Steve Jobs: The Other Man in My Marriage
I met my (now) husband the same year Frank Sinatra died.
(I know it was “before 9/11” but always have to look up “Sinatra” in Wikipedia to get the exact year: 1998.)
(I can’t remember our wedding anniversary, either, except the month starts with a “J.”)
We’ve had unnaturally few fights in all this time, but the first, nastiest, and most persistent is “Mac vs. PC.” Those ads are our relationship (from my P.O.V.)
When I met him, Arnie had never even used a computer before. I, on the other hand, had been working on Apples since the late 1980s, when I was helping put out a 16-page newspaper on a 20MB Macintosh SE. (Somehow.)
That thing took so long to start up, I could push the power button at 9 a.m., walk down three flights of stairs, smoke two cigarettes, come back to my desk — and that adorably homely oatmeal colored box was still churning awake, emitting metallic crunching noises that would have been a clue to call a repairman with any other machine in existence.
I didn’t care. I loved everything about Apple computers and dutifully believed that Bill Gates was the Devil incarnate:
He looked at this
http://pajamasmedia.com/lifestyle/files/2011/10/poptronics_Jan1975cover.jpg
….and saw this
http://iphoneappworld.com/wp-content/gallery/ipad-pictures/ipad2-a.jpg
….because he also looked at this
http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf
….in 1972
Yeah, Xerox PARC was really the “skunk works” of the 1970s computer industry — even if Xerox ultimately never really benefited from their pioneering efforts.
Xerox did benefit from the PARC work, unlike the erroneous myth that is continually repeated. After Steve Jobs saw their dormant, but brilliant work on a tour they granted him, he conceived how that sort of user interface could simplify computer use for the masses. He paid Xerox in a stock transfer for the intellectual property. He did not just plagiarize it. And of course the early Apple stock did well. So Xeeox was paid, and Apple did what Xerox was completely unfit to do – they changed the computing world.
PARC changed the computer world in several different ways. What Xerox wasn’t particularly good at was commercialising PARC’s inventions, though it eventually did pretty well out of the laser printer. On the other side of the coin, someone else would have got around to bringing a PARC-like GUI machine to the personal-computer mass market at some point, but it probably wouldn’t have been as nice as the original Macintosh.
Xerox did indeed get Apple stock in exchange for the demo, but they sold it before the IPO – probably not the best decision, though hardly Apple’s fault. Apple also had ex-PARC employees like Bruce Horn and Larry Tesler working for them in the original Lisa and Apple groups.
For that matter an awful lot of what Apple took from PARC actually originated at SRI. Not to say that PARC hadn’t built a lot on the SRI work, but the original Mac missed out on a huge amount of what had been done at PARC.
You could even argue that the Mac hurt the evolution of the PC by bringing these ideas to market too soon. It’s incontrovertibly true that other systems of the time were much more capable than the Mac. The Genera allowed you to rewrite the operating system as it was running. Kay’s Smalltalk (which might have well been an OS) allowed the same. I’ll admit that I really wish that I had an OS that was a descendant of these… but I’ll also acknowledge that most people don’t actually want to rewrite their OS in real-time.
Kay is a visionary, but he gets one thing wrong- he expects too much of people. Maybe that is why he has chosen to focus on computing environments for children.
Amiga came out one year later in 1985.
http://in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070204073853AAuFzBJ
The ideas that Alan Kay (who is a visionary) and his team worked on at PARC go back farther than that. To quote Wikipedia’s page on “The Mother of All Demos:”
“The Mother of All Demos is Douglas Engelbart’s December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.”
The first Macs didn’t have much that was really new. I recently saw some photos online of a TI Lisp machine running a WYSIWG editor in a windowing GUI in color- the photos were from ’80 or so. Wish I could find the link, but I seem to have misplaced it.
The problem is that the Lisp machines cost 5 figures for an entry-level workstation, and that was real money thirty years ago. Jobs deserves credit for having introduced these things in a form that could be practically used by a lot of people, and that is a big thing.
I’m not a Mac guy- my OS of choice is pretty much Emacs, preferably running on some *nix. But I understand why people have such a strong attachment to Jobs, even if it has sometimes irritated me that people like Kay, Adele Goldberg, and of course Engelbart aren’t very well-known at all. Jobs didn’t invent much, but he was very good at bringing ideas to people in a form they could use. 56 is awfully young.
And he didn’t care how difficult it was, or how long it would take.
What Apple saw at the famous demos was a system running Smalltalk, but the Macintosh is actually a lot closer to the Xerox Star, the child of a line of systems which had developed in parallel with Smalltalk at PARC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q . A Smalltalk system is a big sandpit, a single running Smalltalk program which the user edits: the Star’s operating system is a more conventional world of document files and folders.
This is a very insightful comment. I doubt that many people who see it will understand it though.
Also, big chunks of the Macintosh system came straight from Apple’s own Lisa project, which was never under the control of Jobs.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
Sure. But the point of the LISA project was to imitate other commercial offerings. I remember the LISA, though I never got to play with one. I remember being taken on a trip by two engineers who were excitedly talking about it. The thing I remember most vividly is them talking about the ESC key “You can back out of what you’ve done, because there is an Escape key.” These particular engineers were very excited about that, as I recall. I think the conversation ended with “But it is kind of expensive.”
