Thursday, October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs dies at 56 (updated)


Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder, dies at 56, article

Steve surprises us again. 
I would say "long live his legacy", but nothing less than total annihilation of our current civilization could wipe that out.
Probably my nice life and nice livelihood could have happened without the machines he helped create but at the very least I'm sure it would have felt much less like fun and much more like work.

It's hard to believe that a person with so much life-force is dead at such an age.
On the other hand, if you could ever say about anybody that "he burned his candle at both ends"...

Thanks, dude. Blessings be with you whereever you are and whereever you go. I'm sure Apple and Pixar will make you proud in the future. 

5 comments:

dave_at_efi said...

Life with only MS-DOS.

What a different world it would have been without Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Like Pogue wrote many years ago, maybe the Web itself, being visual, would not have happened without the GUI.

Timo Lehtinen said...

But Jobs didn't invent the GUI. Jobs didn't even invent WIMP. Both existed in commercial products before Apple used them. And through the X Window System development track, both would have been very visible in the industry in any case.

And had NeXT not existed, CERN would have probably used Suns as their standard workstations, and WWW would have seen the light there.

What Jobs did invent, however, was resolution independence in the GUI -- through Display PostScript, while at NeXT. This is still not used to full effect, but I predict it will in the future when Mac screen resolutions take a leap.

He also invented desktop publishing, and in general had a huge contribution to the field of digital type.

Timo Lehtinen said...

What Jobs will be most remembered for is his insistence to Zen-like minimalism in the design of computers. And in general for seeing personal computers as Objects d'Art. He was one of the greatest industrial designers that ever lived.

I find it fascinating that he leaves us at the point where this phase of computer history is largely coming to an end. Personal computers have become pocketable and so small that what they look like will soon no longer matter (they will be built into clothes and other ubiquitous accessories). Also, the centralization cycle has moved the computing power back from the desktop/person to the server farms.

It's as if he made his contribution by seeing this phase to its end, and now his work is done.

Rest in peace, Steve.

Steffen Larsen said...

I can never stop thinking back to that day in '84 when I by accident walked in on what was a presentation of the first Mac. Lately the first consumer products - Sinclair, Commodore et al - had become interesting but they were all beyond what I could and would afford.
I never forgot that the heels were higher and the cleavages lower than seen elsewhere when computers were the topic: I knew instinctively that Macs were quality.
When I many years later finally decided to get a 'real' computer I skipped PCs entirely and went straight for the iMac.