TWENTY-SIX years ago, a whizz-kid Silicon Valley entrepreneur, asked why anyone would particularly want a personal computer in their home, described that aspect of the business as “more of a conceptual market than a real market”.

“The primary reasons to buy a computer for your home now are that you want to do some business work at home or you want to run educational software for yourself or your children,” he went on. “If you can’t justify buying a computer for one of those two reasons, the only other possible reason is that you just want to be computer-literate. You know there’s something going on, you don’t know exactly what it is, so you want to learn. This will change: computers will be essential in most homes.”

Asked to elaborate, he added: “The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people — as remarkable as the telephone.”

Speaking to Playboy magazine in 1985, Steven Jobs clearly had an inkling of what lay ahead. But note the reference to “a nationwide network”. The dimensions of the Internet were beyond even his imagination little more than a quarter-century ago. Almost a decade after he had co-founded Apple, Jobs was at the time keen to publicise the virtues of the Macintosh — a small box with a black-and-white screen, attached to a keyboard and a novel device called a mouse — which was intended to supersede the comparatively clunky IBM PC.

With its graphic interface and clickability, it was certainly an advance on the existing technology. It attracted a niche following but hardly captured the market. By the end of 1985, Jobs had been booted out of Apple by its board of directors.

The previous year, Mitch Kapor, the president of the Lotus software company, had used a somewhat unusual term in summing up the appeal of Apple’s latest product. “The IBM PC is a machine you can respect,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. “The Macintosh is a machine you can love.”

A couple of months ago, The New York Times reported the results of an investigation into whether Apple’s currently biggest-selling products, the iPad and the iPhone, were somehow addictive in the same way as drugs and alcohol. The conclusion was that users are not so much addicted to these devices as in love with them.

It doesn’t necessarily follow that this a healthy obsession, but the emotional link does help to explain why the news of Jobs’s premature death last week prompted such widespread expressions of grief in some parts of the world. His personal association with these objects of desire had a great deal to do with it — the notion that but for him there would have been no iPods, iPads and iPhones, and the world would have been poorer for it.

In recent days he has been compared with Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan among others. The hyperbole seems extraordinary to many and excruciating to some. The tendency to view him as an anti-establishment figure who challenged, with some success, corporate behemoths such as IBM and Microsoft is difficult to uphold in the light of Apple’s own tendencies in the capitalist context. Last year, following a spate of news reports about the rate of suicides among workers at manufacturing plants in China, the company struggled to hose down suggestions that in respect of optimising profits it was as ruthless as any of its competitors.

The legend of Jobs rests largely on the fact that Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy when he returned to it in the late 1990s and turned its fortunes around. He had, in the interim, presided over the fortunes of the Pixar computer animation firm (which never looked back after it struck a chord with the movie Toy Story in 1995) and NeXT, a computer company that struggled for years to come up with a better machine than the Macintosh, and was eventually bought up by Apple.

With Jobs as CEO, Apple’s first great leap forward came with the colourful iMac — which shattered the aesthetic status quo just as the Internet was becoming ubiquitous. It was followed in due course by the iPod, and Jobs was instrumental in ensuring that the earliest released versions were as small as possible — and, above all, easy to use. They have, since then, continued to diminish in size and increase in versatility.

A quarter-century ago, the idea of carrying around thousands of songs and even full-length movies in a device smaller than a matchbox would have seemed miraculous.

Jobs did not have a great deal to do with the technology that has facilitated such innovations, but he had an acute sense of aesthetics, user-friendliness and desirability — which enabled him, in the medium run, not so much to meet consumer demand as it create it. That has got to be the ultimate capitalist fantasy.

It had a great deal to do with marketing nous, and his hippie youth and the associated quest for enlightenment (notably in India) may well have fed into some of the concepts he focused on.

As someone who has never found adequate cause to deviate from the Apple path ever since we acquired our first computer, a Macintosh Classic (with its 4MB of RAM and a 40MB hard disk) nearly 20 years ago, I don’t find it hard to empathise with the true believers without buying into the cultish aspects of Mac-worship.

It would be fatuous to deny Jobs’s largely helpful interference, particularly in the past decade, in the way a section of humanity perceives the world. The notion that he substantially changed that world, however, can only be based on a somewhat blinkered vision of the planet.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com