VANITY: My Journey Through the Computer Age, and The Passing of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has been the public face of the technology landscape for me for much of my adult life. These are my thoughts on his impact, not only on me, but on the technology we all use.

He was a visionary. That vision will be missed.
My husband and I met him in the lateish ‘70s when he was pitching his idea for a personal computer. The first electronic fair event we ever attended, the booth gift was a McIntosh apple. (I type this on my Mac lap top) Thanks Steve.

This is the absolute best, by far, vanity I have ever read on Free Republic.

My journey was different, but I remember the evolution of Apple products much like you do.

A worthy send off to a great man.

Thanks Steve!

I’m curious to know why the Left gives a pass to Jobs

He was super rich
His company was highly valued
He tried to pay as little of “his fair share” of taxes
He sent A LOT of jobs overseas
He employed tens of thousands in Chinese modern day “sweatshops” to make his products for the corrupt upper classes who could afford them.
He never supported unions in his company
His suppliers never would support unions

What makes Jobs different from the Chairman of Exxon-Mobile, who of course, they hate?

Great! You ought to submit it for print publication somewhere.

Your father’s eyes in the photo on your home page, tell me so much about him, and about you.

Thank you, I envy you.

Just for your info, and apropos of nothing, but something to ponder, PGR is an acronym that stands for the name of a collective farm in a Communist country.

Just for your info, and apropos of nothing, but something to ponder, PGR is an acronym that stands for the name of a collective farm in a Communist country.

Interesting - which one? I didn't know collective farms still existed!

I once played high-school baseball in our town (named Kenyon), and our team was sponsored by the local police department. The initials on our uniform were "KPD"

I wore my jersey a few times when travelling with a group of visiting exchange students from Germany. Only at the end of their visit did they tell me they thought it meant "Kommunist Partie Deutschland"

What a beautiful story - thank you for sharing your journey. My favorite part?

I found my music again.

Brought a tear to my eye!

This is the absolute best, by far, vanity I have ever read on Free Republic.

I second that emotion, well, that I've read since I found FR in 2004.

Yes. Steve Jobs has profoundly impacted and brought great joy to many of our lives—especially he brought great relief to us old PC converts and joggers :-D. RIP Steve!!! and thank you.

In 1988 collective farms still existed. I had to look it up, and I was wrong in my original assertion. There were two types of farms in the Communist world: collective farms and state farms, called in the Soviet Union where the model originated kolchoz, and sovchoz, respectively. How their workings differed, I'm not sure, since many of the distinctions of the organizational structurse under Communism were bogus, when everything was in one way or another controlled by the almighty (and highly corrupt) Party.

Anyway, PGR was in Poland a state farm and the acronym stood for Państwowe Gospodarstwo Rolne, which means (I think) State Agrarian Farm.

This is my techno-story. And I suspect there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who have traveled that same road that I have, and arrived at the same kind of destination. That in itself is not all that remarkable, it's wonderful that so many have done so.

Great post. Have been there since the beginning. I have also pushed technology and voided many warranties. I can only marvel now at how far we have come since my childhood. From a rotary phone to the iPhone. RIP Steve Jobs.

BUMP for a great article.

Steve Jobs on the importance of rounded rectangles:

Round Rects Are Everywhere!

Author: Andy Hertzfeld

Date: May 1981

Characters: Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson

Topics: Software Design, Inspiration, QuickDraw

Summary: Steve inspires Bill by pointing out something about the real world

Revision: most recent of 8

ill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.

Bill had added new code to QuickDraw (which was still called LisaGraf at this point) to draw circles and ovals very quickly. That was a bit hard to do on the Macintosh, since the math for circles usually involved taking square roots, and the 68000 processor in the Lisa and Macintosh didn't support floating point operations. But Bill had come up with a clever way to do the circle calculation that only used addition and subtraction, not even multiplication or division, which the 68000 could do, but was kind of slow at.

Bill's technique used the fact the sum of a sequence of odd numbers is always the next perfect square (For example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16, etc). So he could figure out when to bump the dependent coordinate value by iterating in a loop until a threshold was exceeded. This allowed QuickDraw to draw ovals very quickly.

Bill fired up his demo and it quickly filled the Lisa screen with randomly-sized ovals, faster than you thought was possible. But something was bothering Steve Jobs. "Well, circles and ovals are good, but how about drawing rectangles with rounded corners? Can we do that now, too?"

"No, there's no way to do that. In fact it would be really hard to do, and I don't think we really need it". I think Bill was a little miffed that Steve wasn't raving over the fast ovals and still wanted more.

Steve suddenly got more intense. "Rectangles with rounded corners are everywhere! Just look around this room!". And sure enough, there were lots of them, like the whiteboard and some of the desks and tables. Then he pointed out the window. "And look outside, there's even more, practically everywhere you look!". He even persuaded Bill to take a quick walk around the block with him, pointing out every rectangle with rounded corners that he could find.

When Steve and Bill passed a no-parking sign with rounded corners, it did the trick. "OK, I give up", Bill pleaded. "I'll see if it's as hard as I thought." He went back home to work on it.

Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles. When he added the code to LisaGraf, he named the new primitive "RoundRects". Over the next few months, roundrects worked their way into various parts of the user interface, and soon became indispensable.

The details matter ... and Steve knew how to get them out of his engineers.

Jobs, Gates, and I have a couple things in common...besides making our respective living in the computer industry for years, we were all born in the same year (in fact, Gates and I share the exact same date/year of birth). It’s been a fun ride watching all the changes. I entered the industry in 1984 upon leaving my AF pilot days behind me. This “second career” now spans over 27 years; I’m currently in the supercomputing business, playing around with and marketing to the owners/users of the most powerful systems on the planet...literally.

Jobs was one of those guys that always just made you shake your head. He could rip off an idea and make it his own (the entire Apple interface; a direct rip off from Xerox), but he’d get furious with Gates for ostensibly ripping HIM off (e.g. Windows)...yet he was a bloody genius when it came to understanding human interfaces.

As you so accurately portrayed, it’s the end user interface that is so critical to any technology. Ask any software developer, and they’ll tell you that the code takes 20% of their time in developing an application...the user interface takes about 80% (or at least that was the case for years; this day and age, with much more advanced s/w development tools, those percentages may well have shifted).

The point, and one you made so well, is that Jobs made high end technology VERY accessible in ways that Microsoft is still struggling to achieve decades later. Windows 7 is actually terrific, but MS still find themselves chasing Jobs’ visions for computers, OS’s, smart phone interfaces, etc.

Rest in peace, indeed, Steve Jobs. You plowed a lot of ground for us in your lifetime.

Beautiful post. I am sad and will miss him.

To my knowledge I’ve never operated anything Apple/Mac/i*. But I recongnize Steve Jobs’ contribution to our modern technical society. That was a good article. Thank you.

Thanks for the memories and a great story. As a non Apple user, you have increased my interest in the I phone.

A Freeper’s personal commentary on the passing of Steve Jobs. . .

Mr. Jobs was a pioneer in the tech area.

Author:	Andy Hertzfeld
Date:	May 1981
Characters:	Steve Jobs, Bill Atkinson
Topics:	Software Design, Inspiration, QuickDraw
Summary:	Steve inspires Bill by pointing out something about the real world
Revision:	most recent of 8