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Steve Jobs Interview with Time Magazine
broohaha wrote to us with the
online version of Time's interview with Steve Jobs. It's the cover of this week's edition, and gives an interesting perspective into the labyrinth of his mind. The most interesting part is the Pixar stuff, IMHO. Just waiting for Toy Story II right now.
No argument. Ours cost us less, but that's because my old man was an electrical engineer and we designed and built the S-100 cards ourselves. We even did photo-etching ourselves on some of our later cards. Fun. Educational.
;-)
No, my nitpick consisted simply of pointing out that the Apple was not that innovative in a technical sense. It was hardly the first computer with swappable cards. That's all. I'm not saying that it wasn't the market breakthrough. It certainly was. Not everyone was ready to be their own engineer and software developer. The Apple ][ was a consumer item. The CP/M based S-100 bus machines were computers for computer people who couldn't afford 370's at home (and didn't have the raised floor
They still use co-operative multi-tasking, instead of pre-emptive, because they made an ideological decision before, and the developer community is not aware enough to yell about it
This statement is laughable. Actually, most all of your statements are laughable, but the rest have been pretty well addressed by other people.
They did not use cooperative multitasking because of an ideological decision. I challenge you: compare a well-done cooperative system versus a well-done preemptive system on an 8MHz 68000 machine with 128k of memory which is generally running only one or two programs at once. (Remember, the original Mac did have those funky Desk Accessories which could run concurrently with the current program, and can be considered to be a seperate process.) Guess which one is faster? I'll let you figure it out. (HINT: It's the one Apple actually went with.) Once the decision was made, it was pretty much stuck. Retrofitting a preemptive tasking system onto the OS once the hardware had picked up enough to handle it would have been an absolute nightmare.
You ought to hang around the Mac developer community more before you say that we aren't aware enough to complain. Among the ones I hang out with, about half of all our complaining is directed toward either the lack of preemptive multitasking or memory protection in MacOS. It's a big issue, and Apple knows it, which is why they're releasing MacOS X. Again, retrofitting these features onto the old system would be far too painful. If you don't believe me, write some down 'n' dirty Mac programs and see the tricks the MacOS goes through to ensure you can still run an application from 1983 on a modern system. It's ugly.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
1) A tokenized Forth graphics engine.
2) Smalltalk.
The Forth graphics engine was originally intended to grow from a programmable replacement of the NAPLPS videotex graphics protocol, into a silicon implementation of a stack machine upon which byte codes, compiled from Smalltalk would be executed. At least that's the direction in which I had hoped to see the Viewtron videotex terminal evolve when I originated the dynamically downloaded tokenized Forth graphics protocol as a replacement for NAPLPS in 1981 and discussed these ideas with the folks at Xerox PARC prior to the genesis of Postscript and Lisa.
If Charles Moore could produce an economical 10MIPS 16 bit Forth engine on a 10K ECL gate array on virtually zero bucks back then, why couldn't Jobs with all his resources produce a silicon Postscript engine with power enough to execute Smalltalk?
Somehow a Forth interpreter made it into the first Mac, as did Postscript, but Smalltalk just didn't.
The Motorola 68000 family just didn't have the power. It may have been better than the Intel 86 family, but that really isn't saying much, now is it?
Seastead this.
>As for Beos, only the kernel is proprietary,
>every thing else is completely open.
Really?
Show me the source for:
1. The 'twitcher'
2. The tracker
3. NetPositive
4. Their TCP/IP implementation
5. The underlying code behind replicants
...while you're at it, show me where Be says I could integrate this into my own operating system. I'd love to see Apple take on some of the special benefits behind the BeOS.
Not so open, is it?
As much as I like Be, the whole "Apple is stopping us" argument is tired and dead. First Apple shouldn't be obligated to support a competing OS - even though I personally think it'd be in their best interest in this case. Apple's supposed closed nature hasn't stopped the Linux community (LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog, even MkLinux). Even weirder still, such closed companies rarely release large chunks of their own source code to the public (Darwin).
