October 6, 2011
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Steve Jobs & Apple Computers
Steve Jobs died on Wednesday after a long illness. This was not unexpected, but most of us did hope that this driven genius would be around for the decades he hoped for just last year.
Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak famously started building their first computer in Jobs' parent's garage in the mid seventies. Woz was the geek - able to write code in his head. He was working at HP and got permission from them to use a motherboard design that HP had no interest in developing. Jobs was the entrepreneur of the company they eventually founded. He was literally the driving force behind Apple and did not suffer fools gladly - or even at all. This eventually lost him his position in Apple which went under the control of bean counters for a few years. When Jobs regained control of the company, he introduced the iMac and the rest, as they say, is history.
I learned to program in BASIC using a text which assumed I would be using a teletypewriter keyboard linked to a mainframe mini-computer [Minis in those days were computers that could fit in a closet, like a PDP-11]. My sister-in-law was my teacher and she had an early Apple II, which I used, so I finally bought one in 1982.
This began my love affair with Apples:
Apple ii+ 1982
Apple II E 1984
Apple II GS 1987 [I stuck with Woz's Apple II design for some years after introduction of the MAC - I liked the open design of the II and contrary to common belief, it also had a graphic interface which used a good deal less memory and was in color, which the early Macs were not. The early Macs were not easy to add to or tinker with - and I liked to do both.
I bought my first Mac - a Color Classic in 1993, but became frustrated by the small screen and a couple of years later bought my first Mac Desktop.
Power Mac 7500 - 1995 This was the first really open Mac and for several years I happily added bells and whistles, up-graded the memory and GPU until I bought my first Laptop in 1999.
Mac PowerBook G3/333 - 1999 I added a superdisk, a Nikon CoolScan and a couple of HDs.
Mac PowerBook G4 - 2002 I still use this for games like Myst - but it has a broken hinge and has to be handled carefully
MacBook Pro 17 - 2007 This was the first of the Mac line with the intel chip
MacBook Pro 17 - 2010 This, my newest Mac has a much faster chip and handles web access much faster. I'm writing this on it accessing the internet over a Verizon G3 wireless modem from out here in the [currently very chilly] Maine woods.
I'm a happy Apple addict - the kind of person Steve Jobs developed the Apple line for - someone who wanted a top-of-the-line super dependable computer that didn't require a lot of tinkering - unless you wanted to.
Comments (3)
I never got caught in the Apple technology but I have great respect for the man...lets hope his vision of innovation will not die away with him.
Uhm.... i never got caught in Apple either, mainly because (atleast over here) their product are very expensive.
I don't dare to judge the man Steve Jobs, but, from the technical point of view, he didn't do anything innovative at all. When the first Apple/Mac computer was sold, their operating system was much less advanced than Unix (although much more than the equivalent Microsoft dumb environment). All the inventions i can think by Steve Jobs (or Apple) were already invented before. The real credit i could give to Steve Jobs is that he thought to put things together and make them available for the big public.
For example he didn't invent the cellphone, he didn't invent the touch screen and he didn't invent the modular software. But he put all of those stuffs together in one product (the iPhone), user friendly and affordable for most of the middle class people. In other word, he was not any informatic-engineering bugger, but better a marketing one. At the end he sold also his image, including his terrible disease.
At the end i think the world will miss somebody like him that would give a good voice to some normal people like me, for example. Much before the iPad i thought: "oh... why don't they make a laptop without any keybord that could be handled with a big touch screen?". And i believe that a good half of the world that has to do everyday with a computer had the same idea. But Steve was the only one among those people that had the opportunity to really create one thing like that, and commercialize it with the name iPad.
@Zeal4living - Hi Jurgens, Steve Jobs was a real slave-driver of a boss according to all those who knew/worked for him - but he did have a clear vision of what he wanted and knew how to push his engineers to get it. One famous story is about the early iPhone: When the first prototype was handed to him he said it was too large - the engineers said it was as small as possible - could not possibly be made smaller. He walked over and dropped the prototype into his fish tank, where it bubbled as it sank to the bottom. "See those bubbles - that's air. Make it smaller". That's typical Jobs.
@italian_culture - Hi Dario, You are right about Apple product's costs. They have been [until recently] much more expensive than their competitors - but, as they say: You get what you pay for. That Power Mac 7500 I bought in 1995 is still being used by the children of the guy I passed it on to and all the Mac laptops I have owned are still up and running - though the battery of the Mac PowerBook G3 has failed and you have to plug it in. Incidentally, I changed the internal HD in that one a couple of times - try that if you have really tiny fingers.
The first Apples ran on a hardware/motherboard system developed by Steve Wozniak - apparently out of his head. Modern Mac OSs are in fact based on Unix - which is why you can run Windows on them with little trouble, but Apple is famous for guarding its hardware and controlling what works on it. Jobs was not an inventor - but he certainly knew what he wanted and drove his engineers to get it and as you say, user-friendly was always his first consideration. His genius died with him and it will be interesting to see who carries on the information revolution. I predict it will be in the area of managing easily-accessed information - probably without the present rather clumsy wireless systems now prevaient.