Slashdot Mirror
World Cup Memo Written By Steve Jobs Going Up For Auction
New submitter Dega704 writes with an excerpt from El Reg: "Before Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone or even the Apple II, he designed paddles for ball-flipping games at Atari where the scruffy 19-year-old was employed to improve game design. Sotheby's New York will auction off a document dating from Jobs's time there: a 1974 report that Jobs wrote for his boss suggesting ways to improve arcade game World Cup. According to Jobs' biography, his Atari days are most notable for his clashes with colleagues, who he considered to be 'dumb shits'. He was made to work night shifts there partly because he was in a phase of refusing to wash and so he apparently smelt bad, causing complaints from his co-workers. But Jobs obviously did some work at Atari too, with the document laying out his ideas for improving player experience. The typed four-page document includes three circuit designs in pencil and additional designs for the paddles and alignment of players defending a soccer goal."
I'm going to be a billionaire!
He's venerated as a demi-god but like many high/over achievers he was also complete prick.
Sorry Steve.
What does a post about Steve Jobs have to do with geniuses?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
He employs them in his apple stores
I laughed, then I realized you might be serious... so I laughed harder.
Well, he may have come up with the design for the thing. After all, if a computer or a smartphone is simply a bunch of chips soldered, screwed or superglued together, then Apple would be selling iBoards and the iBerry Pi, instead of selling the iMac and the iPhone.
You may want to look up the definition of the word. It probably has many more meanings than you suspect.
P.S. - why are some people never happy unless they're ripping down someone else?
I was working as a sales rep in a Silicon Valley computer store in the early 80's. I knew the Woz and many other notables (I sold 3com their first 100 PC's). One day Woz's mother came into our store, looking for a joke present for the computer geek son who had everything geeky he could want. I sold her a bottle of "Bug Off" - anti-static spay for his monitor! ... :-)
Kind of shocking the guys at Slashdot would miss something as big as this. Wonder if they're just too young and inexperienced to know about Woz.
(Yeah, I know they're not -- which means only temporary idiocy could explain them making that mistake!)
He was a user-interaction genius, not necessarily a technical genius. He knew what people would want without them first knowing they wanted it.
Table-ized A.I.
I thought it was going to be a memo about how to improve the snoozefest that is soccer/futbol.
Let's see...
Nope, still not worth watching.
To hear about a young man on a path to providing joy and happiness to millions, only to lose his way and become a business executive. Where did we fail you Steve. You clearly had the potential. Antisocial, poor hygiene, you had all the traits of a budding young geek. Then somewhere a terrible turn south. Perhaps we'll never know.
To see the same phenomena in a scientific genius just pick up any bio of Issac Newton, he was widely recognised in his own lifetime as genius of the highest caliber by the public, and a common arsehole by his collegues and relatives. "American idol" style fawning over an arsehole who happens to also be a genius is definitely not something new.
Like him or not
I don't go out of my way to read about Jobs, Woz, BillG, et al, but I I like Woz as a person from what I've seen of him, Jobs I'm still undecided. None of that detracts from their status as modern day geniuses.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Putting the thing into a plastic case and embedding the keyboard was Steve's idea. Trying to keep it simple and not suck is still kind of a revolutionary concept.
We're all so willing to live with things that suck. I mean, even OSX sucks in many ways(I prefer it because it sucks less than Windows, and while Linux is great for stability, living with the OS is a kind of suck I can't deal with; even if it sucks less overall).
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Steve JOBS came up with the Apple II? I don't think so.
Steve Wozniak is on record stating that Steve designed the layout of everything on the Apple II down to how to layout the ICs. Wozniak could have cared less but saw the merit in Steve's constant design critique to make things organized, minimalistic and right down to the look of the inside of cases not to be nothing but some piece of crap sheet metal cover, ala today's typical PC Clone shell.
I think you mean he COULDN'T have cared less.