I have the utmost respect for Be, but their argument is pretty much defunct. I'd much rather they simply outright state that their PowerPC users don't hold the same importance that they used to, and quit shifting the blame. Then again, people might realize that Intel - Be's biggest investor - is being anticompetitive.
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
Some of the things he attibutes to Apple as reasons why it's great are pretty right-on the mark though.
Example: Apple WAS able to add USB to their boxes without worry about anything. They just did it. But I don't know if I wholly agree with his reasoning why. It seems to me that apple could make a jump like this precisely because they'd become a small niche-player in the industry. The smaller warrior always moves faster.
Werd.
Why is it that whenever an Apple topic comes up, some bozo feels the need to make some completely random comment with absolutely no foundation in truth? MacOS, despite its limitations, is quite capable of saturating a 10Mb link and does almost as well with 100BaseT. Please, get a life, check your 'facts' and stop spouting rubbish.
One thing that really jumped out at me in the interview was his mellow attitude. If I recall correctly, he's been described as a controlling megalomaniac... I don't know if anybody's heard the "Employee Number One" anecdote, so here goes:
Apple decided to issue all the employees name badges and ID numbers, since the company had grown beyond the point where everybody knew everybody. Wozniak was assigned number 1, Jobs number 2, etc. Jobs couldn't stand being number 2, despite the fact that Woz really was Apple at that point... So Jobs went ahead and assigned himself Employee Number Zero, since it hadn't been taken yet, and it placed him above everyone else.
I find it amusing to watch SGI go for Linux and Debian, because it might end up that my old software group at Pixar will use my hobby project as their interactive operating system. Some of them were quite resistant to Linux when I left.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
But this is not to say anything, positive or negative, about the graphics in FF8 vs. Pixar. I really haven't looked.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Interesting rhetorical gymnastics. Too bad they're either misleading or flat out wrong.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
The very quote you use says "don't need", as opposed to "make sure..does not". Quite a different logical meaning there. Perhaps you would be happier with a car or television that *forced* the user to be intimate with it's underlying technology? Maybe you should have to manually set the fuel-air ratio in your Honda? Screw channels, you should have to manually tune your TV. The entire computing world is built upon the concept of functional abstraction, otherwise we'd be trying to send web pages using assembly language. Apple is trying to 'abstract' up to the user level by integrating software and hardware. Many users may not know how a computer works. So what? Perhaps, God forbid, they actually want to do other things with their lives.
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
Gee, that's funny, my cable modem dowloaded a file the other night at 180KB/s. That pipe seems pretty full to me. Perhaps my Macs are running NT without my knowledge...
Apple finally realized that to get consumers you need to get their workplace
Hardly. I don't see Sony products anywhere in my workplace, and they seem to do okay. People bought two million iMacs because they were easy to use and looked cool (at least to their eyes), while the computers at work were neither. Frankly, I'd be less likely to buy the same product I see at work (phone, VCR, company car) because I know PHBs only care about buying what the herd mentality tells them they should buy, and what fits with the corporate culture. They're gonna buy the white Ford Taurus GL, not the SHO, and surely not a Beetle/Audi TT/Ferrari/anything mildy interesting. As people see how clueless some IT departments are, they'll come to the same conclusion about computers.
Not only can their product not work at that level, but they have no interest in developing one that can (MS at least used the OS/2 code they had written for IBM to make NT)
So the world needs another kernel? Avie Tevanian did a lot of work on what became the Mach kernel. Avie worked for Steve at NeXT. Apple bought NeXT. A lot of the other technology (e.g., QuickTime) was "homegrown" at Apple. People used to complain that Apple had NIH-syndrome. Now you criticize them because they didn't reinvent the wheel? So what are we to make of companies that now support Linux? How about IBM? Is this an indictment against OS/2 and AIX, or is it just good business? How about SGI and IRIX?
So what if Jobs has his own ideology about technology? Since Apple is a vertical integrator, they will never dominate the overall market. You can take Steve's vision or leave it. If I don't like Saab's vision for the automobile, I don't buy one, but I'm not frightened by them. I'm more frightened by a company that's wants to have a piece of everything. Now who could that be?
