Ex-Apple CEO Steve Jobs Has Died

ABC News ^ | October 1, 2011 | Ned Potter

[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.

[hedgetrimmer]

I quote Steve Wozniak and you say I’m totally wrong. Woz is the inventor of the original Apple duo, and he is still inventing.

Maybe you should attack him, not me.

You have personal knowledge about what?

If you’re under NDA to Apple on one of their projects and you’re telling me Apple doesn’t hire smart people and the team doesn’t contribute anything to the usability and substance of the product, LOL then why are they paying you?

I don’t think you should make Steve Jobs the Princess Diana of the 21st century. He was a man, he did things, he passed and his family and friends mourn him. But he did NOTHING by himself, and you have to credit the very very bright, very very hard working people at Apple,(maybe excluding yourself) for his success. That’s all. The company isn’t going to fold up and blow away now that he is gone. There are still engineers and innovators at the company. That’s all.

[TheThirdRuffian]

“Somehow I am thinking that the new I Phone “S”, may now have a meaning. “S” for Steve.”

Actually, Jobs was a huge Porsche fan, and specifically modelled his company and marketing after Porsche -— niche product, high end, little compromise, form follows function — cultivate a very loyal core fan base.

Porsche traditionally uses “S” to denote the middle-superior model -— e.g., Carrera S, mid-way prior to a new model.

Hence the iPhone 4S

(I saw this interview with Jobs back in the 80s when he talked about how he modeled the whole thing after Porsche.)

[Lexinom]

Yes, Wozniak did do most of the real work. I respect Jobs and share in consoling over his loss, but you are so right to acknowledge Steve Wozniak as the man who truly built Apple Computer. In short, Jobs was the talker, but Woz was the doer.

Woz related how he engineered and built the Disk II controller - which gave us floppy disks instead of SLOW cassette tapes as a convenient storage medium - over just a couple of weeks.

I remember him relating how utterly embarrassed by the audacious amounts Jobs was asking when he and Jobs approached Commodore executives in the late 70s for funding.

Just a couple of guys with a dream who did not let their limitations hinder them.

That was the Apple Computer that I loved and missed, the Apple that Jobs and Woz built that will remain in my heart forever.

[hedgetrimmer]

Good post.

[TheDailyChange]

Steve Jobs = American Exceptionalism at it’s best!!

[NVDave]

Close, but not quite. They invented the trackball.

And it really wasn’t sized for desktop use, being that “desktop” computers were still 20+ years away...

here’s a pic of the invention:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/DATAR_trackball.jpg

Yes, that’s a bowling ball in the middle of all that.

[NVDave]

More to the point - there had to be a way to do it without floating point.

With the speed of today’s chips, people forget that most all desktop CPU’s back in that day were missing two things we now take for granted: FPU’s and MMU’s.

FPU’s were huge expenditures of silicon gates in those days, back when the max # of gates you could get on a chip was minute compared to today. So FPU’s were often outboard chips. For the 68000, there wasn’t a FPU available. The industry had to wait until the 68020, then FPU was the 68881.

The solution to the RoundRect problem was elegant and non-obvious to people trained to think purely in math terms, where a square root would be available in floating point math. The first time I disassembled the code, I didn’t know of the little math trick, and I was staring at the code, wondering “WTF?” Took me a whole lot of desk emulation to prove to myself it worked. Then the “ah-ha” moment hit and I saw the light. There were a lot of little things like that in the early Mac code where you’d say “Why isn’t it done XYZ way?” where “XYZ” often was what was taught in CS or EE classes on mainframes or super-mini’s of that day.

With only 128K of memory (and some of that taken up by the screen buffer and IO area) and no FP math, folks had to get very clever.

[Swordmaker]

Jobs hired very smart people. They did the work. Jobs gets the glory because he was the one behind the microphone demoing the product at the introduction. . . (and the rest of your tripe)

You really do not know what you are talking through your hat about. I suggest you read the New York Times' Obituary about some of that... about Steve Jobs' actual hands on approach to development... including that blue box he and Steve Wozniak built and sold before Apple. Yes, Woz built the Apple I, but he and Jobs designed and built the Apple II... But Steve Wozniak LEFT Apple in 1985, so he knows nothing about what happened internally after that except grapevine stuff. He wasn't there. So quoting Woz as evidence of what happened is third hand, hearsay. Listen to what people who WORKED there say... you've been told several times on here, yet you keep repeating the tripe.

[Aqua225]

Nice way to twist my words.

More than one project. A decade of them.

The smart people he hires are important. I never claimed he wrote the millions of lines of code in MacOSX, though he probably did write several 100,000 of them, as he and just a handful of engineers at NeXT wrote OSX (or it’s precursor if you want to be technical about it).

But when it came to the vision of what the product had to be, he set those goals.

You don’t think he wrote down many of his ideas for the company to continue to pursue? Apple was his project (and Wozniak’s), and without his vision, Apple would have died on the vine -— look at what the PepsiCo CEO did to them before Jobs came back and turned the company into the most valuable company in the world.

