a crisp if anyone smoked around them.

    That campaign ran into a bit of a problem though.  C-64 online geeks were notoriously heavy smokers, and millions shoebox-sized 1541s sat next to the C-64 keyboards where they served as perches for millions of active ashtrays with nary a problem.  The Antismokers were laughed out the door and the campaign vanished in a wisp of smoke.

    John, your insight into Steve Jobs, as brilliant and driven and perhaps even as nice as he may have been otherwise, as an Antismoker leads me to wonder about the origins of Apple's "Your Computer Will Die Of Gunk Gorging!" campaign.  I have to wonder how much of it was simply a lie like so many other Antismoker lies we are hit with every day. Antismokers will target our computers, our pets, our families, and our children — basically anything and anyone we care about in our lives — with their propaganda and fears.  

    Thank you for sharing your tale and memories and reminding me of all this John!  Keep on fightin!

    – MJM

  2. Thanks for that Michael.

    In fact back in California at that time smoking was very common, though in deference to any kind of future in Apple, you didn't smoke if Steve was around because he absolutely hated it. You wouldn't be fired for smoking but if you got up his nose he'd find some other reason. The reformed hippie in him became quite intolerant as time went on.

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