His products sell, his products' have inspired all of consumer electronics, over 90% of iMac owners are on the internet, and Apple's stock has travelled from $14 to over $70.
I'm still looking for why people are "scared" of him, why they don't "get" him, and feel compelled to bag on his goals.
Everything he's done at Apple has helped Apple and made better products and made everyone involved money.
Last time i checked, even people that use Linux would like to accomplish goals like that.
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"I know kung-fu."
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
My opinion of Jobs is finally starting to form a bit. The way he phrases his sentences is very familiar, much like the way very smart people I know phrase things, with confidence. Probably my two favorite things he said in the interview were the comment about normal vs. talented people, and woz. He said that a small group of very talented people can do much greater things than ANY number of normal people. And I think that is definately correct. He also said that the normal 'talented' label applies to usually only 30% better than normal, with twice as good being VERY good. Then he says woz was 25 times or more better than average. Wow. That's a compliment. Anyhoo... I dunno bout you guys, but I like reading these kind of stories, a bit of the history of computing, a bit of its future.
abrams's advice: when eating an elephant, take one bite at a time.
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Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
Too bad Gil killed Newton.. Then we would have two good PDA devices. I wish it never died.
I believe the Newton was "Steved," not Gil-ed. I bought an eMate about a month before Jobs came in and shut down the Newtons, but luckily, I haven't had a single problem with it.
In fact, I use it every day to take notes on in my big lecture classes at Penn State. It works like a charm, and I'd highly reccomend it to any other college students. The fact that it's battery life is between 12 and 15 hours is the greatest thing about it.
Both times? :)
I'm just saying no one (read: major movie studios) seems to think there is a market for really cool animated movies (I'm thinking like HBO's Spawn, i.e. rated R). Because of the Disney factor everyone here thinks animation means cute, fuzzy, and happy. Animation techniques have gotten so amazing I just wish someone would make a Star Wars/Hobbitt type epic. That's what my hope for the FF movie is.
And I know Pixar ain't gonna make it.
+&x
You'll notice that when he described his daily routine (waking up, logging on, eating breakfast with his kids, etc...) he didn't use the "royal we", and appropriately so.
If you or I were answering the same questions, I doubt we'd use language that was much different.
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Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
I think a few points should be made about what Jobs didn't say. First off, he never mentioned NextStep - except for once as an aside.
Second, he didn't say a thing about Apple Enterprise.
I think it's very telling. Jobs is planning on selling consumer black-boxes, he's made that fairly clear. I don't think he can make it any clearer than he doesn't want to sell to corporate America. Odd, that -- his return to Apple was on the coat-tails of NEXT Software, which is now Apple Enterprise, which he didn't mention once in his interview...
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
I remember a TV special a while back where Pixar was explaining their choice in computers. It had nothing to do with price/performance, but rather performance/cubic foot... They liked the suns because they were so small they could stack tons and tons of them in a relatively small area and get much more processing power than they could by trying to fit Onyx's or anything else into that area.
I think that shows that there are so many other factors to consider when you're in need of processing power... Yeah alphas are cheap, but whose going to sell you 400 quad alpha systems and ships them standard in low profile enclosures?
anyone involved in the real world can tell you that linux/xeon is the only way to go for rendring and 3d animation/modeling.
You're just crazy! For one, so many studios and/or software companies would need to report their solutions to Linux. For two Xeon is a bum when it comes to the highend... Yeah, it's 25% faster than PIII's, but compared to Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PA-RISC, PowerPC, it's the bottom of the barrell so far as floating point performance goes... and that's what you need for rendering... lots of it...
While it's not going to win any awards for bangs-for-bucks, Pixar are using a bunch of nice Sun hardware for their render-farm - 120 E4500s and 4.5 terabytes of disc storage, totaling 1680 CPUs. List price has lots of zeros.... Sun press release.
Plus, CGI sophistication is only a part of good moviemaking... "Roughnecks" may have phenomenal CGI but if the story sucks, the movie sucks IMHO.
The reason "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" were both such excellent movies is because they had excellently-written storylines, exceptional voice talent, etc. The great accomplishment of the CGI is that you forgot that it was CGI.
