MEMOIR: Steve Jobs -- leading a musical revolution

By Robert D. Thomas

Music Critic

Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News

Steve Jobs -- who died today at the age of 56 -- impacted virtually every aspect of the lives we live today and one of those areas was the field of music. I heard a commentator this afternoon call him a modern-day Thomas Edison, which I think is the best description I've heard so far of this visionary. If you haven't read one of Job's many detailed obituaries, I urge you to do so -- a couple of options can be found at the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. It's an amazing story.

I bought my first Macintosh, in 1984, within months after it came out. It was my second computer; my first was an Osborne I (the first sort-of-portable computer -- it weighed about 25 pounds and looked like a portable sewing machine, and ran on an operating system known as CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). That means I've never owned a computer run by a Microsoft operating system (e.g., MS-Dos, Windows). I've been a Mac lover from the beginning.

Even Job's failures turned out to be significant. After he left Apple Computer in a power struggle in 1985, he started NeXT Computing, which never really took off but the technology was so good that British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee used a NeXT computer to create the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Of course, in the ultimate irony, Apple Computer ended up buying NeXT, Jobs eventually returned to head up Apple, and turned his attention to the entertainment business, first with Pixar Animation and then in the music field.

Jobs' music revolution came first with the iPod and iTunes. The iPod (released in 2001) changed how we stored and listened to music; iTunes actually predated the iPod by several months and the iTunes Music Store was born in 2003. Although many people continue to buy CDs today, most get their music by downloading into their iPod, iPhone, iPad or other electronic device.

Classical music lovers may (correctly) bemoan the sound quality of downloaded music but the revolution is here to stay ... although it will quite likely be supplemented by some other visionary's dream in the next decades. Steve would approve of that, although he would be furious that he wasn't around to make it happen.

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(c) Copyright 2011, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.