There was nothing all that new in the Mac (it was a recapitulation of very expensive stuff from 5 years ago.) But it was affordable. And that made all the difference.
I got to use a Lisa a bit back in 1986. The office I worked in had one for some reason. As I recall, it had a 10 MB hard drive, 1 MB of RAM, and ran on a Motorola 68000 CPU at about 8 MHz (give or take). The screen was 12″ (give or take) monochrome. The only software we had was what came with it, Lisa Write, Lisa Calc, Lisa Draw, etc. It was interesting if somewhat slow.
IIRC, when the Lisa was first introduced, it cost about $10K and that may have been without the hard drive. The first Mac only had 128K of RAM and cost somewhere around $3K. When I first used one, there was almost no software for it but it was interesting. I just couldn’t afford one.
I loved the end of “Pirates of Silicon Valley” where Jobs is screaming at Gates that he “stole my stuff”! Gates says “You mean I stole the same stuff you stole”?
That’s one of my favorite scenes. The other is Gates’ frustration that Microsoft’s second-rate copy of the Mac interface just wasn’t working right – sorta’ like Windows through much of its life. It just shows that, compared to Jobs, Gates was a hack.
Jobs took various technologies and married them together. The PC vs Mac, doesn’t exist! The desktop is essentially ended. Mac of and by itself, without PC would have moved farther and faster. PC simply had a simple system with a cheap OS; bottom line. Jobs was brilliant, in that he took what existed(not very well), and created what no one else had done. Nicholi Tesla; as the US Supreme Court has stated; IS THE patent, of the Radio! Marconi only used (a portion), of Tesla’s patent in the use of Morse Code. Sound familiar! Tesla’s patent, and parts of it, used in another way! What’s new about that! That’s why Jobs always made a better mouse trap! That is what creativity is! It’s all so simple; after the fact! An actress developed and created CDMA for torpedo fuses; someone else, decided it could be used in phones and communications, sound familiar? Tesla created a phone, AND a power source and offered BOTH for free: The sierra club was paid by JP Morgan or Rockefeller, to TRASH the electric CAR! All of this is history; and those who have the money will control the ‘business’, of making money.
Jobs was brilliant, creative and I’m saddened of his death. Especially since as a person who DID NOT believe in the past but only the future; died, because of his beliefs of health and medicine(holistic) from the PAST! How Ironic. Jobs with all his money could have gone to Texas and been cured: but he feared ‘future medicine’.
We(American People), could have free electricity – now; but it will never happen, because of those whose business’s stand to lose; and because business hasn’t decided YET how to offer FREE ELECTRICITY, for Sale!
Jobs should be a study of the history of America, and what once made it great; it’s freedom to dream, invent, and prosper; to EVERYONE’s benefit. Mr. Jobs legacy is NOT yet over; and his visions will still be accomplished for the next
five to ten years; after his untimely death.
My prayers for a man to young to have died, to brilliant, even for him, to live his belief in the future, yet cling to the past. The WORLD is at a loss. Jobs went to where no man had gone before and created the way to get there!
Jobs and Tesla had MANY things in common; and in my mine; he was a son of Nicholi Tesla; (unknown to Tesla). An orphan; adopted; had he been aborted as is the want today, the USPS would be bigger and flourishing, and movies and animation would be just as boring.
Jobs; is, was, and shall always be; the face of a technology that changed every one of our lives. America should design a ‘COIN”, after him. As the apple trees of our Founding Father george Washington, and the famous meaning of ‘Rose Bud’, should this coin be of! It is the growth of Johnny Appleseed, and the lingering meaning of all that Mr. Jobs gave to us and our children.
May God Bless; may Almighty God, All the Angels, and Saints, pray for Mr. Jobs and bless him; and all his loved ones. Mr Jobs shadow, like the movie 2010; did deliver on something wonderful!
Yes, Jobs was an innovator, visionary, and product genius. But when I here people knock PC’s and Windows I get angry; before you start screaming curse words at me, let me explain. The problem I have with Apple is their products are expensive and proprietary. I can build a great PC for under $700. People can buy Good PC’s off the shelf for under $700, and many people pay less than $500 for an off the shelf PC. You cant buy any Apple for those prices. Many Apple users rant about how awful Windows is but use an Apple with Windows overlays, never understood that hypocrisy. For the money the average computer user wastes on an Apple I could build one kickass PC; that’s why I call buying an Apple computer a waste of money. The PC was first and continues to bring access to computers to the masses. Apple can’t say that. Now, if you have the money to waste, the Apple is a good computer but don’t expect me to sing their praises. And as a side note, Windows is not the only OS that can be run on a PC. The proprietary nature of Apple makes doing it yourself and choice of OS impossible. A very big turn off for me!
I started wasting my money on Apple computers in 1995 and have kept doing it ever since. My power computing clone still runs like it did the day I bought it in 1995. Every Apple I have runs like a top. It never slows down, never breaks down.
PCs begin grinding to a halt as soon as you plug them in and boot them up…..slowing down noticeably from one week to the next. Getting two or three years use out of one means you are lucky.
If you want a Windows machine, more power to you, but I dont get it.
My G3 Powerbook “Pismo” from 2000 wasn’t built for OS X, but I run “Tiger” on it from time to time. My primary platforms are an iMac and an iPod touch from 2008. To this day I regret donating my MacII running A/UX to the local JCC.
By way of comparison, I had a Micron PC with an early Pentium I bought in 1995 for $3,000 and sold not five years later for $300. And I’ve got a Shuttle in the corner from a few years ago sitting idle because current releases of Windows won’t recognize the video, audio and network controllers.
(Full disclosure: I did computer support for 25 years, working on everything from DOS PCs to UNIX minis and workstations, to Windows servers, and Macs.)
Both Windows and Linux run on Apple machines. Yes, PCs are generally cheaper but not that much when you compare features. Your only complaint seems to be that Apples are more expensive. Well, duh! You want a better anything, say automobiles, you have to pay more. But that isn’t to denigrate Fords–we value diversity. As far as I can see there’s no conflict. At least the consumer gets to decide what’s ‘better’ not the government.
There’s nothing all that special about Apple’s hardware, and it is grossly overpriced if you are buying it just for the hardware. It is higher quality than what you will get buying a cheap Windows machine from an OEM like Dell, but Dell is pretty grossly overpriced these days too.
OEM windows boxes don’t bog down after three years because there is anything wrong with the hardware. They have problems because people do foolish things with them, and because Windows makes it way too easy to do those foolish things.
I think that paying the premium for a Mac makes sense for a lot of people. But I am not very interested in paying that premium. I can put a PC together for 800-1200 dollars (depending on the graphics card,) or get one from a company that puts PCs together cheap and has terrible customer service, that blows away Macs twice as expensive. And if I want a cheap capable machine for browsing the web, sending email, playing casual games, etc., I can build one for 300 dollars.
The catch is that I have to know what I am doing, and I have to be willing to maintain my computer. I have to do these things anyway, so it’s no skin off my ass. But for a lot of people the Mac might be the better deal.
Setting aside the pointless argument about how cheaply you can build a PC (which is only if you spec it well below Apple’s uniformly mid-to-high-end line), everyone I know with PCs, which included myself until a couple of years ago, replaced them every 2-3 years. I get 4-5 years out of Apple laptops and a consistent 6 out of desktops. I’m not trying to provoke anyone or continue a p!ssing match when I say, my own experience is that total cost of ownership over close to 30 years has consistently been better with Apple than with PCs, even in Apple’s dark days. I’d pay a premium for the UE anyway… but I don’t believe that in fact I do.
Steve Jobs is now passed away but he has given itechnology to the world. our children and grand children will remember him as a itechnology man.
One correction, he sold technology to the world. His innovation and dreams have enhanced our lives because we enhanced his pocket. The beatuty of capitalism i sthat it promotes mutually beneficial exhanges. As Rush said, without the economic freedom enjoyed in the US, Apple would have never happened. Don’t give it up for the illusion of safety and security.
Ehh. I come not to bash Jobs, but also not to praise him. He was a bright guy; the machines he oversaw production of are nice machines. But in the end, he was just a guy and they are just machines. I’ve owned and operated his machines; I’ve owned and operated the machines of his competitors. Any more, I build my own, thanks. I’m not looking for any machine to change my life – only to make it more productive and/or more fun.
I suspect Mr. Jobs and I had more in common that you might think. You see, I’m a tinkerer – I spent my younger years cobbling together linear RF decks from old Eimac 3-500Z’s pulled from commercial service at 80% of their original output. Mr. Jobs did the same, only with IC’s and circuit boards. The original Apple designed and assembled in a garage in concert with Mr. Wozniak was a far more appealing project for me than the latest Apple fondleslab, “Now with two times more SHINY”.
Apple lost me when they veered down the path of selling an image instead of selling machines. Just as B&O did in the audio world. Just as the protagonists in the “Cola Wars” did. I’ve never been much of a ‘joiner’ and that’s what’s always put me off about Apple – they wanted me to buy the Apple lifestyle when I just wanted a machine. I had to be part of their ‘revolution’ rather than just a computer owner/user.
Back to Mr. Jobs – it’s a shame he died prematurely – and my sympathies go out to his family and friends. But his death doesn’t really affect me in any personal way. He was a guy who made nice machines. No more, no less. But so were dozens of other men.
Well said. I never bought into the Apple mania, even though I used Apples as early as 1982. Jobs was a helluva adman, which is one big reason Apple became a “cultural” thing.
Mac vs PC is the only surviving hardware dichotomy in a near-monoculture. Even software is a near-monoculture of VMS derivatives (Windows NT and its descendants, the current versions of Windows) and Unix versions and clones (FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris, Linux). The hardware is nearly the same, the file formats are the same (you can except to get JPEG images and OpenType fonts no matter what platform you use), and the programming world gives you the choice between C and its syntactical derivatives (Java, Perl, Python and others) and a handful of functional languages that are having trouble getting out of the halls of academe (LISP, OCaml, Haskell and others).
It’s boring. One of Steve’s last comments, about it being a ‘post-PC world’, could just as well be taken as stating the way things were, rather than one of his visionary impulses. The Mac runs on Intel chips today, the old desktop PC is being phased in favour of the nearly-shut laptop and the tightly-shut smartphone and tablet, all in line with Jobs’s vision of making the computer like an appliance, a toaster. Hardware matters no longer, ever since all but the lowliest embedded systems could boast a C compiler to write programs for them in.
Shaidle’s perspective of the Mac’s attractiveness and ease of use is one perspective. Another perspective praises the PC for versatility and Windows for its no-nonsense functionality. Yet another perspective extols the openness and programming freedom and total control of the system available in Linux on whatever hardware platform. All those perspectives are valid, and all of them are heard. What is little heard, and promptly dismissed as the grouchiness of an old fogey, is the perspective of someone who views the Commodore 64 as the pinnacle of personal computing. Yes, from 1977, when the Apple II made computers accessible to the masses, up till 1993, when the Internet made each computer nothing but a big home directory on a worldwide server, personal computing flourished, and the C64, in 1982, was its highest point.
One would like to program every aspect of the hardware. Today the operating system gets in one’s way (‘Program foo has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down’).
One would like to do insane graphics programming on one’s computer. Today one needs to put all graphics in a dedicated window, therefore needs the mediation of a graphics library like OpenGL.
One would like to really interact with the machine using its own language. Today one learns object-oriented and functional programming paradigms far removed from the machine by abstractions, and looking more like Philosophy 101 courses than anything to do with actual programming.
Between the past period when computers had been inaccessible due to the batch processing paradigm and the present period when computers are inaccessible due to the constraints of the OS, the necessities of windowing and the overwhelming complexity of the hardware, there was a period of ability to know every aspect of the hardware and use that knowledge to program the hardware to do anything within its capability. That was the period of the C64, and that was what Jobs (Mac), Gates (PC) and Thompson, Ritchie, Kernighan, Stallman and Torvalds (Unix and its clones) have all taken away.
‘But computers are meant to be used‘. That’s the same thing the old mainframers used to say, and strictly speaking it’s true, but don’t get surprised after a few years when that leads to the replacement of computers by gadgets. Mac vs PC is irrelevant: both are sides of the same coin that’s headed towards the post-PC world, the full reversal and rollback of all the achievements of that awesome period of 1977–93.
And don’t complain about the programmer shortage. No normal kid would be attracted to a field that is now (as it wasn’t in the 1980s) boring beyond belief.
Oh, come now. The TI 99′er was better than the Commodore 64. Bill Cosby said so.
I always thought the Coleco Adam was a great idea, and wish it had caught on. The idea of making all the peripherals “smart” by each having their own processor made sense then, and should have caught on. We’re now getting almost all of what the Adam had back then, with printers now having their own print servers, disks available in RAID boxes, and graphics cards with more processing than old computers, but back then it was apparently too radical an idea to offload printing, storage and graphics tasks away from the CPU.
I’m responding to comment 5 by Richard Tremayne in case this blogging engine screwed that up, and I have to say..
That’s an interesting perspective, all right, and I can understand it. There was a period where what exact computer you used was very important, and now, I’m a professional programmer and I don’t even know what hardware I’m using 90% of the time. It just doesn’t matter.
But I would dispute that Apple wasn’t important during that “golden age”. Anyone remember “Inside Macintosh”? Insanely detailed documentation of everything about the built in APIs in the Mac ROM(before everything moved to the OS). You could, and I did, build your own program from a very low level on the early Macs. Before that, I owned a VIC-20(precursor to the C-64) and I never felt like I had the same level of control, possibly because there wasn’t the same level of documentation, or possible because I was only 10 years old
So I look back to that with some nostalgia too but it’s to a time when it was just me and my Mac Plus.
Thank you for the response, sir. I agree Apple wasn’t still closed with its computers in the Mac days. The fact that the classical Mac OS, like MS-DOS, didn’t prevent access to the underlying hardware meant low-level hacking was still possible, and so it was still with Windows 3.x, again not a true operating system with all the memory protection involved.
However, the ambition on part of both Jobs and Gates was to move the computer away from programmer’s box to appliance. The few developer tools that remained, such as QBasic in the DOS/Windows world and HyperCard on the Macintosh, were yanked in due course. Such tools are abundant in the open-source world, but Unix and its clones have had memory protection and machine abstraction from their very inception. With a Linux box you have the machine time all your own, as it was not in the days of batch processing and later timesharing, but you no longer have the control of the machine all to yourself, for the OS does as any modern OS is expected to, managing the hardware resources by itself.
Jobs and Gates have achieved their goal of maturing our digital machines. In the process, however, and using technology that used to be the province of mainframes and minicomputers, they made present-day computers unfriendly to low-level hacking. The older Macintoshes with that ability were of the ‘not yet’ period, because the mainframe and mini tech still couldn’t be implemented on the micros comfortably. Not because Jobs was being low-level hacker-friendly.
From a user’s perspective my misgivings must sound stupid. However, from the perspective of someone who remembers programming as tinkering, innovation, exploration and above all fun, I consider this development bodes ill for the future of programming. There was a pool of bright and enthusiastic programmers who had had their formative years in the 1980s, and that pool is now drying up. Programming has become, for today’s kids, only a little less boring than science.
Oh, blast. I mentioned Ritchie, and now he’s gone too.
I hope the others I’ve mentioned aren’t superstitious.
If there was one conversation I could have had it would have been to try and understand the dichotomy between the capitalistic nature of Apple vs his own political views.
Apple is a shining example of how capitalism works. On the socialism-capitalism scale, Apple pegged the meter in the capitalism end. Yet Jobs himself was a liberal. I would have loved to have understood his reasoning.
Perhaps he was more like a classical liberal rather the “liberal” of our nightmares. One must always remember that there is nothing particularly liberal in modern liberalism and often nothing particularly conservative about modern conservatism. It’s confusing to a lot of people who took their eye off the ball a long time ago.
I beg to differ that Apple is the shiningest example of how capitalism is supposed to work. Apple makes products that have the primary product differentiation that they have flashy design. They make nothing that’s unique. There’s an equal to every product that they produce.
For every American job they create, they create 5 in China. That’s not necessarily their fault; that’s just the way the electronics industry is these days; their competitors’ products are also made in China. But here’s the thing: how is it that Apple computers, with most of its workforce in China, and twice the profit margins of ExxonMobil, are considered the pinnacle of grooviness, and ExxonMobil, with much lower profit margins, and an almost 100% American workforce (for domestic production, refining, and marketing) is considered the Darth Vader of corporate America? Oil is a lot more useful than some silicon toy.
Maybe because no one makes an emotional connection to gasoline. It’s a commodity. We need it, we drill for it, we refine it, we use it. End of story. What Apple products do is something else entirely. They go beyond utility, to fascinate and inspire.
My sister, who only knew PCs, initially disliked the iMac I’d recommended to her because it was so … different. But after just a brief intro, she “got it”; to her it is now “cool”. I could mention a former colleague who mocked the Mac until his HP laptop died and he checked out a 24″ iMac. He was smitten. Such stories are very familiar.
Steve Jobs’ liberalism: leave me alone to do my own things
Today’s liberals can’t even leave your toilet alone, they low flushed San Francisco into spending tens of millions to clear their sewage system.
Steve Jobs would rather quit college than burdened his parents, wall-street liberal protesters bankrupted themselves before they’ve finished one semester of college.
Steve Jobs was a thinker; today’s liberals mindlessly parrot whatever their “leaders” want them to say.
The difference is staggering.
I’m not a Microsoft fan, but rather a Unix/Linux kind of guy. But, back in the day (1998) I read this article by Virgina Postrel and it forever changed my view of Apple and Microsoft.
http://reason.com/archives/1998/01/01/creative-insecurity/singlepage
Sorry, but when I look at the Altair, I see real silicon, not a toy like the picture below. Apple computers are like – what was it that Patton said? – a pearl handled pistol. Only a pimp in New Orleans whorehouse would be seen with one.
I really like Steve Jobs. The guy was good at what he did. The problem is, most people haven’t figured out that what he -did- wasn’t innovation; it was refinement. I can’t think of a single product he actually developed.
The first PC can equally be credited to HP, Apple, or Commodore, depending on where you draw the line. HP’s business machines, running CP/M became the first home computers by default, when they migrated from the business world to the homes of their users. Apple had the idea to sell them to the masses, primarily, but their first attempt was only the completed circuit board. Commodore, though not first to the market, was the first to -finish- the job, with their PET. Between the three, I would only cite HP or Commodore as the true holders of the title.
As the video clip showed, the GUI was developed by Xerox, for their Alto. That’s the biggest thing that was “stolen” from Apple. The actor playing Bill Gates puts it well, but I think it can better be summed up by Vizzini, in the Princess Bride, “you’re trying to take from me what I’ve already rightfully stolen.”
iPod? They were beat to the market by Audio Highway by five years. When they finally got around to joining the market, they found it was already filled with products from Creative, Rio, and iRiver. Somehow, though, they get credit for the mp3 player.
Even the iPod touch, however, is basically just a Palm Pilot with a better OS.
How about the iPhone? Big Blue was there first, in the 1990′s, with the Simon. Even if you ignore that (it didn’t get much market penetration), you have to admit that they didn’t beat the Crackberry to market.
Ok, how about the iPad? Surely that was a first! Not so fast. As any of my classmates at Virginia Tech could tell you, the wailing and gnashing of teeth about Apple’s lack of a tablet rang heavy in the air (and warmed the hearts of those of us not in the iCult). VT required engineering students to purchase tablet PCs, of which Apple had none until my second senior year (no, I’m not that stupid; I was getting two degrees). So even Apple’s current “biggest innovation” was around long before Apple got in the game. And, yes, there were even some models that didn’t require a stylus.
Steve Jobs and Apple deserve credit for what they did in each of those markets, when they finally got in them, however they should not get credit as the ones who invented those products. In short, they did not change the world. What they did do was release good products for a huge markup and ensured that hipsters had a little less spending money.
Isn’t that reason enough to celebrate?
Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile but he made the automobile something that an ordinary person could own and use. In doing so, he created the modern automobile industry and all subsequent automobiles (expect for luxury models) are patterned on Ford’s work.
