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Steve Jobs Dead At 56
SoCalChris writes "Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was found dead in his Cupertino home this morning. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him — even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon."
While I'm not a fan of Apple's business practices, Steve made a lot of advances in technology. RIP.
jk...I'm not a big fan of his company, but RIP.
Can we have Woz back in charge now?
Evil people are out to get you.
I never met him in person, but for a while my company leased space in an Apple-owned building on Valley Green Drive, and Steve would frequently walk past my window on the sidewalk on his way back and forth from HQ to various buildings on VGD (which tended to have all the windows covered up or painted black). He would just be walking alone without any entourage or anything, at a time when Carly was running HP and seemingly couldn't leave her office without press followers, support staff, security detail with automatic weapons, and a helicopter.
I can't imagine how much different (and for the worse) the history of the last thirty years of computing would have been without him.
He will be greatly missed by friends and foes alike.
G.
amen to that, he contributed more to driving the technology industry than just about anyone else.
Statements like this make me no longer care about the inappropriate timing of the comment I'm about to make, but I'll make it anyway: I sure hope the latest news means that objectivity will return to how devices are rated, how interfaces are criticized, how Apple is viewed by the media, and how computing will progress from here on out. From the fall of AOL to the rise of iComputing, we had a 12 year golden age where walled gardens were derided, people owned their own devices, and the landscape of the internet formed more or less naturally.
That said, I will miss how he made it okay to latch onto a particular fashion and stick to it. That's one of the few things we'd agree on.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
I was ten years old. After wearing out a Timex Sinclair 1000 and a VIC-20, my dad took me to the computer shop to pick out a new one. They all looked cool and incredibly complex - the TI/99 with it's bizarre cartridge slot, the Apple II with it's strange ribbon cables coming out of the back (sorry Woz) the Atari 400 with it's horrid keyboard, the clunky PC with it's austere green display.
Then there was the Macintosh. It made the other machines look like junk. It had real fonts. It had *graphics*. It could make sounds other than a harsh piezoelectric bleep. You looked at it and could figure out how to get something done. My dad saved up and pulled a deal from a friend, and my early Christmas (and birthday and second Christmas) present that year was a shiny new beige Macintosh 512K with a wide-carriage Imagewriter and external floppy drive. Using it felt like you were using something from Star Trek. I learned how to touch type doing papers on that thing. I learned how to program using Microsoft Basic, then Metrowerks Pascal. I took it to Heathkit and had it upgraded to a 512KE with an enormous 800k drive. While there I drooled over the completely maxed-out Mac II with color ImageWriter II, LaserWriter II, dual 1.44MB floppies, a stack of SCSI drives (40MB HD, tape backup, and CD-ROM) and every desk accessory known to man loaded and ready to go. I finally retired it when I got a job out of high school and saved up enough to buy a PowerMac 6100/60, which I still have, and still works. Since then I've gotten into DIY, building my own PC compatables to experiment with Windows, Linux, Inferno, BeOS, and OS/2. Then I needed a PC at home to run all the development environments I had to learn for work. But I still have a soft spot for the elegance and simplicity of Mac hardware and software.
Thanks, Jobs, for pushing computer design forward on all fronts - from UI design to standardizing iconography used for ports, and forcing everyone else to at least attempt to be as innovative. I think, for my next computer, I'm retiring the water cooled behemoth running Windows 7 under my desk, and buying a Macbook Air.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, too. Good flick, and a fair amount of background on Jobs' early years.
Sometimes it's important to realize geeks don't understand what normal people want in technology.
This is an important point which is often overlooked in technology discussion forums such as this one.
Steve's genius was in predicting the things nobody thought they wanted until he showed it to them. "You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
I had maybe a dozen iPods, mostly for photo storage. Not sure how many Apple laptops. 3 iPhones.
None of them ever tried to control me.
I'd be sitting on the couch surfing the web with my MBP and would think "I want to go outside". I'd then do that, seemingly with no interference from the MBP. Similarly I'd be driving down the street with my iPhone in my pocket and never once felt like the phone was trying to get be to drive to the Apple store.
But I will admit that the MBP I am typing this on auto-capilatized iPhone. Maybe that is what you mean...
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I think you're not giving Jobs enough credit even for the first wave of personal computers.
I think you're not giving Woz enough credit.
This is a man, whether you liked him or not or approved of everything he did or not, who was in fact instrumental in a number of steps in the post-1960s computer revolution.
Although Jobs had his part, it was Woz that designed the first two generations of apple computers himself.
I'm not trying to make light of this death, but the engineers behind all the devices are still alive.
So? He was an engineer. And he did a damn awesome job of it, too. Without Woz, early PCs might have taken longer to bring to market; they would have had more chips and would have cost more because of it. It probably would have taken an army of engineers to build what Woz did.
But the world has armies and armies of engineers.
On the other hand Steve Jobs, more than anyone, realized that computers could be made into consumer appliances that every housewife, artist, author, schoolchild and, yes, hipster would want to own. The design and marketing of computers and smartphones to ordinary people, not just businesspeople or techies.
Woz without Jobs would have been happy to stay in his garage and solder. Linus Torvalds would probably still have been inspired to create an open-source OS for geeks to play with and build upon. Bill Gates would have gone ahead and put business machines on the desks of every cubicle drone in the corporate world. But without Steve Jobs, personal computers would never have become personal.
Much of Slashdot hates him for this, of course. They hate the lack of choice, the warm and fuzzy design, the drool-proof UI and the high prices. But what they really hate is that he took this wonderful world of powerful technology, a world where they are kings, and turned the keys over to the unwashed masses of housewives, schoolkids, artists, and, yes, hipsters.
Steve Jobs and Woz did work for Atari as technicians.
Wikipedia has a story on how they were paid to reduce the chip count on some arcade boards. They worked together to create one ASIC to replace 50 logic chips.
Reading computer magazines between the 1970's and1990's was an experience. Seeing the evolution of computing from home-assembled S-100 boards in the 1970's to Apple ]['s, Apple Mac, NEXT workstations in the early 1990's, hand-held devices like the Newton in the later years.
How many other people need three separate pages of historical time lines to list all the products that they were involved in designing?
Time Line of Apple Products
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads