Posted on 10/05/2011 4:50:17 PM PDT by Kaslin
Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple's iPhone, iPad, iPod, iMac and iTunes, has died in California. Jobs was 56.
His death was reported by The Associated Press, citing Apple.
Jobs co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 and, with his childhood friend Steve Wozniak, marketed what was considered the world's first personal computer, the Apple II.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
This hurts. One of the greatest capitalists and businessmen of all time.
God bless you, Steve.
I have a manager, but I probably talk to him once in a blue moon, I mainly deal with my users, and project managers
He was just a plain genius, no question about it.
“While I am no Apple fan by any stretch of the imagination, all I can say is this. Risk and innovation gave us Apple. Hope and change gave us Solyndra. Steve Jobs had a radical, revolutionary view of technology that has literally set the standard for this century.”
We see these protestors with iphones and cups of Starbucks lattes while bashing all these corporations. Maybe they will finally appreciate these ‘greedy’ corporations.
I am glad he was another like many I know that came close to the knife. I hope he knew the Lord. The best that can be said about him was he was a failure in this sense: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/275528/steve-jobs-america-s-greatest-failure-nick-schulz and his mom failed at motherhood but made the right choice for all of us when she chose life: http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conserving-freedom/2011/sep/18/abortion-adoption-and-steve-jobs/
Power Book 150, loved it for many years, SE, etc.
Thank you, Steve. RIP.
As far as I’ve read, Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventor in the mold of Thomas Edison, and I hadn’t heard of him being a noted “engineer”, hardware or software, until I saw this thread, but he was a brilliant conceptualizer, that was his greatest strength, an idea man, and yes, a marketer of those ideas, and don’t let the fanatical fanboys here call you a “hater”. Pathetic and insecure seekers of superiority when a great man dies.
RIP.
I’m sorry, but you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
There were teams of people at Apple conducting usability studies and determining how to better the products. This happened whether Jobs was CEO of the company or not.
There were many years and many products put out that established Apple computer as a leader in personal computing and Jobs wasn’t even at the company when that happened.
Like I said, he hung out with smart people, and Apple kept hiring them, even when Jobs was no longer with the company.
Nah. That wasn’t the problem. The size of the hardware didn’t stop Sun, HP, SGI or any of the other workstation outfits from selling their early workstations. Neither did price, since workstations with Unix were selling in the same ballpark as the D-machines in the mid-to-late 80’s.
The problem with Xerox’s computers is that they didn’t know how to market what they had. They didn’t know how to turn all their neat-o technology into a *product*.
Speed:
The CPU in the D-machines was faster than the 68K’s of that era - they were using bit-slice AMD chips (29xx family), and there were other machines out there making a nice market for themselves based on those chips. eg, the Tektronics 4052:
http://www.electronixandmore.com/articles/teksystem.html
The DG Nova was based on four AMD 2901’s.
If you’re not familiar with bit-sliced CPU’s in that day, go noodle around a bit. They were faster than the microprocessors of the day - by a large margin.
The problem for Xerox was that they didn’t know how to make a product. I know this because in the early 90’s, my girlfriend (later wife) worked “down the hill” from PARC at XSoft, and their job was to “integrate” PARC technology into products. Xerox management had *no* clue how to do this. PARC knew how to invent, they didn’t know how to create a product, much less support it. XSoft had this muddled mission, and no one in ‘rox management wanted to believe that some of their stuff had to be re-written or re-spun.
In the end, they ended up doing a deal with Sun for hardware, and porting Mesa and their GUI into C/Unix, with much grumbling from the old hands at Xerox, but they got it done... and then Xerox management ceased pushing the project and it went nowhere.
Oh, yes - let’s have a little diversion here about Mesa. Ever hear of “modular programming?” Modula, Modula-2, Oberon and other languages that came out of that era?
Ripped off from Xerox’s Mesa language. Modula would NEVER had gotten anywhere if Xerox had released Mesa. Pascal would have been dead, and we might not be infected with C++ as a system programming language if Mesa had been published.
