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."

Comments

Very sad news.

[Gavin Scott]

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.

Thanks, Jobs

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:I recommend people read this blog

[Niris]

Watch Pirates of Silicon Valley, too. Good flick, and a fair amount of background on Jobs' early years.

Re:What he took away is more precious than given

[ScottyLad]

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."

Re:Lameness

[mikael]

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