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Think Green... Burn only 100% recycled dinosaurs in you car.
Because of Steve-o many killer products devloped or ripped-off) have been brought to market: -the mouse -the networked laser printer -expansion slots (Apple II)
WARNING! NITPICK AHEAD!
The Apple was hardly the first computer (even personal computer) with expansion slots. There were two major camps in the 8-bit computing world. Those who centered their designs around the 6502, and those who centered their designs around the 8080/Z80. Most of the early 8080/Z80 designs used something called the S-100 bus. It was a 100-pin bus and most of the designs had the CPU as just another card. You could swap everything including the processor. Not only that, but it was a broadcast bus so you didn't have this "slot address" crap you had with the Apple ][ bus.
The Apple did a lot, and I still think Visicalc was one of the finest pieces of software writing of all time (all that functionality squeezed out of an inferior processor running in some tight memory limits, and to this day Excel doesn't give you that much more functionality), but there were much more sophisitcated architectures out there.
They didn't win the marketing war, though.
As I said, a nitpick. BTW, I was moving a really old couch out of my parent's basement and I found a computer hobbyist catalog from 1976 in there. How would you like to buy an S-100 bus 32k (that's "k") static memory card for $835?
That's what these things cost assembled. No wonder my Dad and I wire-wrapped our first computer...
This is just the usual clueless Apple bashing. He even admits himself to almost never having used macs. But of course he considers himself an expert anyway!
:-).
The only technical claim, about Mac TCP/IP speed, has been shown to be wrong by a factor 100 or so by several other posters.
The claim that MacOS uses co-operative multi-tasking beacuse of some idelogical decision is absurd. What ideology, exactly, would that be? In reality preemptive multitasking just cannot be retrofitted into MacOS, and Apple has been working hard (if not always successfully...) for almost 10 years to replace it.
The claim that Apple tries to make their products hard to understand is too silly to comment on.
If the BSD comment is meant to mean anything, I can't decipher what it is (but I'm sure it is wrong
The only thing sadder that techno macho posturing from people who don't actually know what they're talking about, is probably those who moderate it up as "Insightful".
Bah!
run, do not walk, to your software archive, pull that old 68k Mac out from mothballs, load up A/UX 3.0 ..... you mean you want it like that? but you HAVE it like that already (ok so it's 10 years old and only runs on 68k macs - porting's easy these days - if they wanted A/UX on PPCs it would have happened in 6 months) .... it's just that Apple threw it away and now seem to want to do it again from scratch .... oh well
obApple: They're actually doing really well, despite the G4 not shipping in the quantities they need it to. (Personally I couldn't care less about bugs that only appear over the rated speed. There's nothing new about chips running into problems over the rated speed...) The new iMacs are going to sell amazingly well, and iBooks and G4s are getting into the channels. Jobs is not an especially great guy, in fact he's a creep. The difference between Steve and Bill is merely that Steve is an egomaniac and Bill's a megalomaniac. I wonder if they've ever been seen together irl... hm...
But it's undeniable that Steve has been doing good stuff for Apple for the past couple years. This doesn't necessarily translate as good stuff for the consumers, esp those of us who had clones and/or used Linux or BeOS. But even then there's still a need for a strong Apple as a foundation. So I'm cool with Steve running the show. He just can't slack off, with his helicopter and handicapped parking spot.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
No contest. Steve hands down. One of the major problems with linux, is that it does not have a salesperson. Linus will put the audience to sleep, and Eric is worse than Mussolini crossing his arms on the pulpet. Imagine when Apple releases MacOS X client, AND IT WORKS. Unix with the MacOS look and feel? Yikes! Oh boy, seems to make linux look pretty ugly, but hey its open. Question is, who cares about that. Yea, yea I know. Linux this...linux that. Ouch boys, I just bought a iMac, DV special edition. Perfect for my undersized Manhattan studio.
nice to hear Apple is still innovating - for a while there I thought Microsoft® was going to run out of new ideas to copy.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Their TCP/IP stack can't handle ftping at more that 10KB/s on a 10BaseT connection to the server that is 20 feet away...
