Steve Jobs passes away

[cnelson566]

Just thought i'd bring this up. Love or hate Apple,the man was a missionary.

[Nessie]

Although the keyboard I'm typing on now is attached to a PC, the work of Steve Jobs seriously affected me since I have worked primarily with Macs for around 20 years now.

The place I quit last June actually threw a Mac out over the winter. They thought of selling it but it didn't have Pentium. I got my hand out before it hit the dumpster.

Maybe I should light a candle the next time I boot that computer up.

Nessie

[Mynock]

Jobs basically invented the personal computer. Wheather you're an Apple fanboy or loyal Windows user we wouldn't be here if not for him and Wozniak.
RIP Steve....your brilliance will be missed.

[Kookus]

Respectfully: No, he didn't, and yes, we would. Jobs was a marketing genius and proved that he was a savvy businessman, but Woz is the engineer... and even he cannot honestly be credited with "inventing" the PC.

Sorry, but I've been hearing this rubbish all day. Jobs didn't invent the PC, the MP3 player, the smart phone, or the tablet. His product line improved upon existing designs in each category, raising the bar for future iterations of the devices, yes, but he's no Wright brother, as I've heard him compared to this day.

[tempman]

Respectfully: No, he didn't, and yes, we would. Jobs was a marketing genius and proved that he was a savvy businessman, but Woz is the engineer... and even he cannot honestly be credited with "inventing" the PC.

Sorry, but I've been hearing this rubbish all day. Jobs didn't invent the PC, the MP3 player, the smart phone, or the tablet. His product line improved upon existing designs in each category, raising the bar for future iterations of the devices, yes, but he's no Wright brother, as I've heard him compared to this day.

It's a lot more than that.
They're built on the shoulders of each other. Smartphones and Pocket PC's were awful contraptions - I had to deal with them from 1999 to 2004. In the end I gave up and went back to using a regular phone until the iPhone was introduced. And that pushed their iPod line forward, which pushed other devices forward, which created the usable tablet PC, etc etc.
Tablet PC's were completely different when they were invented. They were just laptops with swivelling screens and resistive touchscreens. They were heavy, hot and near unusable with their lack of tablet optimisations. The iPad and other competitors are the complete opposite and different machines entirely, the key was taking the "computer" part out of it and making it a new kind of system. (I don't have one as I don't need one yet)

The same can be said for MP3 players. Before iPods there wasn't much. I had a Creative Nomad and a Rio 64mb player at the time the iPod came out. If not for the iPod where would be? What other innovative MP3 players have come along since? It's completely chaos theory but we might still be using HDD-based MP3 players in this day and age if not for Apple and it's massive investment into solid state media - which brought trade prices down greatly.

I think Apple are okay (I use iMacs and Powermacs at home and work dualbooting with both Windows and OSX), I think Jobs was a great marketer more than anything else. But without Apple the current face of computing could be so much worse. He pushed everything forward, for better or worse. Without him I've no doubt we'd be several years behind. And what makes me sad is - what happens now? Who is going to push tech forward years down the line when Job's noted plans are used up?

[Duncan Edwards]

Respectfully: No, he didn't, and yes, we would. Jobs was a marketing genius and proved that he was a savvy businessman, but Woz is the engineer... and even he cannot honestly be credited with "inventing" the PC.

Sorry, but I've been hearing this rubbish all day. Jobs didn't invent the PC, the MP3 player, the smart phone, or the tablet. His product line improved upon existing designs in each category, raising the bar for future iterations of the devices, yes, but he's no Wright brother, as I've heard him compared to this day.

Thank you.

Back in the day "Woz" was the one all the real wireheads thought was cool. Jobs admitted several times to taking advantage of his hard work in the early years. Truth is though that they also had that Lennon and McCartney relationship where neither of them would have made much without the other. One example was when Jobs worked for Atari and was offered a sum for each chip he managed to strip from an Atari design and simplify production. Jobs went to Wozniak with it and when it was done Atari gave him a $5000.00 bonus for the excellent job. Jobs didn't tell him about it and gave Woz $375.00.

Woz was the guy who actually built the original Apple but it was Jobs who sold it and got a parts vendor to advance the hardware for the first fifty. They started Apple without borrowing a dime thanks to Jobs.

Jobs was a tremendous "idea man". He bought the rudiments of Pixar for ten million dollars and ended up selling it to Disney for seven and a half billion. Not only did that make him a fortune but made him the biggest stockholder at Disney as well. That's no small trick all by itself. He saw the needs, promoted them in his own way, and made a lot of people rich.

Kind of like Henry Ford he took an existing product and refined it for the masses. The world could use a few more like him.

[Mynock]

Kind of like Henry Ford he took an existing product and refined it for the masses. The world could use a few more like him.

Thanks. ^That^ is what I was trying to get at, I guess my choice of words was a little overboard.

[Woody]

Apple is credited for developing the GUI (Graphical User Interface), but in all reality, XEROX was the company who invented it. Xerox didn't believe it was practical/ sellable, and put it on a storage shelf. Jobs happened to be walking through the storage room, saw it, and stole the idea.

Between Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, they were all thieves in one way or another. IBM paid Gates to develop PC-DOS for the IBM PC, and since IBM didn't have a non-disclosure agreement with Gates, Gates superficially altered the work and sold it to all of IBM's competitors as MS-DOS. Wozniak developed a blue-box tone generator specifically used to make free phone calls on pay phones.

[Duncan Edwards]

Apple is credited for developing the GUI (Graphical User Interface), but in all reality, XEROX was the company who invented it. Xerox didn't believe it was practical/ sellable, and put it on a storage shelf. Jobs happened to be walking through the storage room, saw it, and stole the idea.

Between Gates, Jobs and Wozniak, they were all thieves in one way or another. IBM paid Gates to develop PC-DOS for the IBM PC, and since IBM didn't have a non-disclosure agreement with Gates, Gates superficially altered the work and sold it to all of IBM's competitors as MS-DOS. Wozniak developed a blue-box tone generator specifically used to make free phone calls on pay phones.

As has been mentioned they all built on what went before them. Any great inventor, creator, idea man, will say as much.

Xerox was really the biggest loser in all of this. At PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center) they created the GUI, UNIX, ethernet networking, the mouse, lots of neat things. They capitalized on none of it because they believed that being in the document business was all about making paper copies and little else. Jobs saw a lot of this stuff when he worked part time there as a kid. He was the one who actually put a lot of that into use and sold it to the public. First he tried it with the Apple Lisa, a Mac predecessor named for his daughter. I remember when it was introduced rather quietly and died a quick death. Ten thousand or so of the remaining machines were put in a landfill and bulldozed. Then came the Macintosh with the spectacular, one time only, intro during the Superbowl in 1984.

Apple 1984 Superbowl Commercial

That's supermodel Linda Evangelista in the Hooter's uniform throwing that hammer.

[Billie Bonce]

Xerox was really the biggest loser in all of this.

I always tell my students about inventions of Xerox.

By the way, not just simple GUI - they experimented with touch screen, too! And they had the reason. They had to design complicated computer-controlled machines, but the people who were supposed to run those machines weren't computer guys willing to type long command lines with multiple parameters.

The next step was to realize that all that stuff was suitable not only for "non-computer guys running complicated machines" but for housewives, too

I have a deep respect for Steve Jobs. He was one of those who changed our world.

(But, to be honest, anything from Apple is too expensive in our part of the world. Those are luxury items, mostly for "rich bitches". Great designs, no doubt...)