One can only hope that the team he left behind to be his brain in his absence can live up to his level. Especially Apple investors.

You are either dense or a troll, which is it?

[Aqua225]

Hedgetrimmer is a troll, and I admit I am feeding him.

He is not even a classy troll, and he just twists our words to his liking anyway. He knows exactly what we mean, he just wants to split hairs.

Let’s just leave him to his trolling. Trolls die without food.

[Swordmaker]

I remember him relating how utterly embarrassed by the audacious amounts Jobs was asking when he and Jobs approached Commodore executives in the late 70s for funding.

OH? Here is what Steve Wozniak actually said about the Commodore request from the interview:

"We knew we'd sell 1,000 a month, but we couldn't afford to build them. So we sought money, and one of the first places we went to was Commodore. To the guy who had been the product marketing manager for the 6502 microprocessor that I had chosen. I had actually bought them at a show in San Francisco over the counter for $20 bills. He and his wife would hand them to us at the table. That's how we bought our first microprocessors that became the Apple I and Apple II, from this guy Chuck Peddle. He now was moving to Commodore to do a computer. We said, "We've got to show him the Apple II."

So we brought him by the garage. I really respected the guy; he designed the microprocessor that I had chosen. He came to the garage and looked at the Apple II, and I put it through all its specs of bringing up quick patterns on the screen and scrolling text and playing games—all the things I'd done on it. He looked at it and didn't say too much. I figured he'd be more impressed. We later heard that Commodore turned it down.

We went in and spoke one day to Commodore's head of Engineering, Andre Sousan, and Andre told us that his boss who ran Commodore, Jack Tramiel, had basically brought in Chuck Peddle and Chuck had talked him into "No, you don't want to put all these exotic things like color into it." The truth is, he didn't know how to. No one knew how to do color cheap. There were boards out for small computers. Cromemco had a color system. You buy two boards for your Altair; each of those had more chips than the Apple II on it. So, just to add color, that's what it was like for most people. And Chuck Peddle said, "You should do it cheap. We should just have black and white; we should have the cheapest keyboard you can imagine, the smallest screen, and just keep the costs way down." They wanted to make it cheap enough to be affordable. The funny thing is that the Apple II had so few parts, it was cheaper to build and still was much more of a computer. We didn't have to include a TV set, because we assumed everyone had their own.

Livingston: Why didn't Commodore want it?

Wozniak: Good question. Andre Sousan very soon after (within weeks) left Commodore and came to Apple saying that he felt we had the right product and he wanted to be with us. They just missed the boat. I think it was that Chuck Peddle knew what he could design, but he knew that he couldn't design what the Apple II was. They should have bought it. They would have had a real good deal cheap. After that, we were still seeking money. I wasn't really seeking the money, Steve Jobs was. I mean, I almost couldn't have cared less. If I could show it off at the club and get credit for having a great computer design in my life, that's what I wanted." — Founders at work

So Steve never made a request for a specific amount of money, never even made a pitch to Commodore for money. The just showed the Apple II to the designer of the 6502 and had him present it to Commodore. Tramiel turned it down because his design engineer said it was too expensive to make... with color. Instead they got in touch with Mike Markkula, who invested $250,000 to make the first 1000 Apple IIs.

[hedgetrimmer]

But Steve Wozniak LEFT Apple in 1985, and Steve Jobs was fired!

[hedgetrimmer]

You are either dense or a troll, which is it?

Classic liberal Alinsky method.

[Swordmaker]

But Steve Wozniak LEFT Apple in 1985, and Steve Jobs was fired!

No, Steve resigned. He was stripped of authority, but not fired. He left on his own. Your grasp of the history is very weak... and you confabulate it into falseness.

[Swordmaker]

...Steve Jobs was fired!

Not quite. He chose to leave.

[hedgetrimmer]

You already said that.

So how to fire a company founder in the Silicon Valley? It’s better for them to ‘resign’ than to have to give reason for cause of the firing and put up with rebellion from the employees who sided with Jobs. So you take away everything but an office— in siberia— and a phone so they can use the time to look for their next gig. They find one and ‘resign’.

Besides that, John Sculley has publicly stated he fired Jobs, and he also stated that he wrote the resignation letter. You don’t really know much about how companies like this work, do you?

[motivated]

So sad, all that money and talent - but cancer doesn’t care.

[ravager]

That story is nearly forty years old now. Today Apple has gone WAY AHEAD in terms of cutting edge technology, whereas Xerox is still struggling with document management and printing solutions. As for your comment...... “Xerox had developed much of what we think of coming from Apple”. Except for the initial GUI concept in the 70s, NOTHING that came out of Apple was developed by Xerox. Its a good things Jobs never worked for Xerox, he would have suffocated ad died long ago.

[ravager]

He didn't just market thing. The he identified the right ideas and combined them into a world class concepts. Not all inventors are able to come up with the right solution or a brilliant concept even though they may be technical geniuses. A large number of so-called inventions never end up anywhere because of a number of reasons ranging from high cost to impracticality. The names that you mentioned as “inventors” are inventors because of Jobs. And that is why he is a GENIUS.