Posted on 10/05/2011 9:57:56 PM PDT by rlmorel
I have been caring for my parents for the last few years. Dad died last year on Sept. 17th, Constitution Day. The IPad was a big pleasure to him in his final days.
Dad had dementia. Conversations frustrated him. But the IPad, with our family photos and card games, gave him hours of entertainment as death approached. As mom said, it was worth its weight in gold.
Now Mom is amazed at my IPhone. As I explain the apps to her, she just shakes her head and smiles. Hearing of Steve’s death bring only one remark from her: “too soon.”
Mr. Job’s influence did not reach our family until this last year, but it was substantial and rewarding.
I do hope that Apple starts using US manufacturing to a higher degree. I’m sure the US consumer would support it.
Thank you, Steve. All of us will miss you.
Uh, No... the entire Apple interface was not a "direct rip off from Xerox." There are lots of differences between the Xerox GUI and the Apple GUI that were purely Apple's invention, separate and distinct from the Small Talk derived GUI that Apple paid XEROX for the rights visit PARC to observe and use the ideas they saw in their visit. Apple was developing a GUI before Steve Jobs and his engineer's ever visited Xerox's PARC. . . and many of their ideas were parallel development. PARC based much of their research on the same work that Apple did that was done by Doug Engelbart's work at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute (icons, mouse, pixel bit mapped graphics, windows). Apple LICENSED that work from SRI and then built on it. Both Xerox and Apple simultaneously came up with the concept of menus... but Xerox's appeared at the location of the pointer. Apple added a lot that Xerox never developed such as: menu bars, drop down menus, nested hierarchal menus, overlapping windows, draggable self-repairing windows that didn't disappear, resizable windows, multiple resizable fonts, drag and drop icons and files, the clipboard, the trashcan metaphor, direct manipulation editing of documents, and dragging a doc icon onto an app icon to open it. That was ALL Apple!
And Apple was aiming toward WYSIWYG... Xerox wasn't. PARC was only interested in the GUI.
The Xerox Star was much more rudimentary in function compared to the even the Lisa, much less the Mac. — Source for this information "History of the Graphical User Interface (GUI)"
I agree with Ronin.
Thanks for the ping, Swordmaker.
Interesting… you are first-person witness to technology history! I am a history buff, and I’ve always had a desire to be able to get tangibly close to history.
For example, we have a little-known museum up here in Massachusetts called the World War II Museum. If you didn’t know what was, you have no idea what was inside.
Nobody seems to know about it, and you can’t you show up… you have to contact the people who run the museum and arrange a time to visit, and tell them why you want to visit. They don’t allow anyone under 18 (but I’m sure that’s a rule they would bend)
When you get inside, they follow you around, and once they see you treat the artifacts with respect, you can pretty much pick up and handle nearly anything if you have a pair of cotton gloves with you. Really, really interesting stuff. All kinds of weapons, and things like that. They have one of the copies the treaty of Versailles, the bronze bust of Hitler that was taken from the Eagles Nest in Berchtesgaden… it still had the urine stains on it from Gen. Patton’s pit bull that he trained to pee on it when he took it out for a walk (they use it for doorstop) But my favorite artifact for some reason was in a cylindrical box on the table. When I opened the box, it was a top hat. It was the top that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had worn to his inauguration. When I pulled that thing out and held it in my hands, I felt an incredibly strong bond to real, honest to goodness history! (By the way, I’m no fan of FDR, but the history quotient was pretty high there…)
When I read your anecdote about meeting Steve Jobs before he really made it big, basically when he was still trying to fight his way out of the paper bag so to speak, I think I would look back on that as equivalent to holding that top hat in my hands… :-)
That’s quite a wonderful tome. I submitted a few paragraphs to memorialize Steve via Apples homepage link this morning when I got to work. Our stories are quite similar. He created my future. There is no other way to say it. If it weren’t for Steve Jobs, I may have been much less of a person.
