Saddened to hear the news about Steve Jobs today, but inspired all over again by his wise words. Rather than a load of overblown sentimentality or sub-par FastCompany-esque analysis, here are three of my favourite clips of Steve’s amazing thoughtful clarity.

What an inspiration. Rest in peace Steve…

Title image via Jonathan Mak, clever bugger.

I’m quite excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet, or iPad, even though I’m not likely to be buying one.

Not as excited as I was about the iPhone though…

Those images above are genuine Apple prototypes from 1983, the image below however is real, ladies and gentlemen, the first ever Apple Computer from 1976…

Whatever is announced in a couple of hours, it’s sure to be impressive. Steve Jobs has been allegedly quoted as saying it’s the “most important thing I’ve ever done” With rumours ranging from the reinvention of newspapers, to fingerprint identification and impressive gaming capabilities, the idea is that you really DO need another shiny Apple product in your life.

We’ll see.

Everyone loves a psychotic supercomputer, especially when it comes with some lovely graphic design. The HAL project has opened stage 2, a beautiful letterbox website devoted to 2001′s HAL 9000 showcasing the graphic displays, typography and even providing sound clips of the killing machine’s soothing tones.

The big news is the screensaver, now you too can have HAL 9000 on your desktop or laptop. Is your webcam reading your lips? You’ll never feel safe again…

Thanks to Martin for the link, you have made me a very happy man.

While the world mentally says goodbye to war, famine and injustice while they wait for President Obama to start work, I’ve noticed that all that speculation during the Democratic campaign has proved sound. Obama IS a Mac, and so is Joe Biden too.

I wonder if Barack will be ringing up Al Gore for some Keynote tips?

This is genius, a site which looks exactly like Microsoft Windows XP, so you can read other stuff while you’re at work. Choose from short stories, poetry, classics etc, all called up in a faux PowerPoint window. I think this is the only time I have been able to forgive a website for forcing fullscreen mode on me. Found through the very nice Very Short List

No good for Mac workplaces though. If slightly less cultured vintage games are your thing, check out The Macintosh Garden or the Little Green Desktop for similar GUI lookalikes.

Has anyone seen any other sites which look like operating systems?