Likewise, Steve Jobs didn’t invent the personal computer, the GUI, Networked Operating systems, tablet computers or smart phones but he was the first to make all those things successful mass market to tools that millions of people could use. Just like Ford, Steve saw it as his job/mission to provide power to ordinary individuals and not just institutions computer professional and hobbyist.
Inventing something is just the start of the process of putting a functional product into the hands of millions so that it can make a big impact on the world. Zerox as an institution didn’t see the potential of the GUI and neither did the dozens of other people they should the technology to. Jobs did and he made it work on the scale of hundreds of millions of units. A lot of people were talking about selling content online but Jobs actually created a system that struck a balance between content providers (especial small providers) and consumers.
I think a lot of people have strong emotional commitments to Jobs and Apple because Jobs made the individual end user the focus of Apple design. Even the attention to atheistic was a statement of respect towards the end user by saying, “this is YOUR computer and you have right to one that looks good just like you have the right to have an aesthetically pleasing car, house, TV etc.”
This type of adoration might seem strange but Ford had the same thing to an even greater degree. Individuals who put power into the hand of millions of ordinary people become admired, emulated and even venerated.
They certainly deserve it.
Zerox as an institution didn’t see the potential of the GUI and neither did the dozens of other people they should the technology to. Jobs did and he made it work on the scale of hundreds of millions of units.
This is a variant of apple pop narrative, and it’s crap. Xerox took a common trackball used by radar PPI consoles since the 50′s and turned it upside down. The “GUI” was a derivative of the PPI method of point/click (the act of tagging an aircraft or ship.) It wasn’t new and it wasn’t revolutionary.
Xerox knew damn well what they had, as did everyone else at the time because this was an obvious extension of the existing technology. What was questionable in that era was the use of the “GUI” within the confines of the memory available. In that era (when Xerox was showing this) the common RAM format was the 2114 chip (2k x 8) and there wasn’t enough memory to run the OS *and* any sort of useful application and expect same day response.
True enough when the mac came out it maxed at either 128k or 256k and was a glorified toy. What Jobs did was place a huge bet on Moore’s law accelerating and won. And he won because the IBM-PC (and clones) were creating enough market share that the japanese chip makers were dumping memory in the USA at prices below what US producers could make. I know this because my company made the machines that were used in making the chips, and we worked with everybody in the RAM industry in that era.
In short if the IBM-PC wasn’t a success there would have been no mac, and the PC was a success because IBM was prescient enough to make it non-proprietary. The real heros in this story were the IBM geniuses in Boca Raton who designed the world’s first open architecture computer.
You go right ahead though and regurgitate your pop culture narrative.
I too sit in praise of Steve Jobs and thanks to him my life is a happy one. Why? I was living in CA and via my Apple PC I met my wife who happened to live on the East coast. Through emails and a brief LDR we developed a friendship and fourteen years ago we married. I have lived those years in a state of profound happiness and they’ve been the very best in my life. Had it not been for Steve Jobs I would have missed here. We are two people that met online, fell in love, married and lived happily ever after.
Thank you Mr. Jobs. With the Mac you helped create an enviable life for us. As far as we’re concerned it’s another contribution to your legacy.
People Say the Darndest Things, Part Two
. . . For example, with Steve Jobs’ body barely cold, Gawker.com punctured numerous holes in the popular conception of the legacy and the persona of the man whose genius has been compared with DaVinci, Edison, and Einstein.
In brief, Gawker delved into “the dark side of Steve Jobs and the company he founded.”
While praising his innovation and achievement in “What Everyone Is too Polite to Say about Steve Jobs,” Gawker rips virtually everything else about him and Apple Inc.
Gawker contends that the innovative achiever was a tyranical, mean-spirited employer who publicly humiliated underlings, that Apple unfairly repressed information and competition, was guilty of knowingly violating child labor laws and human rights by establishing ”sweat shops” in China, that Jobs’ personal life was something of a mess, and he and his company were stingy with their billions.
Those are some darned harsh things to say, even if they are true.
Americans are accustomed to politicians uttering the darndest things–cynics would call them lies–especially during an election campaign and the current re-election campaign which began the day Barack Hussein Obama was elected president is no exception.
Still, some utterances by the POTUS–the president–and the FLOTUS–his wife stagger the imagination as much for the repetitive nature of their truth-stretching as for the pair’s blithe disregard for honesty.
Call them falsehoods, fabrications, misstatements, or the less-politic lies, our president has accumulated legions of them, few if any of which have been reported by his mainstream media.
Obama’s most recent mendacity was obviously intended tug at the heartstrings of a major constituency, public school teachers, at the same time he was trying to pull at congressional purse strings to get more billions to waste on his “jobs bill.”
At a pseudo-White House press conference on Friday, pseudo since it was really just another campaign stop, Obama cited a well-credentialed but jobless teacher Robert Baroz whom the president said he had met. As pointed out by BostonHerald.com, the president fudged the whole thing. He never met Baroz and Baroz isn’t unemployed at all, unless Boston’s K-8 Curley School in Jamaica Plain is paying him in error.
