A tale of two Steves
Recently, I travelled by coach from Lilongwe to Blantyre. As is my habit, I had a book with me as my companion. I had just buried myself deep into Nelson Mandela’s biography when I noticed, on lifting my eyes, that two young people sitting on the seat opposite mine, across the aisle, had an iPad. They kept rolling the screen this way and that at the touch of fingers, obviously having great fun.
An iPad and a book have the same common function, namely to convey information. But that is as far as the similarities go. They otherwise have developed very differently from each other and in different eras.
My mind quickly went to the men behind the development of the two devices. Books, as we know them today, were the brainchild of German Johannes Gutenberg who, having invented what is known as movable type (so called because the type, cast as individual characters, could be assembled into pages, which could, after use, be subsequently disassembled and reassembled into different pages), he went ahead to print his 42 line Latin Bible on a press that he had built in or around 1450 AD. Gutenberg’s invention ushered in what has been known as the Renaissance, the rebirth of knowledge, as books became widely available because they could be mass produced.
An iPad, on the other hand, is a product of Apple, a company co-founded by two Steves—Steve Jobs (deceased) and Steve Wozniak. In 1983, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, spelt out what his company was planning to do, which was to “put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can take around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes.” Ten years and many experiments later came Apple’s first tablet, the Newton MessagePad 100.Today Ap
What I admire most in Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is their hard working spirit and their focus. Having dropped from institutions of tertiary education, for reasons other than academic, they set out to form Apple Computers from scratch. Their initial laboratory was Jobs’ garage. Wozniak sold his electronic calculator and Jobs his Volkswagen van to raise venture capital for their business.
The two young men toiled day and night to understand how computer circuits worked. They became members of a California based electronics club called the Homebrew Computer Club. Members of this club were hobbyists and enthusiasts of latest electronic wizardry. They met often to discuss the latest circuitry or the latest electronic innovations, a far cry from the meetings at Kamba or Bwandilo, where men discuss the latest scandals in town. Homebrew produced a number of entrepreneurs in electronics, among them Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. When I last checked Kamba and Bwandilo had not yet produced anybody worth writing home about.
I was deeply saddened with the news of the demise of Steve Jobs on October 5 2011. He was one of my American heroes. He died at 55. Like Rev Reynold Mangisa recently said, a man’s life is not measured by its length but by its impact. The impact of Jobs’ life will, no doubt, long outlive him.
My advice to our young people and to all that would find themselves using the iPad or indeed other computer tablets, is that they should not just use these gadgets to show that they can afford them or simply to have fun. They should be focused and hard working like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, without whom we would not have had the iPad. Yes, it feels nice to slide one’s fingers on a tablet and flip pages. It feels great to activate the pop-up virtual keyboard and type something. But I think the tablets should be used as conveyers of information, first and foremost.
My view is that tablets should whet our reading appetite and make us read more, not less, books. Like Gutenberg’s books did nearly 6 centuries ago, tablets should usher us into a new Renaissance. Africa badly needs this Renaissance, which will be the springboard on which new, out of the box, thinking will be launched, to transform our economies and change our destiny.
Good material indeed. How i wished all of us were good at invention like the two Steves. As you rightly said, our gatherings and discussions will not take us anywhere because the topics discussed are shallow.
I hope the Ipads will encourage us to read more to gain knowledge.