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

10/6/2011 | Myself

[NVDave]

Most of you people who keep mouthing this “rip off from Xerox” line have never, ever seen, much less USED a D*machine from Xerox.

I have. My wife used to work at Xerox, porting their s/w to Sun workstations and Unix.

Neither one of us think that the Xerox interface is remotely as clean or well thought out as Apple’s. Yes, the D machines were the first integrated GUI system, but there were very important differences. For example, Xerox D machines had 3-button mice.

Why? Their equivalent of the Finder didn’t use more than two. Why three?

Because their SmallTalk environment used three.

How many people here have programmed in SmallTalk-80? Probably not many. I’ve hacked around in it and while it is an elegant language, there’s nothing therein that I didn’t already have in Lisp, really.

Anyone who has shipped a product knows that there’s a whole lot of stuff that has to be done between having a great idea and a great product. Xerox has never been willing or able to do that work.

[rlmorel]

I have thought about it, but that is between him and God now. I hope he was saved.

[vox_freedom]

Thanks much rimorel, for your beautifully written epitaph. We all have our own Apple Mac stories. Mine also go back to the mid 80's and I was the first in a large Fortune 500 company to get a Mac instead of a PC. For those now under 30 years old in age, it was a time before email, or internet, or smart phones. There was no software for word processing or even spreadsheets. Just a box on the desk for typing and some info exchange between computers in the company. Soon there was a mouse, then communication to those in the company, and even messaging to others in the outside world!
I was fortunate to be able to get new Macs almost every year for that first decade when they were introduced. The old ones were brought home and my son began using my SE when he was two years old. He grew up on them and clicking a mouse with KidPix. He is now into complex programing.

When I left that company I was forced to go over to the dark side and PC's. It was actually a good time to learn the Microsoft world, as some years did lag in the Apple universe. So for a decade I got into new and different software and got up to speed with MS Office, etc. Oh, and I learned how to defrag and update anti-virus software and the other list of computer drudgery.

Then in 2007 I returned to Mac in a big way, with a new MacBook Pro, large LCD screen, and an iPod Touch. Now iPhones that keep my family in touch and informed!

It has been a wonderful return to the best tech devices created for the common folk and all thanks to the man who passed on yesterday. May Steve Jobs RIP. I will pray for his salvation and hope he found Christ before he died. He did a lot of good for many, including me, and also taught me how to listen to, and appreciate, music again.

Thanks again for your post and experiences. Also gratitude to Swordmaker for regularly keeping us up to date on the latest news re: Macs here on Free Republic and his diligence in "the positive."

[all the best]

Just another greedy evil rich person who made us all richer and more prosperous whether we ever used an Apple product or not. Created more jobs directly and indirectly than all politicians combined.

[RightOnline]

You sorta miss the point, but never mind.

[Siena Dreaming]

Excellent vanity. Thanks.

[Tribune7]

Thanks, rlmorel.

You brought back some memories -- nice and not so -- of my travels with technology.

A couple hours a day wasted on computer crashes. Imagine that.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

[BuddaBudd]

Bump

[svcw]

Remembered the date of that first fair, April 1977.
If I ever get to Mass I am going to that museum.
Yea, was an interesting time in the Valley.
My husband had just started working at HP, Feb 1976.
He and bunch of his friends started a PC club,they wanted to be the first to build personal computers from the ground up. I think we spent $2,000 over the next year and it had 87 megs of memory.
Very exciting.
We were just talking last night about when we got our first over the counter PC, and how we were able to send bulletin board messages over the “net”, then came CompuServe.
There was a game we used to play called life. Every time you played to had to type in pages of code.
And we have progressed from that to my husband and his work pals can go out to lunch and monitor their equipment from their iphones directing operations as necessary.
(We still have our first Sinclare, out in the garage)

[vox_freedom]

[Atlas Sneezed]

Best Vanity Ever.

This should be published. I honestly kept thinking: “I must have read the author wrong, because this can’t possibly be a vanity. It must be from Wired, or WSJ, or NYT Magazine, or The New Yorker.”

But I couldn’t pull myself away from it to double check until I finished reading every word.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

My journey was similar to yours and the time frame was the same. I started with a machine, The Classic, I think, with the 20 MB external drive running OS 6. I well remember the extensions managing bit and the transition for OS 8 to OS 9 to OS X. I also remember Hypercard which was so simple it made programmers of us all. What ever happened to that?

It is easy to forget that the Mac was the easiest to use word processor at the time and that MacPaint was revolutionary. Wang was a very successful company selling a machine that was strictly a word processor. Apple put them put of business. Word processing had a bigger impact on the success of Apple than most people realize. That and not having to be a semi programmer/computer guru were the keys. Yes, DOS required some programming skills and many didn’t care to learn it.