Ever true to his union and to Obama, Baroz dismissed the fudging as a mere oversight and still fully supports the president. True to their dedication to his re-election, not a soul in the MSM called Obama on his misrepresentations at the presser and once again skated away from his lies.
No stranger to prevarications, First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama also pulled a swifty last week at a Rhode Island fundraiser raising funds for, what else, her hubby’s re-election, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5649.)
My first “real” computer after my Coleco Adam [yes, I am old] was an un-enhanced Apple IIe [which I still have stored away]. For two decades I lusted after a Mac due to its operating simplicity, the relative safety from online threats, and Microsoft’s deliberate lack of responsiveness to those threats. The fact that Bill Gates was a more blatant flaming bodily orifice than Steve Jobs; and he used his paying customers as Alpha testers at their expense did not help. [The valid adage of never buying any version of any Microsoft product before the inevitable Service Pack One is incorporated comes to mind.]
Sadly, every time I had to replace a computer, the price difference over-rode other considerations.
That ended a few months ago when it was revealed that like all smartphones, every Apple device with the Snow Leopard OS or later collected regular reports as to your location every few minutes and sent the data collected back to Apple for their use.
That means that I will nurse old Mycroft here for as long as I can, and probably will go for a custom machine, with a LINUX OS variant thereafter.
A plague on both their houses. And while the loss of Steve Jobs is the loss of an amazingly successful capitalist, I do not mourn him particularly. Now if I should hear that Steve Wozniak has died, I will be sad; because he shows every sign of being a truly good and creative person.
Subotai Bahadur
So the iPhone knows where you are? Wow. If it didn’t how would it tell you how to get to Joe’s Pizza when you press the Maps button? Of course it knows where you are. But Apple does not share the data with anybody. There has not been an instance of abuse of that anywhere. So, grow up.
What is truly extraordinary about Jobs and other men like him is something Wozniak pointed out–”making things out of their ideas.”
To take a mental entity in your head and transform that totally transitory, ephemeral thing into an actual existing material object is awesome. It seems to me it is that act which transforms us from mere animals into human beings.
A major function of corporations is to institutionalize that transformative process. We need to recognize more openly that that transformative process is what corporations do; profits are necessary for the corporation to continue to engage in that tranformation-making process, but the profits are auxiliary to the process. Maybe if professors in universities (and I was one before I retired) were smart enough to recognize the real function of corporations, they could pass this knowledge on to their students and the students would then not engage in “occupations of Wall street.”
Steve Jobs was an exceptional person. But he was not perfect or holy, he was just a man. He had personality quirks and biases just like anybody else. He is deserving of praise, but so are the thousands of creative, talented, hard working people who worked for him. They are the people who stayed up late designing and writing the software, and designing Apple’s circuits, mice, keyboards, and monitors.
Jobs had high standards and he pushed his people hard. But no single person, no matter how intelligent, visionary and hard working, could accomplish what Apple has, by himself. That takes thousands of talented, dedicated people and tens of billions of dollars.
As a devout (for it is a religion) PC user from the very beginning of the mass produced personal computers, roughly the early 1980s, the death of Steve Jobs hit me hard. I grew up starting off with his DOS based Apple II, and when the IBM computer was released, using Charlie Chaplin, I went the way of DOS.
The rest is history, and I never lost my respect for the two people, et al, responsible for this historic change in the way the world communicates. His loss is very sad, and I weep a little inside whenever his name comes up. God bless him, and the entrepreneurial spirit promoted by American exceptionalism.
Technological society is maintained by smart people,
and advanced by geniuses like Jobs, Gates, Moore, et. al.
There are never enough people with their capabilities,
and every time one is lost, all of us lose; We should
applaud their accomplishments, and regret their passing.
Steve Jobs was a trendsetter, but that’s all he was. His products were— and are— grossly overpriced, sub-standard in performance, and grossly user-unfriendly in that they are impossible for a user to adjust, upgrade, or repair. His only real achievement was grasping the concept of the user interface: that a product has to at least look like an ordinary person can use it and have handles (metaphorical or literal) that the user can grasp. But after getting the shiny smooth curves and the pretty GUI, his designers and programmers quit and went home for the day.
It was left up to his competitors to take the empty form he marketed and add something that resembled FUNCTION.
Seriously?
Because I use both platforms on a daily basis and find the functionality of my iMac vastly exceeds that of my PC laptop. I get more done, faster and better on a Mac than I ever have on a PC. Among other reasons because the operating system stays out of my way and lets me work.
Yeah that probably explains apple market share being about 3% until they put their OS on intel hardware.
They spec faster intel hardware than cheap pc’s need because the popular thing to do with a mac is run a virtual copy of windoze. Even today most real functional software needed by industry/business is windoze based. Imagine that.
I bought my first Mac in 1985 when I started grad school. I came bundled with Microsoft Word and Excel, and I ultimately published my dissertation using this Mac connected to an Apple laser printer. The MS-DOS PC’s had nothing like either product until Microsoft brought out its first Windows operating system and then the Windows versions were clunky. I suspect that Microsoft brought out the Mac versions so that Microsoft could learn valuable Mac OS information that they could incorporate in their Windows 95 OS later on, because later versions of Word and Excel on the Windows 95 OS behaved very much like the Mac versions did.
