I’ve never felt sad at the death of a famous person or someone I didn’t know. The recent news, however, does make me sad—probably because it seems like Steve Jobs’s personality infused everything Apple made. Maybe that’s just Apple’s marketing magic working on me, but if so, I’m still impressed, and I’m still not sure how to analyze a feeling of sadness about a person I never met, or how to go beyond what others have said about the loss of someone whose work and life’s work is so insanely great.

Like so many people writing about Jobs, I feel compelled to mention the hardware on which I’m doing it: a 27″ iMac with an impressively fast SSD and incredibly small footprint given the monitor’s size. Since getting an aluminum PowerBook in 2004, each subsequent Mac has been more amazing than the one preceding it—especially because I didn’t think it was possible to be more amazed than the one preceding it. There’s an iPhone sitting nearby, and in the near future that might become an iPhone 4S. So few devices feel so right, and I think people respond to Apple because it understands the link between technological function and feelings as few others do or few others can.

I look around to see what else I use and think about whether I know anything about the people behind those things: certainly not the Honda Civic I drive. Not the tea kettle I use to boil water. Not the Dell secondary monitor, whose badge could be stripped and another appended with absolutely no one noticing. I know a little about the Jeff Weber, who designed the Embody with Bill Stumpf, but that’s mostly because of wonky interest on my par. Try as I might, I can’t think of anyone else remotely like Jobs in achievement, fame, importance, and ubiquity. That person might be out there, but I don’t know who he is. His work is anonymous in a way Jobs’s has never been. He makes stuff with character in a world where so much stuff utterly lacks it.

Take the Apple logo off the iMac, and you’ll still have a machine that makes one stop and take account. And those improvements! Jobs offers lessons to the ambitious: Good is never good enough; you can always go further; done is never done enough; and, even if those things aren’t true, time will make them true. I wouldn’t be surprised if, 200 years from now, Jobs is still taken to be one of the pillars of his age, known to some extent by non-specialists, like Edison or Ford.

The Internet is saying a lot about Jobs. People are linking to the text version of his 2005 Stanford graduation speech. The Atlantic is explaining Why We Mourn Steve Jobs. Here’s someone almost as obscure as me writing Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011: “Today marked the end of an era. Each of the quotes below is linked to a eulogy or collection of reflections on the passing of Steve Jobs.” Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica and A New Kind of Science fame remembers Jobs and Jobs’s encouragement too. There are probably more tributes and commentaries than anyone could read, even if they had the inclination. Let me add to the pile, and to the pile of people saying they feel a strange connection to the man, however ridiculous that feeling might be. It’s ridiculous, but it’s real, like that connection between person and tool, user and computer. The connection is real in part because Jobs helped make it real.

EDIT: See also Megan McArdle on the Jobs speech:

The problem is, the people who give these sorts of speeches are the outliers: the folks who have made a name for themselves in some very challenging, competitive, and high-status field. No one ever brings in the regional sales manager for a medical supplies firm to say, “Yeah, I didn’t get to be CEO. But I wake up happy most mornings, my kids are great, and my golf game gets better every year.”

In addition, I usually hate watching videos on the Internet because most are overrated, but Colbert on Jobs is not. Also available in the funny / genuine vein: “Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies,” courtesy of the Onion.

Heres’t the tech columnist Walt Mossberg on Jobs.