R.i.P Steve Jobs

 

There were two American kids, probably sons of university academics, who really got into progamming and as 14 to 15 year olds spent all their free time at school writing software. I often wonder what happened to them....and what they're doing with their billions!!

 

They were real geeks, as I'm sure was Steve Jobs, and Larry and Bill and all the other computer moguls. Just the sort that GRF usually takes the piss out of, interesting to hear him singing Mr Jobs praises now he's gone.

 

They don't touch everybody's life, Jobs did, unless you've been in a cave and never used a smart phone or computer nor watched CGi animated movies like Toy Story.

His life has Holywood appeal wether he wanted to or not or wether you like it or not.

Nobody will mourn the passing of Michael Dell, or Larry Oracleman or Bill Gates or our own WWWman who's name I forget or even Alan Turin who is even more responsible and sadly only nowadays talked about for his sexuality,  anyway they won't be remembered in the same way because they didn't touch us all and influence market trends and influence the way we do things in the manner Apple and Pixar have.

I think that's a fair view frankly, I certainly don't' 'hero worship' the guy to me he was the lessor of nerdish no hopers, what Bill Gates did was to set back computing years, had Jobs not come along y'all would have been denied GUI's and we'd have all been stuck in the hands of the IT techs for much longer.

He was just leader of the rebel alliance of common sense and 'cool' computing, stuff that just looked good and worked without you having to reach for the manual, or worse for the phone. They defined 'plug n play'.

So us graphics types could get on with doing the stuff we needed the computer for, we could hire folk to do computer stuff with the minimum of training, everything worked the same, I could go on. To me he was a marketing Genius, what a shame all we had in this country was a barrow boy at the head of Amstrad, or whatever short termism it was that closed down Apricot and the Scottish silicon valley (Apricot pre-dated Apple not only with a mouse, but an infra red cable less mouse two years before Apple and it had windows (Gem Desktop) a monocoque construction with integral hard drive bigger then than the 1st Mac. But this country has even more of those 'doubting thomases" the same folk that sent the Jet Engine to Germany before WW2 and consigned our finest Nuclear scientists to the states in the 50's the same types that believe the City is just for making money from itself rather than using it to finance our natural talent for invention. (Those types - they all sail wooden dinghies  )

Oh dear I've gone into another rant - sorry

Thanks for posting that article Al, a lot of truisms there, read it again he was lauding Jobs, in an entirely different and pretty accurate manner.