Tributes to Steve Jobs: five top tweets

Apple's announcement Wednesday that founder Steve Jobs had died sparked waves of comment across the Internet, as techies and others chose their own ways to note his achievements or mourn his passing. Here are five noteworthy tweets ...

3. "1984 : Got to play with an original Mac. Tried to type, was told to move the mouse instead. I declared it stupid. :-/ Guess I was wrong :)" –@ShakespeareGeek, Duane Morin

Ng Han Guan/AP
Fresh apples, flowers, and a large poster of Steve Jobs are placed outside an Apple retail store in Beijing on Thursday, in tribute to the Apple co-founder.

How true. When Jobs saw the concept of a graphical, mouse-controlled interface, he decided it would be the wave of computing's future. Today, as people swipe their fingers over Apple's touch screens, nobody's arguing for a keystroke-only control of digital devices.

Back in the 1970s, computers were for "programming." People cared for refrigerator-size machines that occupied their own special rooms. Steve Jobs helped usher in the era when ordinary people could do their own programming, writing, or spreadsheets at home. But it took a while before Apple and the rest of the world made the inexorable move toward hand-held devices where music or movies could appear at the tap of a finger.

@ShakespeareGeek, who describes his Twitter account as "Dedicated to proving that Shakespeare makes life better," also paid tribute to Jobs with a link to a Joy of Tech cartoon at GeekCulture.com. The cartoon borrows from the St. Crispin's Day pre-battle pep talk given by Shakespeare's Henry V: "For he today that sheds his cash with me shall be my brother," a character says to fellow Apple fans in line to buy an iPad. "Gentlegeek asleep now-a-bed shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here...."

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