[Gator113]

Thank you for such a wonderful post.

We will all miss him......

[ßuddaßudd]

bump ∞

[zeugma]

Yours was a well done post. While I don’t own any Apple products beyond an iPad I bought for my wife, (who doesn’t let me use it - grin), there is no doubt in my mind that Steve Jobs made a tremendous mark on technology. His vision and eye for design will be missed in this world. As someone else upthread mentioned, we’re all richer for his success even if we haven’t personally been customers of his.

[Kimmers]

Thank you for sharing your Apple journey. This is probably one of the best vanity posts I have ever seen on FR....a great way to honor a man that was on the cutting edge of technology.....

[Liberty Valance]

Well done. Thanks for posting.

RIP Steve Jobs.

[Revolting cat!]

Things are as they have been with me, not too good. Thank you for your response. You were quite fortunate to have the man your father was, and I’m sure I don’t even have to tell you that.

I’ve been thinking all night about Steve Jobs and the phenomenal influence he has had over our lives, without having invented a light bulb. It’s enough to compare him to his former partner, to realize that there was something special there. A designer in a highly evolved industry who had no formal training or apprenticeship in design. Forget his marketing prowess, that’s what Larry Ellison is about, and little more beyond that. Oracle can survive without supersalesman Ellison, can Apple survive without Jobs? Did he leave behind enough of his spirit, as Henry Ford did, I believe, in his company? (Compare Ford of today, or heck, of 30 years ago to GM of today or 30 years ago!)

I also remembered people I worked with who had this kind of special spark that Jobs did, the sense of the aesthetic, and judging from the anecdotes about Jobs, I think they would behave exactly as he did in regards to product design, had they reached his position or been given the opportunity. But they were, like so many of us, stuck in these bureaucratic corporate environments where creativity was to be suppressed and even penalized, and, man, I am talking not about toothpaste manufacturing but about the very computer industry. So I think that luck too played some role in Steve Jobs’ success. No way would he have succeeded as a salaryman at a computer company that wasn’t his from the start!

Be all that as it may, I read a lot, newspapers, magazines and bumperstickers, everywhere, and in my judgment, your post could easily pass the muster at a decent print publication, such as the weekend WSJ or even the New Yorker, it’s that good.

[SamAdams76]

Very good post. I was very much a PC-user and actually vowed never to use an Apple product until around the time the iPod started gaining widespread acceptance in the 2003-2004 period. As a music fanatic, I could no longer resist the notion of carrying all my music around with me in my pocket. I had owned a couple of competing MP3 players up to that time (a Samsung and a Rio) but was very disappointed with the limitations of those products and their clumsy interface to add music.

I discovered the iPod in much the same way you discovered the Macintosh. A co-worker of mine, who had recently bought a newer iPod, let me borrow his original iPod for a trip I was going on. Even though I had to listen to his music (that version iPod would only work on a Mac), it only took me about 30 seconds to realize I must own one for myself.

Fortunately the newer iPods were PC-compatible and I can still remember taking home my first iPod - a 40GB model that had no problem sucking the thousands of digital music files I already had on my PC into it. I was hooked from day one and as with yourself, I started re-discovering music in my collection that I had long forgotten about.

I should comment also on the way that Apple packages their products. My first iPod was so carefully packaged that I immediately became obsessed with cleaning it of all fingerprints so that it would always have the same pristine appearance of when it first came out of the box. The packaging for Apple products is so perfect that I was never able to throw it away. In the back of my closet are still the original boxes that all my iPods, iPhones and MacBook Pro came in.

This is a contrast to how most electronics products are packaged - in that horrendous hard plastic packaging that require knife and scissors to open (with potential injury to both yourself and product).

So over the course of the past 7 years, I have gradually replaced all my PC-based products with Apple products and have become convinced of the superiority of the OSX operating system over Windows and iOS over Windows Mobile (which is a joke, by the way).

With respect to Steve Jobs, it is sad to see him pass on. He has been very ill for a number of years now and it just goes to show that wealthy and successful people know what they are talking about when they say they will happily trade in all their millions for good health.

I've read some biographies on Steve Jobs over the past few years and in general was never that impressed with him as a person. However, as a businessman, a perfectionist and a visionary, he had no peer. It is a rare thing for all those traits to come together in one person and for those who worked at Apple since the early days, it must have been one hell of a ride.

[tubebender]

Someone once said that there are a hundred moments of truth that lead to Meeting and Exceeding the Customer’s Expectations...