Ronin, As someone who has conversed with you over the years on occasion on Free Republic, your complement is high praise indeed. Thank you, and I’m glad you enjoyed it. It was funny, when I sat down at my computer and saw the announcement of his death on Free Republic (Naturally, it’s where I get my news from now) I was just going to write a little blurb maybe 2 lines.
But as I sat there and thought about the impact, the direct impact that products with his unique imprimatur on them, had on me personally, as I started to write… I ended up sitting there for a while! When I was done, I looked at it and said “darn… I can’t post that in the existing thread because nobody will read it, it’s too long, a stream of consciousness so to speak, and people don’t read those things in the middle of a thread. Darn, I can’t start a new thread and then post a link in the existing thread either, because that might be like hijacking thread…”
Anyway, thanks for reading it.
I can’t say I ever warmed up to Apple. My boss during graduate school was a big Mac fan, and always had the newest software loaded up on the lab Macs. He also made sure that the lab Macs could read PC disks.
I haven’t used a Mac since grad school. Yet I have Apple software on my computer. It just appears.
When my son told me a few days ago that Steve Jobs had resigned from Apple, I commented that it must mean he’s really sick by now, and he won’t be around much longer.
I guess I was right.
You don’t have to be a Mac fan to appreciate all that Steve Jobs accomplished.
RIP, Mr. Jobs.
The difference is Steve Jobs was a larger hypocrite.
I’ll be honest with you… I’m no fan of the politics of Steve Jobs. And I’m definitely no fan of the politically correct stench that emanates from Apple Computer. But you know what? The more I think of it, that is not much different than nearly any large company in this country, or even the institution that I currently work at.
I think the problem is that that list that you posted of being super rich, paying his “fair share”, sending jobs overseas and so on, has nothing at all to do with being either conservative or liberal.
Liberals like to take those characteristics and paint conservatives with them, but in reality (and you and I understand and know the reality) those are all characteristics that are shared by people that cover the political spectrum from one end to the other.
The problem with liberals they wear that list of faults on their backs, and use that list to hypocritically vilify others with.
I give Steve Jobs a pass too, for the simple reason that I admire someone who pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and built a huge company that still employed thousands of Americans, and did bring money into this country as well as products that were used productively and enjoyed by millions of people.
Personally, he sounds like he could’ve been the biggest prick around, and I’ve never been one to subscribe to the concept that the only way you get the best out of people is to whip them into fear and submission in order to get things out of them. But I do know this: I would’ve gone to work for Steve Jobs, because I know how to work. I know how to get things done, and I know how to do them well, on time and within budget. I know how to listen to instructions from my boss, and follow them to the letter and deliver candid feedback.
It has been my experience that people who are successful and powerful often make a lot of enemies in their journeys through life, and Steve Jobs was no exception. He sounds like he was an exceptionally hard taskmaster, but as it is with many things, the proof is in the pudding.
He’s made a lot of mistakes in life, and he’s made a lot of personal mistakes. I pray that before Steve Jobs left this world, he found Christ. But that is between him and his maker.
I’m not Steve Jobs fan boy, but I do recognize successful people, and by any metric (save the religious one, and I will do that just for the purpose of this discussion) Steve Jobs was a successful man in affected a lot of people’s lives in positive ways.
I’m no liberal, but I guess I’ll give him a pass too.
Heheh… Revolting Cat, That was an interesting pickup…
By the way, hope all is well… I think of you often over there… :-)
So true, so true. You and I both, buddy. I posted links to this on Facebook and Twitter. Wonderful write-up, FRiend. :)
Thanks RC... I have found that interesting that, as I get older, I have those fleeting experiences where I look in the mirror, and I see my father’s face looking back at me… and I don’t find that a bad thing at all!
My wife and I were watching the Clint Eastwood movie “Gran Torino” the other night, and I found myself subjected to a wave of nostalgia. It was funny, my wife picked up on it to… from some angles and with some facial expressions, Clint Eastwood’s character in that movie looked very much like my father.
