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http://www.folklore.org/

Not a bad source for stories about Jobs dickish behavior...and before some /.er wants to point it out I'll do so. There's one story with Knuth where Steve looks like a pretty big doofus. It's been reported that Knuth has denied it - in particular in a talk by Randal Monroe's where he was present - the actual quote from Knuth though could easily be interpreted as avoiding the question rather than denying it.

And had just about as much success with it too.

For your reference, a liver transplant gets you qualified for parking in a handicapped spot for some time after it occurs and all sorts of time while you're waiting, as does most of the other treatments he was going through.

Jobs was parking in handicapped spots decades before he got cancer.

Even though Apple has made a fortune leading the public to believe otherwise, Jobs didn't design or make the changes to Apple's products himself; engineers like Wozniak, Hertzfeld and Ive did. (He has patents on record, but they're not for any of Apple's actual products.) Likewise, *his* choices were what almost destroyed Apple, and would have if John Sculley hadn't worked hard to limit the damage he could do. (Some good articles: Showdown at Apple, this Forbes article. The "Father of the Macintosh," Andy Hertzfeld, also wrote an article on the events leading up to it.)

Jobs' genius was actually in presenting items to their best effect and persuading people — intuitively knowing just what to say, how to say it, what appearance or impression to give, how to use his charisma, and so forth. That's why it was his original job with Wozniak: one Steve created the product, the other found buyers & investors. Apple, which had little left to lose by the mid-90s, thus hired Jobs so he could play the role of the long-lost genius behind Apple who had returned to "save" it, somebody that they could use as the face of the company for the public to latch onto.

Apple isn't innovating any less than before: they were already bouncing between phone & tablet prior to Jobs' death. It just seems to be doing more poorly now because — well, much as "Dumbo" was led to believe he could fly due to a magic feather and that he'd fail without it, Apple led its iDevice-era fans to believe that Jobs exerted some magical force on the company that produced near-miraculous tech, and that it will fail without him. You're just now seeing the company from the outside perspective of people that were never affected by Apple's/Jobs' tactics — very much like the Apple II-era/Woz fans (including me) came to in the early 1990s.

FWIW I don't have anything in particular against Jobs, but it drives me batty when a company or individual is given a great deal of credit for other peoples' work. Give him credit for his incredible talent at persuasion & salesmanship, and for the role that trait played in directing the industry — but let the unsung engineers, artistic designers, etc. behind the actual products have their due as well.

If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad (2002 Slashdot discussion). Btw, by introducing 'The Computer for The Rest of Us' in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates no doubt helped discourage both girls and boys from studying CS, even if BillG is trying to make amends now.

No idea why this has a Sony image with the post, the article is in large part about Apple and doesn't provide any proof of what exactly Apple consumed in Sony's supply chain.

There was a lot of argument over the floppy drive in the original Mac - Jobs wanted their own "twiggy" drive (that never worked right) over Sony's 3.5" drive (also new and proprietary at the time). Except Sony's drive was more reliable and well, it worked.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

Heck, you could cause a lot problems on a classic Mac by having a file named ".sony" on it.

(RoundRect was what the Rounded-corner Rectangle was called in old Apple developer docs, either when drawing a button, or using that shape directly in QuickDraw).

At the time, it wasn't easy drawing rounded corners.

Steve [Jobs] suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill [Atkinson] to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Fast-forward to the next century where rectangles with rounded corners are still everywhere, but only Steve's company is allowed to use them.

Found it.

Was this before he was kicked out of Apple for running it into the ground, or after he spent years in the wilderness learning how to actually manage a company?

Before.

This is likely from folklore.org which has all sorts of early Apple history.

What I'm saying is that while it may be fun to trot out things like the "640K should be enough for everyone" to bust on Bill Gates that is an urban myth and he never said it. Instead, bust on him for things that he *did* do (like hire someone else to pirate CPM). Same for Apple and Jobs (I just have a somewhat better memory for the Microsoft end of things, hence using MS-centric example).

The thing that is funny about the old days of Apple, is that people misrepresent what happened back then too. Everyone claims that Apple ripped off Xerox when they started working on GUI with Lisa / Mac, when one of the alumni of Xerox PARC (and a member of the original Macintosh team) says otherwise. Oh, and Lisa and Mac were already specified to be graphical bitmapped systems before Xerox allowed the Apple team to come in not once, but twice, mostly allowed because Xerox had given Apple VC money.

Never mind that there is a massive gulf between research, and product development. Best example from this particular topic: the original Apple mouse. It went from being a tricky, finicky, expensive piece of lab equipment into a cheap, mass produced, reliable, and easy to use piece of equipment that everyone just accepts as always being there under Apple's development. More info including interviews, design sketches, and documentation here.

