Remembering Steve Jobs: how those who covered his life observed his death.

A brief roundup of some of the pieces observing the passing of Steve Jobs, by journalists who covered Apple and Jobs, and peers who knew him.

Steven Levy's piece in Wired was beautiful. Levy first interviewed Jobs in the mid-1980s.

At the New York Times, John Markoff wrote the obituary. Markoff has been at it in Silicon Valley for about the same number of years, and he wrote the book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer , in which Jobs is a central figure.

Brian Lam, the former Gizmodo editor who now runs Wirecutter, wrote a very personal story about his interaction with Jobs around the infamous "stolen" iPhone 4 prototype.

John Gruber's piece is a must: "Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot".

Walt Mossberg shared some personal observations at the Wall Street Journal.

PBS NewsHour hosted a panel last night with Vint Cerf (Google), Steve Case (AOL), and me. The video for that segment is here. Both Cerf and Case knew the man personally, and had interacted with him and the company he ran, for decades. Just before we went on-air, a member of the NewsHour team pointed me to this amazing 1985 NewsHour segment on Apple and Jobs, during a time when the company was fumbling. John Sculley was CEO. "I believe there is no such thing as a home computer market," he says in the piece. Things were different then. Lots of mullets and mainframes.

Rachel Maddow led the Rachel Maddow Show with coverage of Steve Jobs' passing on the night he died. Video here. I was a guest on the show that night. Video is embedded below. John Sculley was a guest last night on Maddow. "He was an artist," Sculley said. Don't miss that interview. Video also below.

And finally, Boing Boing developer Dean Putney, who is 21, wrote this observance as we switched off our site's temporary "skin" (an early Mac OS "emulator") to memorialize Steve's passing. Dean covered a couple of the last Apple launch events for Boing Boing, where Steve was present. I thought what Dean wrote was beautiful.

(thank you, Rachel Maddow, and Jenny Marder, Dave Gustafson, and Patti Parson of PBS NewsHour)

• [Thomas Terashima]

  “Mullets & Mainframes” should be a mid-season replacement TV series, set in the fantastic year 1981.

  • [Ari B.]

    Alternately, Mullets & Mainframes sounds like the sort of role playing game that people living in a Fantasy universe would play. They’d pretend to be us, from the 1980s…

• [ambiguator]

  Given the outpouring of nostalgia for Jobs, allow me to recommend Mike Daisey’s clear and level opinion piece in today’s Times, “Steve Jobs, Enemy of Nostalgia”:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    Right, it’s featured here on Boing Boing in the immediately previous post to this one. Perhaps you missed it.

    • [ambiguator]

      Yeah, for some reason this post came in to my rss feed 20 minutes before the previous one.
      Stupid Google reader.

• [LinkMan]

  Walt Mossberg wrote about some personal interactions as well. 

  • [Xeni Jardin]

    adding.

• [petsounds]

  I’m glad that Brian Lam finally copped to the horrible way he played out the lost iPhone debacle, and that he finally apologized to Steve. But the damage was already done. It was a situation where a blogger, who doesn’t have journalistic credentials and experience behind him, failed to work through a story in a professional way with integrity.

• [styrofoam]

  Today’s NYT crossword is a tribute as well, oddly enough.

• [digi_owl]

  All in all, it boils down to some kind of “enlightened despotism”…

• [NeilE]

  Stephen Colbert did a tribute to Mr Jobs last night. Classy in only a way that Mr Colbert could do: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/399182/october-06-2011/tribute-to-steve-jobs?xrs=share_copy.

  Neil

  • [flosofl]

    I got chills when he wrote his “reply” and a hush settled over the audience.

  • [jimh]

    Thanks so much for putting that up. Colbert is brilliant.

• [Eric Peacock]

  I think I want to create a band called “Mullets and Mainframes.”

• [fable2000]

   Steve Jobs is a great man….
  He change the word with iPhone ………