The Steve Jobs Zone
Words by A. David Cooper

Apple CEO and Pixar Chairman Steve Jobs is slowly taking America on a digital lifestyle ride that promises to change the way we think about computers, entertainment and creativity.

"Even people who use Windows machines, people who have never owned any shares of Apple stock, who never use the term 'hi tech,' seem to follow the ups and downs of Apple Computer with fascination. Steve Jobs had, like Walt Disney, created an institution."
-Gil Amelio, Former Apple CEO

It's a balmy night in San Francisco. Lazily issuing forth through the dusky metropolis miasma, smoke billows from a manhole connected to the underground tunnel network that drives the city's erratic rhythm. Clad in khakis and a button-down shirt, a lone man strides casually in sync with the city's staccato mechanized palpitations. Passing a store window, suddenly, he notices movement. Beckoning from inside the window with its animated flat-screen face, an oddly anthropomorphic computer pleads for attention. Human and artificial intelligence meet, and it's love at first sight. A random passerby catches a glimpse of the man's gesticulations, and immediately the secret human-to-computer interface is dropped - no sane person actually talks to a computer. Right?

The episode, a recounting of Apple's ground-breaking new iMac commercial, is
just a faint echo of the digital hub dream born in the mind of a man who gets all his best ideas while taking casual walks around California. The dream is Steve Jobs'.

Event Scene

The year is 1923, and in a California garage Walter Elias Disney and his brother Roy are creating the future of American pop culture. Starting with a mere $750, Walt Disney went on to create a vast animation, television and live entertainment empire that would culminate with the opening of Disney World on October 1, 1971. Today, the most sacred pilgrimage made by most Americans is directly to the fabled Disney World which houses EPCOT Center [Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow] to revel in the fantasy and promise of the future. Viewed by many as eccentric at best, and strange to be sure, Walt Disney was the 20th century's pop culture visionary who also fostered the idea of an egalitarian utopia.

Before his death in 1966, Disney said, "I don't believe there is a challenge
anywhere in the world that is more important to people everywhere than
finding the solution to the problems of our cities. But where do we begin? Well, we're convinced we must start with the public need. And the need is not just for curing the old ills of old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land and building a community that will
become a prototype for the future." Thus became Disney World, the ultimate
tableau of American iconography. Ten years later, in 1976, a similarly eccentric visionary would introduce popular computing to the masses and begin the arduous task of reshaping American culture.