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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
Certain people here have said that Jobs wasn't innovative, and that he was opposed to the idea of literature in accessible electronic form. But that seems a direct contradiction of writers and artists' experience with early macs.
When I was given my very first computer, a Mac SE30, it was a tool for artists, writers, musicians and graphic designers; that computer was part of the reason I was able to make a living early on as a studio musician. Years later, my PowerMac was the reason I was able to lay out my first short story collection and not leave it to my academic publisher, who wouldn't have understood my design approach back then. It was the reason I was able to enlist a recent Brown graduate, designer Eric Hoffsten, to create the original cover.
Before Jobs perfected his styling of Apple devices into consumer fetish objects, the mac was the only efficient computer on which to run Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator, Performer and Protools. Artistically, it had no competition. Musically, its only competition was the Atari, and that was in Europe.
The reason for these artistic refinements is made clear in Jobs's remarks at Stanford in 2005. His interest in calligraphy resulted in proportional and scalable fonts. That sort of thinking, which was unheard-of in the PC world, was everywhere apparent in the Mac. That's why it became an indispensable tool for artists, and why people speak of Jobs as an artist himself.
What the mac became decades later is subject to controversy, but its place in the professional artist's environment is directly traceable to Jobs's vision, as is the modern PC's place (now that it has the same level of sophistication in applications and palette-specific UI).
People forget that, in the mid-80s, you couldn't use a PC for professional DTP or photo editing because nothing but the mac functioned on that artistic level. And it isn't an accident that the original eBooks, CD-ROMs, were created for the mac and popularized by Voyager, a company co-founded by a Marxist who certainly had no place in the business world and didn't like PCs.
I'd be the first to argue the importance of Xerox PARC and the people from whom Jobs borrowed and sometimes stole. But to reduce Jobs's innovations to a series of specific and closed technological advances is to ignore the kind of difference Jobs actually made. Yes, we'd have had the PC without him. Yes, the desktop UI was predestined whether Jobs caught wind of it or not. But none of those innovations would have been oriented toward aesthetic beauty from the beginning, and artists wouldn't have been the first to seize the PC's destiny without him.
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I think this is a cultural clash. Let me explain.
There is a large group of people who are tool users. The artistic use you describe is purely using the computer as a tool, unchanged by the user of the tool.
There is another, smaller group out there, the tool builders (of which I am one). We use tools, and we create new ones. I specialize in logic structure creation (code), but physical creation is just as important.
Tool creaators need openness to provide the tools for other people. They are at odds with the closed, I know all the answers, tool implementations. They are alway looking to do something new, something different, something better. You might say "They
are the bleeding edge, by definition." They want, they need, openness to express their creativity.
They don't like closed systems, nor are they enthralled with the proponents of closed systems. And the pure tool user, has no use for the world view of the tool creator, except where the crweations can be "broken to harness" for use without any tool creativity (tweaking) being needed.
Hence the slogan "The computer for the rest of us."