Don’t forget the TRS-80.
Man, a bunch of commenters here sound a little too eager to dress down Steve Jobs’ accomplishments! Yeah, sure, he was no inventor of the home PC market, blah blah blah. I remember those days well, too. Apple products have always been more elegant, and significantly, more straightforward to use out-of-the-box, than its competitors’ products. At least, that was the case at the inflection points where Apple entered nascent markets and quickly defined them.
But the way some people here talk, Henry Ford was a nobody, either. After all, Herr Daimler built a functioning car years and years before Henry got hip to the program. But when Ford’s Model T demonstrated elegance and quality in concert with mass-production for broad consumer audiences, the world was changed.
Jobs may have been more of a Henry Ford than a Da Vinci but before we all disappear up our own arses, let’s consider that hallowed company in which his name is mentioned and show a bit of respect, shall we?
Back in 1988, when I was setting up my sole practitioner law practice, I thought it was about time to enter the computer age. I didn’t know A from B when it came to computers. I asked a knowledgeable acquaintance, and he told me, “Well, there’s the PC world and there’s the Mac world.
I trotted my ignorance up to the computer lab at the University of Oregon and told them what I wanted to do. The helpful person plunked me down in front of an IBM PC. The machine confronted me with DOS and all sorts of gobbledygook. Sweat popped from my brow. The helpful person then plunked me down in front of a Mac Plus or some such. I could type in real English, easily put documents into folders, and saw that I could get to work without a steep learning curve trying to master a machine.
I bought my first Mac, an SE, for $2799, and added on an external hard drive. It was way, way, more than a PC. I didn’t care. I got to work being a self-reliant lawyer the same day. Besides, working on that inadequately powered SE with 1MB of RAM was fun. I eventually made enough money to buy 4 MB of RAM so that I could run the Multi-Finder, or whatever it was called.
I’ve owned nothing but Macs since. They do just what I want and need them to do. I’m writing this on a 10″ Powerbook G4 that I got for my wife in 2004. That’s seven years ago. It works great. She’s got the spiffy new MacBook Pro. It works even better. She’s got the iPhone. I don’t. I’m jealous.
I couldn’t care less about the tear-them-open, upgrade your brains out, make your own, Linux/Unix/Windows stuff.
Steve Jobs and his company made me instantly productive, and he made using “computers” fun. At least for me.
His computers FUNCTION.
He was a genius in delivering great stuff that works and is fun. I’m glad he graced us on the planet, and I’m sorry he died so young.
Enjoyed that real life story. How is it that PC nerds can read or hear things like that and still not get it?
I recently read an article that asked if Steve Jobs was a saint or an SOB, and concluded that due to the inherent virtue of capitalism, it didn’t matter.
Having read much about the history of the computer industry, and Apple in particular, I can tell you that he was an SOB…but an invaluable one.
Without Steve Wozniak, the computers that launched Apple would never have existed. Without Steve Jobs, the company that made those computers would never have existed.
I think Wozniak would have built computers either way. Without Jobs, nobody would have bought them.
This is gross Steve Jobs fanboyism. Steve was a great salesman with a quick mind. He was a lousy person. Ask anybody who had the misfortune of dealing with him.
That’s okay. It just means Steve was human. A deeply flawed human, as we all are.
And a very lucky one. A very, very lucky one. The stars were aligned for Steve Jobs. That’s something not to be celebrated, for it merely reveals the capriciousness of the stars.
As a diehard PC user my nickname for those on the other side – especially when they sit around obsessively discussing the ‘wonders of it all’ – is Macabators….and their activity – macabating.
I am yet to be convinced that computers have done much for humankind other than allow us to stop thinking critically. They gave an entire branch of humanity something to care for though. No small feat. What would all the socially awkward do without their gadgets?
Yet more evidence that interfaith marriages can be the most difficult kind.
I am interested from a clinical point of view about the truth concerning Jobs health.
His friend, who traveled to India with him, reported that Jobs caught hepatitis from his drug use and lifestyle in India.
That may explain why he needed a liver transplant.
Unfortunately the anti rejection drugs he would have had to take for that would have increased his chances of dying from any residual cancer.
The famous Jobs ” reality distortion zone” is just a polite way of saying that he was a skillful liar and thief -according to those who knew Jobs since high school and worked with him.
Shannon Love’s comment is excellent, but he/she should learn that “atheistic” and “aesthetic” are two totally different words with two totally different meanings!
The TRS-80 has to be one of the ugliest machines ever invented, Captain Kirk. Or did he do the VIC-20 and C64 commercials? Too lazy for the Google to find out, but it’s been great tripping down memory lane with the fellow fogies!
Steve Jobs RIP. What a long strange trip it’s been. Kinda like “The Longest Cocktail Party.” My theory is that’s really where Jobs got his inspiration for the name, but I can’t prove it, so that’s why it’s a theory, not a theorem.
For what it is worth…Young couples want their wedding ceremonies to reflect their sense of style and leave their guest visitors with a great experience. The very last thing a special couple want to concern yourself with is shelling out a bundle of dollars on wedding favors. Thanks alot : ).