A great high-tech innovator who put the 'i' into icon

Emotions are running high in Apple founder Steve Jobs's home territory after his death, writes KARLIN LILLINGTONin San Francisco

IT BEGAN with a tweet. “@AP saying Steve Jobs has died”.

I was sitting in the large press room in the basement of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, watching Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison wrap up his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld.

I turned to say something to a British journalist to my left, and at the same moment, he was turning to me. “Steve Jobs has died? Do you think that’s true?” A Dutch journalist in the row in front swung around. “Steve Jobs . . .” “Yeah, saw that.”

Within moments, some 50 technology journalists in the room had heard the news and we’d all started googling news sites, trying to get reliable confirmation of what could be just a terrible rumour. “Apple’s board of directors has issued a statement,” someone said.

And with that, a sense of disbelief and stunned sadness grew in a room that was filled with people whose daily job it is to eat and breathe, think and write about technology. Many there had covered Apple, and Jobs himself, for years. The room was oddly quiet. People didn’t seem to know what to say except “Oh my God” or “I can’t believe it”.

For technology journalists, it was a John Lennon moment. We’d always remember where we were when we heard that Steve Jobs had died.

But it turns out that it isn’t just the tech journalists so familiar with Jobs, his mesmerising product launches and his sometimes prickly press conferences, but people all across the Silicon Valley region and beyond who feel personally grieved at the news of the Apple leader’s death.

Emotions run startlingly deep here, though. This region was Jobs’s home territory. San Francisco is where he was born, to a young woman who would give him up to adoption to a couple further down the peninsula in then-sleepy Cupertino, where he would grow up and eventually base Apple.

Jobs launched many of Apple’s most significant products at the annual January MacWorld conference in the Moscone Center. I’d filed many stories myself on his famed keynote addresses from that same press room where we had just heard of his death.

On a train back to Palo Alto – the city where Jobs lived – a woman across the aisle chattered in Chinese into an iPhone. I understood two words: “Steve Jobs.”

As news spread, people began to gather to pay tribute or stand in silent respect. They came together outside the various Apple stores in the region to mark his passing. A huge crowd formed in San Francisco’s Dolores Park, singing and lighting candles and sharing Apple stories. Valley technology figures tweeted, Facebooked and spoke of their memories, their sadness.

The Valley papers the morning after were front-page memorials to Jobs. The San Francisco Chronicle, normally a riot of front-page colour, chose sombre black and white for almost all its front page and for a huge 1985 picture of Jobs – "The man who saw the future". The San Jose Mercury-Newsoffered website visitors a guestbook in which to record their memories of Jobs.

So did Apple itself which, within minutes of the announcement of his death, replaced its website homepage with a black and white image of Jobs and the brief caption, “Steve Jobs 1955-2011”. Apple has invited memories and condolences to be sent to rememberingsteve@apple.com.

Radio and television coverage here has also been Jobs-saturated. All the television stations had put together memorials to make the evening news broadcasts, filled with images and footage of the brash, boyish, exuberantly confident young Jobs with his mop of hair and that so-1970s moustache. Snippets of his moving Stanford commencement address, in which he considered his own recent near-brush with death, were ubiquitous. But more astonishing was to see how Jobs, the prototype 20-something millionaire by the late 1970s, was already showing all his latent showmanship in an old clip of him launching the original Macintosh in 1984.

Outside Jobs’s home in Palo Alto, and over at One Infinite Loop – Apple’s corporate address in Cupertino (the address for the circular drive jokingly refers to the computing term for a set of computing instructions that repeats endlessly) – visitors arrive nonstop to leave candles, flowers, notes, chalked comments and – of course – apples.

But in a gesture that fittingly echoes Jobs’s own focus on privacy and iron grip on every utterance made by the company, Apple had a public relations team outside Apple HQ yesterday morning to make sure employees did not speak to the press, even in grief, for their visionary leader.

As the morning Bay Area talk shows invite listeners to share Jobs memories and discuss his impact, this is without doubt a big moment for a new generation that has grown up with several iterations of iPods and iPhones, as well as for an older generation whose first venture on to a computer may have been on an early Apple.

It’s hard to think of another Silicon Valley luminary whose death would leave such a broadly sensed void across a region already carpeted with brilliant, innovative entrepreneurs and inventors.

And it’s hard to imagine another business or technology figure whose passing could touch so many, across generations and backgrounds. It’s a mainstream sense of sorrow, not a niche – and a phenomenon in its own right.