Two Sides of Steve Jobs Emerge in Memorial at Hillside Club

Just a few days after the , Raines Cohen, a cofounder of the world's largest Macintosh users group -- BMUG -- asked me if I could call together a (an event for tech people that takes place at the Hillside Club in Berkeley) for a memorial. About three dozen people from all over the Bay Area, from Mill Valley to San Jose, came to sit in a circle and talk about the effect Apple and Steve Jobs had on their lives.

Most of the participants worked in high-tech because of Apple and their enthusiasm for the products. One person said she would have never entered computing if Windows were the only option available because PCs running Windows were just plain ugly. A designer who worked at Apple said it was the first time she was treated as an equal and valued for her ideas in an era when women were regularly degraded. The director of the Center for New Music at UC Berkeley said that Jobs worked with French musicians in Paris to perfect the sound system on the NeXT computer, which was the only computer ever built without a fan. Many people met their mates through Apple events and others developed creative skills and businesses as a result of Jobs's vision of computing as a creative tool of self-expression.

A close friend of Steve's from college and early days at Apple said that he was an "asshole" in the way he treated people, including girlfriends and workers, but that he had reasons for this offensive and often scary behavior. He resented his birth mother for having given him up for adoption right away and underwent primal scream therapy to try to deal with his rage.

His birth parents later had another child, Mona Simpson, who became a close friend to her brother and even wrote a novel based on a similar character. This friend said that Jobs repeated his birth parents' behavior by refusing to even admit he had a daughter of his own, Lisa, until she was much older. When this friend confirmed to the press that Lisa was indeed Jobs's daughter, Jobs refused to speak to him for 15 years. Two years before his death, he called up this person at 7 a.m. and apologized but then never talked to him again or responded to his emails.

So there is a dark side to what was arguably one of the seminal figures of the computing age. Hopefully, it is the light he shed on our ability to express ourselves, share our passions and ideas, and delight in the tools we create that will prevail.

Learn more about Sylvia Paull on her website here.