Steve Cisler Passes

I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my good friend Steve Cisler today. Steve was a champion of community networking for many years and helped countless individuals and communities, including our Hawaiian language community.

The director of our Hawaiian Language Center and I met Steve at a community networking conference in Honolulu in 1993, when we were looking to start a Hawaiian language bulletin-board service for the immersion schools. He showed us FirstClass, the software we used to create Leoki, and continue to use to this day. He lent us (in his capacity with the Apple Library of Tomorrow program) the computer that we used to establish Leoki, and when we provide we could accomplish what we wanted, he gave us the computer as well as another which became our first web server in 1995. While obviously on a different server now, this was the first generation of Kualono. While other, bigger name people of that era made big promises which never materialized, Steve worked quietly and with little fanfare to help us.

Steve and I stayed in touch after he left Apple, but hadn’t communicated for about two years. He will be deeply missed. Some of the many people who knew Steve and benefited from him kindness and dedication have left comments here.