Steve Jobs has died

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Kubizo

Highly interesting! I should read BYTE I guess :-) Thanks again!

Yes, in those days BYTE was THE magazine!

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, in those days BYTE was THE magazine!

Certainly was. Essential reading!

[GA Russell]

I see good news and bad news.

The good news was that in a time when self-made billionaires are typically Wall Street paper traders, Jobs was actually "in the business" (really multiple businesses - computers, music, telephones, film animation). I believe that the businessmen who are "in the business" move the world forward, and we need more of them.

The bad news was that he was known for abusing his employees, completely disregarding the Golden Rule. That is not a small defect.

[hidari]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

I see good news and bad news.

The good news was that in a time when self-made billionaires are typically Wall Street paper traders, Jobs was actually "in the business" (really multiple businesses - computers, music, telephones, film animation). I believe that the businessmen who are "in the business" move the world forward, and we need more of them.

The bad news was that he was known for abusing his employees, completely disregarding the Golden Rule. That is not a small defect.

The bad news which people seem to ignore, may be acceptable at the time of death, but many people who are fans of Apple seem to have ignored the other side of his personality well before his death occured. On top of that some of the adulation from individuals and even newspapers/TV are giving him credit for things he never achieved. Religions and cults seem to succeed in similar ways..

[pidgeon92]

Originally Posted by hidari

The only two constants in life... Death and Taxes.....

Actually there are three.

People with nothing nice to say will always have to comment negatively on discussion forum threads.

[elcreative]

Originally Posted by pidgeon92

Actually there are three.

People with nothing nice to say will always have to comment negatively on discussion forum threads.

Well put...

[kennyc]

[ImogenRose]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Thanks

[sunsets]

This has been making me sad for days. Steve Jobs was a visionary.

[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.

[llreader]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Hear! Hear!

this is IEEE Spectrum's assessment of what we can learn from him:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/h...ampaign=100611

Thanks Kenny, this is an excellent (and brief) piece.

Jobs did a lot of things well. Most of his detractors try to attribute his influence to one small area (salesman, integrating emerging technologies, control freak), but they fail to acknowledge the sweep of his vision, the many levels at which he made Apple function, from the efficiency of their supply chain to design to imposing new commercial paradigms (iTunes, etc.).

On a human level, I am most impressed by his life story: adopted by working class parents, he made his own way in the world, without the family contacts and inherited wealth that so many of his competitors (Gates, for example) had.

One of his great strengths was his dedication to Apple. In the age of CEOs pumping up stock values for short-term profits so they can get their bonus and move on to the next company, Jobs was planning ten years ahead to build his company into the best he could imagine it could be (the same could be said of Gates, who also founded his own company). He made an interesting comment once about how company founders who sell out early for a lot of money miss out on the challenges of working through the inevitable crises and learning more about who they really are. Ironically, in this aspect he was more like a classic company man than a new-age, high-tech CEO.

Our best and brightest will be learning from him and trying to copy his success for many years to come.

[Greg Anos]

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.

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."

[Prestidigitweeze]

Ralph:

I very much appreciate the politeness of your reply. I do not, however, like the condescension of the tone and argument, which suggests that I, as a "tool user," have had nothing to do with programming and programmers in the course of a lifelong career.

At one point, I was actually referred to as a programmer by people who hired me (not that I was well versed in any sense, nor was that my focus). I also have friends who are far better at programming than I, grew far wealthier as a result and are still doing what they love.

One of them began as a person who created utilities in hypercard, eventually designing and maintaining the applications people used to create electronic books as CD-ROMS. That person went on to design database software that is now used professionally across platforms. He still prefers to create applications for OSX environment rather than Windows, though he can easily do both. He even likes writing apps for the iPhone.

Another friend's first job out of college was being Sys Admin for Sun Microsystems. He likes to write in Java and was one of the first people I know to create a database that could be revised by several people at once. His computer of choice is a MacBook Pro and he takes it with him on his long, long vacations between periods of intense and relentless work.

You make it sound as if you haven't had any experience using early macs. I find it hard to understand why you refer to the "closed system" as something the Apple OS has always represented, rather than something which developed after Jobs's return to Apple.

The beauty of Windows is that it's designed to run on all kinds of heterogeneous computers and does so well a good deal of the time. Jobs's approach was different: to design the software and the computer as a single object, as Atari also tried to do with the SE (which, to my knowledge, was the first personal computer with a MIDI jack built in).

You can call that approach controlling if you like, but objectively, it's simply a choice to create a more seamless environment, one in which the same kind of aesthetic informs the hardware as the software. The "closed system," one which banishes innovators who fall outside the Apple camp, came far later. In the beginning, Jobs's approach made the mac far more useful to artists than Windows, and more attractive to programmers with certain kinds of artistic ideas.

You're also creating a false parallel between understanding computers and a polemic endorsing open systems, as if the two were interchangeable, as if no one on this thread had had any experience with operating systems like Linux and Be, or even black boxes in C++.

You're also using the royal we, which I find distracting. I very much appreciate the specialized POV you bring to the discussion as a person who writes code, but you're making an argument by authority, and your conclusions aren't necessarily the same as those of everyone else who writes code -- particularly when you make arguments against Apple in the past based on Apple in the present.

Any number of "tool builders" fall on different sides of the wearisome debate you're insisting on having at the virtual memorial service of a dead man. Any number of "tool builders" prefer more open environments than the one upon which Jobs eventually settled.

But those same "tool builders" are just as likely to point out what was great about Job's approach in the beginning, and how, whatever Draconian excesses might have followed, he was undeniably important, and his approach did "change the world," for better or worse, despite your need to judge his achievements solely by his autocratic social politics and decision in the mid-90s to begin building an electric fence around Apple's OS.

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

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."

[Greg Anos]

No condescending was intended, if it was perceived, it was due to my inability to articulate my views. My apologies.

However, codng is what I do, I have been commercially codiing for 31 years now. I have done virtually nothing else for living in my lifetime, Not in the PC arena, but coding, none the less. Things like maintaining a system that settled up 25% of the stock trades (in real time) on Wall Street in the early 2000's, or writing life insurance commission systems, or making certain a Fed Funds trading system was up with a 1/2 a trillion dollars hanging fire in the 1980's. They weren't sexy jobs, just necessary ones.

No I didn't have an early Mac. I couldn't afford it. They started out at $1999 for a 128Kb machine, with absolutely no memory expansion capabilities. A $2000 throwaway (in 1984 dollars) good for 2-3 year max, As everybody knew then, Moore's law was still in force. (still is 27 years later. 2 GB memory sticks? you couldn't buy a 2 GB hard drive in 1984, even on an IBM Mainframe (though you could come close)). But the operationg system/human interface was so good...(And it was. Straight from PARC. But how many times do I have to buy it?) Yes, the early Mac was closed froim a hardwarrd sense, couldn't open it without breaking the case, no external standard ports for things like printers. no provisions for things like more memory, color graphic expansion or fast hard drive I/O...

(As an aside, it is an Atari ST. I bought one of those in 1987. It was also closed but half the price of a Mac at the time and all sorts ports, like MIDI. Fleetwood Mac used Atari STs as sequencers on their 1987 tour. It wasn't just used in Europe.

Plus a hardware hacker found that if you added Mac ROMs to a cartridge and did some minor software hacks, you could run the Mac OS on the Atari ST - and it ran 30% faster, Apple responded by cutting off the availability off ROMs to the public.)

I could comment further, but why bother. Steve Job was God, it's time for me to burn the incense, before the mob burns me....

Selah (No, I'm not muttering under my breath.)

[GA Russell]

Ralph, I bought an Atari 1040 ST in 1987 as well!

The sales pitch was...Sure, it's plastic. And in five years it will be obsolete. But who knows what you can buy and at what price five years from now!