This is just silly. I used to routinely approach 500 k/s with Anarchie as far back as System 7.5. At home now Anarchie can completely saturate my cable-modem connection in both directions. Your exaggerations weaken your argument.
Um, I'm a big fan of Apple and the Mac, but I have to step in and correct you here.
The mouse was developed a long, long time ago. Jef Raskin, IIRC brought it and most of the GUI stuff to Apple (wish I had my copy of Infinite Loop handy) and managed to get Steve happy with it. After Steve's baby, the Apple III died. And then after Steve's next baby the Lisa (computer) died. Then Steve kicked Raskin out. He's not a pleasant guy. A couple IBM PC programs used mice before the Mac came along as well, but were never popular.
Steve and most of Apple fought the Laser Printer tooth and nail. It _barely_ got approved, along with support for Aldus PageMaker and Adobe Postscript, which turned out to save the Mac from certain death in the 85-88 timeframe. DTP is still the strongest Mac market. I know. I do DTP.
Expansion slots were used on a bunch of different computers before the Apple II. (see someone else's post for details)
He had nothing to do with 24bit video on Macs (first started appearing after the MacII came along, first on the mb when the Quadras appeared both of which happened after he was gone). Steve liked black and white, and the NeXT didn't go color for a really long time because of this.
Steve is not really a visionary at all. All of this stuff was either pushed on him, approved by other people in spite of him, or had absolutely nothing to do with Steve.
(in fact, there's a really funny story about the 3.5" floppy drive in the early Mac days)
What Steve's good at is taking credit and marketing well. He is dangerous to a company in other capacities. Read "The NeXT Big Thing" and be amazed that NeXT did not spontaneously combust under his leadership, and lack therof. He's been good for Apple this time around, but I'd be wary of relying on him too much.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
They opensourced their Quicktime server which is also fairly impressive. Of course IBM is doing more to help Linux though, I mean 90% of Linux computers are running on Intel machines, thus IBM and Intel have more to gain right now. If MkLinux or Linux/PPC get more popular and more mainstream I think that there will be more support from Apple.
The important thing with Apple's Linux support though is that maybe one day we will see off the shelf iMac/Linux boxes. Sure IBM is supporting it in the background, but why can't I go to CompUSA and get an IBM with Linux on it. That would do more for the popularity of Linux than probably anything before. I think the recent M$ Linux Myths page solidifies this, they name several large companies that use NT, but Intel didn't step up and say, "Hey, when we debuted our 64Bit Merced chip it was running Linux, NOT NT." Sony didn't step up and say, "Hey, our development environment, A computer three times more powerful than the Pentium III and immensely more powerful graphically than anything out now, is running Linux, NOT NT" or Tivo didn't say "We chose Linux over CE", Nokia didn't either. So the support is there but it is not mainstream support. I don't have a Mac so I don't know the difference between MkLinux and LinuxPPC (are they even different projects?) but for Apple to help open up a whole new platform to Linux is not to go unnoticed.
Of course you also have to consider Darwin, Apple's new open source OS based on Mac OS X. Does anybody know anything about this? I'd say that could be a major contributer to the open source movement. Even if it isn't any good, I don't see Microsoft releasing any open source operating systems. And although I'm not a lawyer and have a hard time reading licensing agreements the Apple Public License seems to be fairly open, unlike the Sun public License. If I am wrong please correct me, but it seems as though they are saying if you make changes for internal use only then you don't have to release your code but if you "deploy" the software than you have to release your code. Sounds kinda GPLish to me. So maybe they aren't helping Linux greatly per se, but they are helping the open source movement become more mainstream. And regardless of what we think, for a company that is in the business of making money that is pretty impressive.
I think it is telling that Apple views its mission to make sure that the common user does not understand "the black box"
What's more important in the consumer market? That the consumer can use the product to reach an end or that the consumer knows exactly what internal processes achieve the end? Very few people could tell you how their CD player or VCR works--but they can easily use them to reach their. You shouldn't need to muck around, resolving driver conflicts, trying to get Linux to run with your video card, etc.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?