But I digress.
To give you an example of how inept things were: I was asked (informally) if I would come over and debug a network problem for them. They had a problem getting their system to talk across LAPB to a Wang VS system. I knew LAPB, X.25, Wang VS and Unix systems. Boy, how convenient that one of their Unix gurus was dating me, right? A free dinner and a smooch were in it for me if I would come over and lend an ear.
Well, I get over to ‘rox, we start making traces of the packets flying back and forth on the serial line... and I see what looks like a state machine error on the Xerox side. OK, let’s pull up the source to the LAPB module and see what the state machine looks like.
I said, “let’s bring up the source and have a look. I need a Mesa hacker to translate for me...”
This started a sequence of events that made me glad I wasn’t going to be the one reporting to management.
I got there right after I was done with my regular day across the valley. Five hours and several senior people later, (NB, I still had not gotten dinner, much less the smooch) it was determined that they had lost the source deck for their LAPB state machine, and all we had was the object deck that was being run in simulation on the Suns.
OK, so what do you tell the customer at that point? Good thing *I* wasn’t working there and I could just slink away after seeing their people tell their management “Uh, we have a problem.... the source is missing.” (actually, the source was *gone*, but “missing” sounds so much less drastic to management...). I was simply a friend, someone from the valley who driften in and out of the place as a visitor. Kept my mouth shut and reminded myself that we should make sure to archive every CVS repository of a release before it went out the door - and keep a copy of the archive(s) off-site.
I don’t know if they ever found the source, or what they told the customer.
That’s why Xerox never went anywhere.
“Perhaps you should ask him if Jobs only marketed it! And he’ll tell you Steve was a smart engineer too, and contributed a lot to it’s design.”
He was such a good marketer because he personally was involved in so many of the details. You can’t effectively sell something that isn’t a part of you.
Gone too soon, in my humble opinion. 
I think your on to something... Iphone 4S is it called? This maybe translates to Iphone for Steve. Instead of naming it the Iphone 5, naming it the 4S is pretty cool. Could be a dedication to Mr. Jobs
I learned about this when I stepped into the Apple Store this afternoon, which opened here recently, my first time in an Apple store (I’m thinking of buying an iPod.) His face graced some screens, two dates below it “1955-2011, and I knew. I was particularly encouraged to see a couple of old guy employees there in addition to the torn jeans and tattooed youngsters, all of them wearing blue T shirts. I stepped out and took a photo of the large Apple logo up high above the doorway, and above the roof a partly cloudy sky with a pale moon, which I posted on FB when I came home.
And that problem would be you. So many people who are in the anti-Apple camp, seek to tear down Steve Jobs on the day he died. That is low. Steve Jobs is not just a marketing guy. But you people keep promoting that lie. He was very technically savvy. He knew and breathed electronics. Why can’t you accept that? I have worked with computers since the early 1960s. I started working with Apple computers in 1977. And I followed a lot of what Steve Jobs did, and what he accomplished. He was a good engineer, and was very creative. He did indeed create. Not just sell, but create.
Id have to classify Steve Jobs as an engineer. I’ve been working as an engineer for a mere 13 years now. You need that vision Jobs had to create successful products. Engineering isn’t all about knowing details of VHDL/Verilog or C ... its about realizing ideas playing the cards you’re dealt. Granted, he didn’t have the raw talent a Steve Wozniak had, but what he did have was vision to integrate technology into everyday life ... something few engineers have.
Now the cultist lunatics that worship him on FR for various reasons are another story :) ... those and their ilk are the reason I didn’t go crazy over Apple (aside from their stock) in the early 2000s. I recall one of those involents questioning my “skills” and trashing me since I didn’t create an iPod like device this early in my career ... those people are the ones that drive me away from Apple products ... still, last I checked, my lack of support has had no impact on that company :).
Hmmmmm....
I concede your point and that is what I was thinking of.
May he rest in peace.
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