★ Human-Human Interaction

It was 1995 when I first saw a Macintosh com­puter for reals. It did not impress me. The mon­itor was mono­chrome; the mouse was clunky and had only one but­ton. Its Graphical User Interface updated slowly. We had dozens of Macs in the Psychology Department com­puter room, which we called the cattle mar­ket. On these com­puters, we emailed using a Telnet cli­ent and per­formed stat­ist­ical ana­lysis by send­ing code to an SPSS server. I saw the sad Mac face often.

Back in halls, I had an Amiga 500 com­puter. My par­ents had given it to me for Christmas in 1987 and it still worked beau­ti­fully in 1995. The screen was col­our. The mouse had two but­tons. There were show­case demos writ­ten by European code-hackers that could make my Amiga per­form graph­ical won­ders bey­ond any­thing else I’d seen.

Steve Jobs.

Never heard of him.

I first saw a Macintosh in the American film Short Circuit, in which a mil­it­ary robot is struck by light­ning and gains both sen­tience and a pen­chant for slap­stick com­edy. Steve Guttenburg…he picked up a Mac, I think, using the carry-handle. I remem­ber paus­ing the video tape and look­ing at that com­puter. Macintosh? Like the raincoat?

Douglas Adams loved the Mac. I loved Douglas Adams.

Eventually, my Amiga was replaced by a PC. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It wasn’t. The PC ran Microsoft Windows. Over the course of ten years, the soft­ware had crashed so many times and the hard­ware crapped out so much that I was intim­ate with the count­less ways in which an IBM PC com­pat­ible must be nursed and pushed through its short life. People relied on my Windows expertise.

‘You must really like com­puters, Ian.’

I hated them.

Bought a laptop around 2002. It was black. I paid about £600 for it, which put me in the red, but I had a PhD thesis to write and I wasn’t about to do it in the cattle mar­ket, whose Macs had been replaced with Dells. I bought a DVD: Contact, dir­ec­ted by Robert Zemeckis. Lights: turned down. Popcorn. The movie skipped frames every five minutes because the com­puter was not power­ful enough to keep up. That is, the com­puter had been built with a DVD drive, and it had been endowed with a par­tic­u­lar grade of CPU, but the man­u­fac­turer did not care that the two were incompatible.

My girl­friend told me she didn’t mind the skipped frames. I told her I did. I felt like a pillock.

Steve Jobs. Guy with a bow-tie, right? Didn’t Douglas Adams men­tion him in an inter­view once?

Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. I am sur­prised at how sad this makes me. There is the nat­ural sad­ness, of course, that any man should die in his fifties. But I am sur­prised by the impact. After all, this man helped make some machines that I use; noth­ing more.

‘You must really like com­puters, Ian.’

Some people get con­fused by com­puters. The inter­face for a pro­gram like Word, for example, can seem over­whelm­ing. I’ve always con­sidered inter­faces like these — and gen­eral inter­ac­tion with a com­puter — as a com­mu­nic­a­tion with a pro­gram­mer, not the machine. Your email cli­ent is one way another human being thinks you should send and read email. Human-computer inter­ac­tion is not that at all; it is always human-human inter­ac­tion. Who are the humans?

I called my girl­friend from my office yes­ter­day even­ing as I was put­ting on my out­door clothes. In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s Radio Four pod­cast, was play­ing on my iPhone. I squeezed the pause but­ton. Melvyn’s voice faded away. I heard a chir­rup. ‘Call Britta, home,’ I said. A pause. The phone replied, ‘Calling Britta, home,’ and con­nec­ted me to our house. Britta was mak­ing a cake. I apo­lo­gised for stay­ing late at the office and told her I’d be there in five minutes. When I cut the call, Melvyn’s voice faded back up and the dis­cus­sion of empir­i­cism con­tin­ued as though noth­ing had happened.

Human-human inter­ac­tion.

Someone decided — and for me, this was always Steve Jobs, bow-tie man — that the iPhone needed to work. That is, if the job of the iPhone is to do some­thing like make a call, it should make a call. The job of my microwave is to heat things up. It does. They do.

In 2005, I came home from a hol­i­day. Next to a stack of unopened post on the din­ing table was a large, white box. My girl­friend scooped up the post and told me to stop act­ing so cool and just open the bloody box. I opened it. Don’t get your hopes up, I thought. Inside the box was a label that read ‘Designed by Apple in California’. I lif­ted out a white, iBook G4. It was beau­ti­ful. That’s just cos­metic, I told myself. It’s still a com­puter with a pro­cessor, hard drive, and all those other bits that can go wrong.

The key­board did not sag when I typed on it. When I closed the lid, it did some­thing called ‘sleep’, which meant I didn’t need to boot it up with each use ses­sion. In about a month, I was in love with this machine. It was the com­puter I had always wanted. It never got in the way of what I tried to do.

I watched Contact; it played flawlessly.

Don’t get your hopes up.

That’s what Steve Jobs did. He got my hopes up.