There was one scene where it showed him sitting on his porch looking at his car, and he put a cigarette in his mouth, lights it with this zippo lighter, takes a drag and then holds the cigarette away from his mouth in a contemplative pose… my wife said “boy, he sure looks like your father there…”
That was my dad. He always had a cup of coffee in one hand, a T-shirt or sport shirt on, sitting in a chair somewhere, and he would pull out a Pall Mall (one of the unfiltered ones, of course) stick it in his mouth, tilts his head slightly to the side and open the zippo lighter which was filled to the brim with lighter fluid. When he let it, the flame always looked like it went up about 6 inches, this big, broad yellow flame, just like that little cigarette. And then with a sharp clink, he would close the zippo and put it away.
As a matter fact, when he had a stroke, that was one of the last things he did as a whole, functioning human. It was interesting, we were all sitting around the table on one of our family get-togethers, and I was sitting across from my dad. My dad went through his cigarette lighting ritual, but instead of lighting the cigarette, he held the cigarette in one hand, then lit the lighter with the other hand and sat there looking in puzzlement at both cigarette in the burning lighter. While the lighter was still burning with that high yellow flame that was so characteristic, he deliberately placed it down on the table upright, as if he were placing it there to service a candle. He then continued to look in puzzlement at the cigarette, turned around in his hands, and just looked confusedly at it.
As I sat across from him, alarm bells went off in my head because it was so odd and out of sequence. We didn’t know at that single moment, but he was in the process of having a huge crippling stroke, which paralyzed one entire side of his body, and ended up taking his life 5 months later.
God, how I miss that man! While he did resemble the kind of dried up, desiccated aspect of Clint Eastwood’s character in that movie, he didn’t have the cutting, nasty acerbic side. He was nothing like that. He was a good, generous man, who treated everybody he encountered with respect, regardless of their station in life.
Thanks for your post. BTTT...
But when I read your response, it did evoke emotion and bring a tear to my eye.
I found my music again
There a few things in life as beautiful and wonderful as finding a treasured thing that has been lost. Thanks… that DID bring a tear to my eye to realize what a great thing that was for me.
The way I've been putting it for a while now is that for Jobs/Apple the technology is not the product, the product is the product and the technology is just a means of getting there.
If you go to any of Apple's competitors and ask them why you should buy their product instead of Apple's, 99 times out of 100, the first they're going to hit you with are technical specifications. And while specifications do matter, they are only a small part in the end -- it what the device/system does with those specifications and, more importantly, what the user can do with the device/system that really matters.
As an analogy to your comments regarding marketing, a favorite expression of mine for many years is: "style without substance is worthless, but substance without style is often overlooked".
That’s a nice sentiment, there’s no harm in acknowledging that someone did something that affected a lot of people in a positive way, even if it didn’t hit you that way.
I understand that there are some people everywhere including some on Free Republic, and even some on this very thread that can’t find it in their heart to at least see the positive side for single day, but can’t do much about that.
People have to live their own lives, and live within their own skin. So be it…
Steve Jobs was a visionary. He lived a life that many of us would dream of, be wealthy, work a kind of job you would really love and so on, basically “gained the world”.
But yet, one thing in the end that counts, what did he do with Jesus Christ and with his decision, where is he now spending eternity ?
Here's another great (although somewhat shorter) tribute from Kevin Williamson at National Review Online:
Great post. I, too, have been there since the Apple IIC up to the MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, iPad 2 and iPhone 4.
People marvel that I can produce movies, slideshows, DVD’s, presentations, and even create a website with no technical training whatsoever. I just fearlessly and persistently pushed buttons until I ended up with what I wanted.
Not that it was a piece of cake, but I could never have done those types of things without OS X unless I had taken a programming course.
Apple’s WYSIWYG approach has made it possible for a novice like me with just some ideas and courage to dive in and create wonderful things.
May Jobs rest in peace.
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