Thursday, October 6, 2011

A Quick Thought on Steve Jobs

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I won't try to cover all the big-picture stuff about the legacy of Steve Jobs, because the entire commentariat is trying to do that right now.

I just want to stop and thank the guy for one thing:

Fonts.

They say that Jobs was personally responsible for insisting that the early Mac word processing programs had to include multiple font choices - an innovation that Microsoft rapidly copied.

That one decision was critical in giving birth to desktop publishing.

In a very real sense, a lot of the "creative" side of the computer revolution is descended in one way or another from desktop publishing. That was the moment when computers stopped being an appliance or a computational tool and became a canvas, too.

Thanks, Steve.

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