For some reason, everyone likes to put research of an idea without actually turning it into something useful on a mile-high pedestal, but turning that idea into something that people can actually use to accomplish things doesn't mean shit. Research is important, but so is development of that research into a useful thing.

I have a copy of the first three volumes of TAoCP and have skimmed parts of it. I've occasionally opened it as a reference source (for example, on PRNGs), but I wouldn't claim to have "read" it. People who do are likely either hardcore computer scientists or bullshitters.

My favourite take on lines of code as a metric is from the early days of the Macintosh:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

Some things work best when lots of resources are focused on them, and having a strong executive can be very effective if the roles also come with accountability, which is of course where autocrats and many politicians fall down.

This is not a popular idea because it requires people to get over their personal drama and work together toward a goal, instead of finding reasons to justify doing whatever they personally want to do.

However, it's true. Strong leadership gets results. This country was much more "fascist" back in the days when we actually invented real stuff, instead of just moving bits around like a big game of "Puzzle."

Your interpretation leaves out the fact that he was dying of cancer and had organ replacement, which more than qualified him for a handicap placard, though I can't say he went through the effort of getting one. He could have EASILY bought one from a doctor somewhere even if he was perfectly health with the amount of money he had, so really you're just being pedantic.

Nah, he had been doing this since the early 80's. Source: http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

Funny, because a guy that worked at both PARC and Apple says you're wrong.

Andy Hertzfeld, over at folklore.org, has made some comments regarding how poor Gates' coding skills appeared to be.

The linked page says the game was bad, it says nothing of the coding.

Maybe that's it, maybe Gates was a great coder, ...

Andy Hertzfeld, over at folklore.org, has made some comments regarding how poor Gates' coding skills appeared to be.

If you go back all the way to the beginning of Gates's career, then it should be obvious that he is no friend to freedom, and he never has been.

In the beginning, there was no open source movement, because all software was open source. Computers were so difficult and non-standard, that software was one-off for each machine, and everybody shared everything just to get the darn things to work. Gates was born into the economic elite (his father was a lawyer and his mother was a rich civic busybody), and he brought elite paternalism into computing. The software we run is only by his permission, and we should all pay him for the privilege of improving and distributing it.

Wozniak came from a different mindset. His father was an engineer, and he learned the morality of engineers. He wrote the first BASIC for Apple, but licensed Microsoft's BASIC for later models. When somebody at Apple wrote MacBasic, Bill Gates had the gall to cancel it and not release a decent Basic for the Mac. So, Wozniak experienced Gates's ruthlessness, but he's too nice to say anything about it.

> its upgradeable cause the engineers ignored jobs

A citation?
No, I thought not.

I found it with google in literally under one minute. I can see why you're too cowardly to log in. People might know you're the village idiot. If they got to know you, they'd never read any of your comments.

But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

--Andy Hertzfeld, July 1981

Yeah. Uh, if you could leave Slashdot, and never come back, that'd be great. Thanks.

The Monkey was something they used for debugging. You can read about it here: http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

Wrong, Linus is an occasional prick who knows what he's talking about. This is something that people get wrong about Jobs repeatedly.

That's what monkeys are for.

Why not? It sounds like he knew what counts, and amount-of-lines-of-code really doesn't count.
I think this pretty much covers the entire subject:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

The problem is there isn't a way to determine from a simplistic line of code metric whether or no a line is truly needed, resulting in sloppy bloated code.

Every line of code which is properly designed out of a block of code is a line which will not have to be executed, debugged, stored or every worried about again:

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

Quote by Bill Gates, of Microsoft, when asked if he would develop software for the NeXT computer: "Develop for it? I'll piss on it."
http://library.thinkquest.org/22522/quotes.html

(For those who don't recall their computer history, Apple's iOS comes from OPENSTEP, which Apple got when it bought NeXT, and OPENSTEP was the upgrade from NeXTstep which implemented the OPENSTEP standard for NeXT Computers.)

Hopefully this means we'll see a version of OneNote for Mac OS X --- it'd be a nice gesture if they'd bring back Apple's MacBASIC which BG bought for the princely sum of $1 so he could bury it --- http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt .

Yes, but I'm also saddened for a generation of kids who grow up interacting w/ computers to only consume media, not to create.

