[LINK] Jobs not all bad

[Kim Holburn]

On 2011/Oct/13, at 12:45 PM, Richard Chirgwin wrote:

> 2c worth.
> 
> 1c: Apple's wish for the walled garden is far, far older than the iPad 
> or iPhone.

Of course.  For a long time Macs had an incompatible floppy drive, back when floppy drives were important.  They had their own proprietary mouse/keyboard bus, mind you, it was far superior at the time to anything IBM PCs had.  They had their own networking system, well, so did everyone else at the time too.  They were innovative and made lots of mistakes, as everyone who is innovative do:  Apple III, I used to use one;  Jobs desire to make systems without fans lead to a couple of dead ends, (the cube anyone?);  the Newton; the first speech recognition software; the hockey puck mouse (the one button mouse).  It's easy in hindsight to criticise design blunders.  On the other hand, they put together stuff that really changed the way people worked.  At the time of the Amiga, Macs had networking and laser printers.  You didn't have to have a server, you just connected them up and they talked.  Anyone who was there at the time of the first laserwriters will tell you what a huge advance they were, while PCs and Amigas and everyone else were printing on dot matrix or line printers (if they were lucky) and I can tell you, configuring PCs and printers was not for the faint-hearted.  Macs and Laserwriters?  You plugged them in and they worked.

> I have, or had, a T-shirt from the first half of the 1990s 
> promoting an Apple-branded Internet service - I forget the name. The 
> idea was, back then, that the Internet was big, dangerous and 
> uncontrolled, so here's a "safe" place for children. Anyone surprised at 
> later developments forgot their history.
> 
> 1c: In this as in other parts of the Internet, many people were a little 
> smug; the aphorism that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and 
> routes around it" was our excuse for assuming that walled gardens would 
> never succeed. Didn't turn out that way.
> 
> RC
> 
> On 13/10/11 12:27 PM, grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
>> My opinion of Steve Jobs is that like all of us, he was just
>> a human being.   He was gifted with some extraordinary opportunities and
>> knew how to take them into his control.   Maybe his wandering years in
>> India and visiting ashrams and dropping acid did teach him how to create a
>> "reality distortion field"?   But I am just kidding of course.
>> 
>> There are people who come along and create vicariously through others,
>> thereby amplifying their own capabilities - Frank Zappa comes to mind here.
>> He was a brilliant composer for sure, but he had to drive his musicians
>> to make coherent sense of his conceptual ideas.    Likewise, Jobs knew
>> intuitively what worked in both a technical and aesthetic sense and could see
>> conceptually what would follow.  The fact he knew what would sell
>> and how to sell it does not make him inherently evil.
>> 
>> 
>> rachel
>> 
> 
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Kim Holburn
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