Slashdot Mirror
Watch Steve Jobs Demo the Mac, In 1984
VentureBeat is one of the many outlets featuring recently surfaced video of Steve Jobs doing an early demo of the Macintosh, 30 years ago. I remember first seeing one of these Macs in 1984 at a tiny computer store in bustling downtown Westminster, Maryland, and mostly hogging it while other customers (or, I should say, actual customers) tapped their feet impatiently.
Whooa! Godwin's law in just three comments! This must be some kind of a record.
Anyway, the same could not be said for any AC! (Including this one)
..."Steve Jobs take credit for other people's work in this video, just like always", scubamage
1:18:20: "Remember when you use a Macintosh, these are the people that did it and they're sort of hiding out in that ROM", Steve Jobs
It's tough to describe how space-age that stuff was in the 1980s, where 4k and 8k home computers with 8 bit processors was the norm. The 32 bit Motorola 68000 series were used as workstation processors in Sun Microsystems' Sun 1 and Sun 2 workstations & servers, so it was quite surprising to see one in a personal computers.
Note also how Jobs hammers away at IBM, the evil empire who had held foul dominion over computing at that time for longer than MS has existed today. My, how times change.
Look, man: no slashdotter worth his salt has any illusion that Steve Jobs was involved in technical design beyond a very abstract level.
But he's a disgusting human being for having clarity of vision and salesmanship? I'll grant that he seemed like a dick for other reasons, but that's another discussion.
I'm writing this from an Ubuntu box that I built myself, and I tend to be an OS pragmatist. I make my living as an engineer. I don't discount my own contribution in my work, but I dare say there is room for more Steve Jobs (Jobses?) in tech. Someone's got to identify opportunity, guide a bunch of engineers to a product, and then sell the fucking thing. If that someone is very highly effective, it's no small contribution and I submit that if one person deserves credit for Mac it's Jobs.
I truly don't get the level of vitriol for this guy... there are posts here that honestly read batshit, foaming at the mouth crazy to me.
Besides, have you seen what happens when engineers drive product design? There are situations where those products are appropriate but we're talking about mainstream PCs here. Sure, elements were ripped off from Xerox, sure you can probably dig up earlier, better technical implementations of most of this tech. The thing that matters, and the reason we're still talking about it, is that Apple brought it into your grandmother's living room.