Steve Jobs put forth that computers were ``bicycles for the mind'' [1] --- but this switch to tablets is taking general purpose computers out of the hands of our kids and replacing it w/ an interactive TV. While there have been some web mentionings of it [2] I can't find a copy of the ad, or a full set of the quotes. [3]

Where are the brilliant creativity and programming tools for Tablets? (and I say this as a person who uses Autodesk Sketchbook, Creaturehouse Expression, Futurewave SmartSketch, Macromedia FreeHand, Runtime Revolution and Lotus Improv on his Tablet PC)

I'd love to have a list of great creativity tools for tablets (though I wonder how much good it'll do --- I've been unsuccessful in getting my son to d/l and install Petit Computer [4] )

1 - http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Bicycle.txt
2 - http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/
3 - http://creativityandinnovation.blogspot.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-amazing-quotes.html
4 - http://www.petitcomputer.com/

I really wish I'd pirated a copy of MacBasic instead of buying Microsoft's lame BASIC for Macintosh ( http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt ).

Every time I pick up my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 running Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, I wish it were running Go Corp.'s PenPoint ( http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314 http://www.amazon.com/ThinkPad-Different-J-Gerry-Purdy/dp/0672317567/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1368791379&sr=1-1&keywords=thinkpad )

It kills me that I can't buy Creaturehouse Expression for a new version of Mac OS X ( http://www.creativemac.com/article/Microsoft-Buys-Creature-House-Assets-21443 )

Or that I can't upgrade my copy of Altamira Composer or that the plug got pulled on Altsys Virtuoso for Windows NT.

&c.

Had the software been around when I used a C64 (when they were the state of the art) . .

What do you mean? C64 still is state of the art . . . for 1982.

On the other hand, a clever hack borders on being timeless - for example and inspiration if nothing else.

Certainly in a time of ever greater bloatware it can border on mind-blowing to consider what people used to do, and some still do, in handfuls or hundreds of bytes: The Puzzle

Visual Transistor-level Simulation of the 6502 CPU

the multifinder NEVER was as stable as the classic finder all the way up until the point where they discontinued the classic finder

Single-tasking in Classic Mac OS was discontinued in System 7, which came out in the fourth quarter of 1991. It is now the second quarter of 2013, and the UI of both iOS and Android is still using the Switcher paradigm.

I keep hearing that floating windows are coming for Android 5.

You mean like the "desk accessories" of System 1? Besides, Macintosh computers that came with System 6 and had enough RAM could be upgraded to System 7. How many devices that came with Android 4 will get the upgrade to Android 5? I'm told Virgin Mobile is still selling devices with Android 2 for cricket's sake.

But the ideas aren't stolen. They were freely available for everyone to use because they were developed before we reached the level of intellectual property idiocy that allows rounded corners and other moronically simple design elements to be patented and copyrighted.

Actually, Apple does get credit for one type of rounded corner. They came up with a very fast way to draw rounded rectangles in the early 1980s when computing power was very limited. (The same guy came up with regions - a way to quickly display overlapping arbitrary shapes.)

The difference is back then, Apple didn't try to do something stupid like claim nobody else was allowed to draw rounded rectangles on a computer.

But the ideas aren't stolen. They were freely available for everyone to use because they were developed before we reached the level of intellectual property idiocy that allows rounded corners and other moronically simple design elements to be patented and copyrighted.

Actually, Apple does get credit for one type of rounded corner. They came up with a very fast way to draw rounded rectangles in the early 1980s when computing power was very limited. (The same guy came up with regions - a way to quickly display overlapping arbitrary shapes.)

The difference is back then, Apple didn't try to do something stupid like claim nobody else was allowed to draw rounded rectangles on a computer.

Sounds similar to how rounded rectangles landed up in QuickDraw. Note that the developer mostly worked from home: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt

they're much more likely to consider it than if a bunch of twattish neckbeards who preface their demands to Apple with, "I'm not an Apple customer, I hate you, and I will NEVER be your customer, but here's how to run your business:"

You are wrong. FSF told Apple they would "be happy to see Apple distribute these programs under the GPL's terms." Your talent for hyperbole is strong, and nearly matched by your denial over your bias. It's very amusing.

Why the fuck would Apple spend time designing a 2-button mouse when you can trivially buy one yourself? They built in support for a 2-button mouse, and said, "If you want one, go get one."

That's accurate but in no way addresses my point about Apple's attitude toward customer demand. In fact, it reinforces it.

Look, Apple has long had a reputation for arrogance and self-aggrandizing marketing. That is nothing new. Read What's a Megaflop? for an example. In this instance, we see Steve Jobs exhibit:

1) arrogance regarding Apple's quality ("You're going to have to wait a long time to find something better than the Mac!")

2) cluelessness about customer needs ("What's a megaflop?")

3) dishonesty and bluster ("Oh, we believe in that, too. Apple will have an affordable 3M machine before anyone else.")

Sorry, but Apple has always had a practice of introducing products they think are great, and can't understand why anyone would disagree. Their dismissiveness toward customers was arrogant, and of developers was foolhardy. And it almost killed them in the '90s, when they got a thorough pasting in the market.

Interestingly this code is supposedly in there. (According to the comments on the page). Somebody should check the Adobe code...

all the gory details here:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

A later development was Borland's ObjectVision --- there was even provision for loading ObjectVision files into other more sophisticated Borland environments if memory serves.

NeXTstep of course had Interface Builder and Project Builder around that time as well.

William

...read Andy Hertzfeld's site http://www.folklore.org/ which contains stories from the people who actually designed and built the Mac. Some of these stories went into the book "Revolution in the Valley" which you can still buy on Amazon.

You can read more here, http://www.folklore.org/

Folklore.org paints an extremely rosy picture of Jobs compare to what the people in the photo on the top of the page say in person.

When replying to a reference, it's good to provide your own for rebuttal. Where's your cite?

You can read more here, http://www.folklore.org/

Folklore.org paints an extremely rosy picture of Jobs compare to what the people in the photo on the top of the page say in person.

This might be the first example of this particular (and quite correct) philosophy:

I think you got this story a little mixed up

Pull-down menus weren't invented by Xerox, their GUI used a modal button bar at the top of each window. You can see photographic evidence of the Apple development process here. I know Apple get criticised for being derivative, but they did invent this GUI element, and their early attempts used a per-window model, which they eventually rejected for a global bar. You think per-window is better; as someone who used Windows for many years, then various Linux distros exclusively for 5 years, then latterly Mac OSX, I vastly prefer the global menus. It's a matter of opinion.

I think that's a Bill Atkinson history.

Could this be what you are recalling? http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Stolen_From_Apple.txt&characters=Steve%20Capps&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=high&showcomments=1

Can you provide citation or other evidence? Here is one of many reports that state the contrary. Here's another. Here are descriptions of the Xerox Star and Xerox Alto interfaces that don't seem to illustrate these features. Here's video of the Xerox Star, showing the use of dedicated keys, rather than drop-down menus, to carry out basic operations like copy, move, undo, and text formatting, the use of a "Move" key with point-and-click instead of drag-and-drop to arrange files on the desktop or move files into folders, the use of a "Properties sheet" instead of direct editing to change filenames, the use of a Delete key instead of dragging files to the trash, the use of an "Open" key instead of double-click to open a file, the absence of text selecting by dragging, etc.

The spots are technically (and intentionally) improperly designated. See the sign here:

http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/misc/jpg/2042280931_cd407b3ee4.jpg

This lacks the require fine notice from 22511.7(2), and since public parking is specifically prohibited by posted notice (otherwise that whole lot would be filled by people trying to eat at B.J.'s), it's also missing the 22511.8(3)(e) notice. But even if it were so posted, as a private facility, it would have to be Apple security reporting the infraction under 22511.8(3)(d), which would be about as career limiting for the reporting employee as the security person who denied Steve entrance to IL1 because he forgot his badge.

Woz played a joke on Andy Hertzfeld once by calling Jobs car into the Cupertino police department pretending to be Andy, and they called him back and told him they investigated, but couldn't tow the car because the spot was improperly marked. Here's Andy's recounting of the story:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Handicapped.txt

MonkeyLives

n early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

point is, just cause you can manage it, doesnt mean 10,000,000 lines of code is really something to brag about, especially for something that feels as cheap as quickbooks (though it does a ok job if your accountant cant use excel and must have things that visually represent checks)

Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.

As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge

Or even read wikipedia

The following description is based primarily on the August 1976 Alto Hardware Manual by Xerox PARC. . . .The Alto was never a commercial product, although over two thousand were built. . . In December 1979, Apple Computer's co-founder Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 programming environment . . .integrated it first into the Lisa and then in the Macintosh, attracting several key researchers to work in his company. . . In 1980–1981, Xerox Altos were used by engineers at PARC and at the Xerox System Development Department to design the Xerox Star workstations.

Xerox had the concepts for several years before Apple. They never made it into a product. The Star was finally a product but not a standalone that the Lisa and the Mac was.

before you post again, read this . GP is correct... and you are uninformed. Perhaps try to avoid making things up when you attempt a post... you are embarassing the other trolls.

They protect their own innovations to an extent they deem reasonable.

What innovations? Apple is an imitator, marketer, and polisher of other people's products. Did they invent the cellphone? Did they invent tablets? Did they invent mp3 players, touch screens, gridded icons, rounded corners or anything else of substance? Have they ever actually created a new product category? The best people can say is that Samsung imitated an imitator. At best.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt