Steve Jobs's legacy

[bojan]

I know I will be hated even more by some for posting this link..
But what the heck ;) We have to see both sides of the story, always.
http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/steve-jobss-apple-legacy-may-not-be-so-sweet-at-the-core-20110830-1jk04.html

[multiweb]

Like it or not the bloke is a genius and has revolutionized the way we do things now and will for a while.

[Poita]

It is interesting, a relatively closed system has advantages and disadvantages.
I prefer closed systems for most of my work, they just have less noise and hassles, and are diverse enough to not usually be constrictive, but I prefer more open systems for 'play' and more tacky/DIY type stuff.
So a linux/windows PC for hacking about and a Macbook for all my serious work.
Steve Jobs is an oddity for sure, he goes against all of the modern 'formulas for success' and shows that there is a downside to committee based design and the Homer's Car approach to trying to give people what they say they want. He bucks that trend and tells people what they want, and is often right. He is a visionary and a mongrel, as are most people at the hyper-end of success.

[Octane]

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

I find him inspiring.

H

[Alchemy]

He certainly drove the apple brand to the top, lets not forget that apple really started the windows type phenomenon, instead of dos based programmer language, only for Microsoft to leap ahead.

I can't fault apple gadgets particularly, they work, do exactly what they are meant to do ( and no more) I find he iPad great, I know people grumble about cost of things but hey you can buy a fully functional astro program for about 20 dollars and get free updates for life ( almost perhaps), a windows based product of similar nature will cost 100s.

No viruses either.

Visionary..... Maybee but he certainly hit the button for products, although smart phones are now made by everyone, tablets are being copied. If apple wants to stay ahead it needs new ideas, and let's face it before the iphone they weren't going anywhere.

As for Steve jobs, a cruel way to go, drop out at your peak to a horrible disease which is one of the most lethal varieties.

Like or loathe him, he certainly drove technology for he masses.... So where to next?

[dugnsuz]

Apple products still get this old cynic excited.
Perfect mix of style, function, innovation and fun.

Don't know much about all the negative stuff now being dredged up, but I suppose if you put many huge corporations under the microscope you would find something undesirable to somebody.

[RickS]

Nope... they pinched it from Xerox ;) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

[Omaroo]

Apple didn't merely "pinch" it - they paid a blanket fee to license a group of WIMP/GUI technologies from Xerox PARC in the form of a pre-IPO stock swap with Apple. Many of the PARC engineers moved to Apple as well and worked on Lisa/Macintosh.

Prior to that, Xerox had NO idea what to do with it. The Star was never intended to be commercialised. It took Jobs to realise its commercial value and further engineer the GUI I/F and added manipulatable icons, the menu bar and drag n' drop functionality within the file system. Bill Gates then truly "pinched" this from Apple a little later.

[supernova1965]

Yes he reversed the / to \ and called it DOS

[multiweb]

Before this turns into another Apple vs. Microsoft thread lets not forget Bill Gates is an engineer and Microsoft did a lot of coding for Apple. Steve Jobs has the creative flair but Apple wouldn't be where it is today without Microsoft and vice versa.

[Omaroo]

We're talking GUI Warren, so no, not DOS - Windows. He saw it at his first GUI running on a Lisa at Apple's offices and "had to have it". He told Steve Balmer that Microsoft depended on it.

[supernova1965]

Oh don't get me wrong I really respect Bill Gates and all he does for the world he gives huge amounts of money for lots of great causes.:thumbsup:

[RickS]

Strange that Xerox tried to sue Apple then...

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/24/business/most-of-xerox-s-suit-against-apple-barred.html

[Omaroo]

"Garbage"... or is that "Trash"! ;) It depends who you choose to listen to.



http://obamapacman.com/2010/03/myth-copyright-theft-apple-stole-gui-from-xerox-parc-alto/

[OICURMT]

I think credit really has to be given to PARC... they invented a lot of things we take for granted today with respect to communications and computing... http://www.parc.com/about/ Click on the timeline at the bottom of the page... Laser Printing in 1970... anyone remember that? WYSIWYG in '74 and the GUI in '75... these guys were WAY ahead of their time.



http://unweary.com/2010/09/what-left-xerox-parc.html

[Omaroo]

THis has been said... ;)

[gary]

Hi Chris,

Not historically completely correct ... :)

It was the Xerox Alto, not the Star, that the two groups of Apple engineers who
passed through Xerox PARC saw demonstrated.

The Alto was conceptualized and then first built around '72-'73.

Engineers working on the Apple Lisa wanted to show Jobs the types of
technology they were advocating to use which they had already seen for themselves
at PARC. Jobs was apparently reluctant to go, but he received additional
incentive when Xerox's venture capital division invested some cash into Apple.
The two main Apple visits to PARC were said to be circa 1979.

Keep in mind that the Stanford campus was literally across the road from PARC
and many of the PARC engineers had come from Stanford Research International (SRI),
including Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse and an early researcher
into the use of networking and hypertext.

PARC was relatively "open" and sometimes students who were friends with workers
there would almost casually come and go, including sitting in on some meetings.
Some Stanford graduate students were also employed part time at PARC.

Simultaneously on the Stanford campus there was what was known as the
Stanford University Network or SUN. They had developed their own Ethernet
connect workstation around 1980 and eventually licensed it to Sun Microsystems
around 1982.

Then over in Massachusetts, Apollo Computer Inc. had been founded in 1980 by
William Poduska (who had previously founded Prime) and they brought out their DN100
workstation in 1981, nearly two years earlier than Sun. Apollo dominated the
professional workstation market in the period 1980-87, eventually being
outstripped by DEC and Sun.

However, these systems, which employed bitmapped displays, a mouse, a networked
file system, distributed networking computing capability and most of the features
we associate today with modern workstations pre-dated the Apple Lisa, which
was not introduced until 1983.

And these workstations out of Apollo Computer were hugely commercially successful.
However, unless you moved in the industries within which they were used -
in aerospace companies such as Boeing, in automotive design, companies
such as Ford, GM & Chrysler and in electronic design, companies such
Mentor Graphics - the lay public would largely be unaware of them.

I had the pleasure of using Apollo's in the 1980's to work on custom application
integrated circuit design and attributes such as 1024x800 and later 1280x1024 bitmapped
displays, four, eight and later forty-plane color graphics, three button mouses, 300MB disk
drives, high speed networking and a windowed GUI made them an absolute pleasure
to use.

So the use of bitmapped displays and windowing and mouses was not first commercially
introduced by Apple in any way nor were they the first to make these technologies
commercially successful.

Anecdotally, when we first saw Lisa's and later Macintosh's at trade shows,
we said to each other "what would we ever do with those?" Compared to the
high-end workstations we were using at the time, these earlier Apple offerings were
really just toys. They didn't have anywhere near the screen sizes, CPU speed,
RAM capacity, disk capacity and networking features for the types of tasks
we were commercially performing, but we did recognize them as some of the
earlier attempts to enter the low-end market. My recollection was that the Lisa
was regarded generally as commercially unsuccessful.

The Xerox Star was a commercial product that was derived from work on the
earlier Alto and was introduced in 1981. Xerox targeted it at the office environment
and though they sold quite a few, like the Lisa, it was never regarded as
commercially successful either.

Readers who are very interested in the history of computing might wish to consider
subscribing to the IEEE "Annals of Computing History".
See http://www.computer.org/portal/web/annals/home

[Omaroo]

What you say is true Gary - except that in "commercial" I was, I apologise, intimating "home" computer - not workstation. Apple did, indeed, bring this technology to the masses where it was previously so far out of reach it was laughable.

I was using IBM 3270-based terminals when I worked there in 1980 that had fairly sophisticated pen-based graphics capabilities - even then. Pity they required rather powerful big iron behind them. LOL!!

I also unpacked the very, very first IBM PC that landed in Australia - and we engineers, too, laughed at it saying that "it'll never catch on" :) The Charlie Chaplin campaign didn't help its image either...

[OICURMT]

ha ha ha ... I started my post, phone rang (I'm at work) ... and I finished it after I hung up... didn't realize you had posted. Obviously, by the difference in the time between our posts you can guess how long the telephone conversation was... :P


Great minds think alike ! :thumbsup:

[gary]

The work that was done at PARC for the laser printer used with the Xerox Star
has some other interesting Silicon Valley connections including with Apple.

A couple of guys who worked at Xerox PARC, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock,
helped create a page description language called InterPress.

Geschke and Warnock left PARC in late 1982 to form a little company some readers
of this forum may have heard of called Adobe Systems.

At Adobe, they used their experience from having worked on InterPress and developed
the PostScript page description language which they released around 1984.

In 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter printer which internally had an Adobe
developed controller running an Adobe PostScript interpreter. The print engine
was the Canon CX.

There were already other laser printers on the market before the LaserWriter.

Though the LaserWriter assisted in popularizing PostScript and helped grow the
fortunes of Adobe, the printer itself was more expensive and slower at rendering
printed pages than many other non-PostScript printers based on the Canon CX.

The LaserWriter could communicate with Macs over an RS-422 LocalTalk network
which ran a protocol stack that Apple called AppleTalk. The author of this post
later worked designing laser printer controllers for more than a decade for OEM
customers such as Fuji-Xerox. One of the solutions we helped provide for these
OEM's was LocalTalk connectivity which included our own AppleTalk protocol
stack. By design, AppleTalk was a very clunky, very slow protocol and one had
visions of it being designed by a committee. :lol:

HP took the same Canon CX engine that Apple had used in the LaserWriter but
their LaserJet offering propelled HP to be the world's largest printer company.

[Omaroo]

It was still Apple who convinced Warnock to adapt their PostScript raster processor to drive laser printers, and render vector art and typefaces in difference to other other faster bit-map print engines at the time. The LaserWriter's internal RIP required more processing power than the Macs they were connected to in order to output anything at near what could be considered reasonable speed.

I agree that LocalTalk was the slow part, and many of our customers specified EtherTalk as their preferred physical layer and ran NetBEUI, DECnet and IPX - it was a right-royal mish-mash until TCP sorted it out later. Then there was TokenRing, or "TokenTalk".... Golly they were great days :) Bring back SDLC I say!

[gary]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the clarification but no need to apologize. :thumbsup:



Now there's a claim to fame! :thumbsup:

But I know exactly what you mean. The university VLSI research group I was
employed by had received some generous funding out of Yorktown Heights.
Hoping we might be able to use it, IBM also decided to ship us one of their
latest offerings - an IBM PC.

The research group had its own VAX 780 that only a dozen of us shared,
mainly through VT100 style terminals but also by way of a couple of AED
graphics terminals with large color displays and tablets with pucks rather than
a mouse in those days. So a lot of the full custom integrated circuit design was
done on these big graphics terminals connected to the VAX housed in an
airconditioned machine room and if the design layout work became really intensive,
the call would go out for everyone else to go have a coffee break so the graphics
work could continue in real time.

So this comparatively little baby PC turns up and we all scratch our heads as to
what we could use it for and we all have a chuckle. It sat on one of the lab
workbenches outside my office and now and then you might catch someone
who should have been working on their thesis or whatever playing some game. :lol:

But of course the personal computer did eventually come of age.
And some of the real champions of course are those who you never hear their names.
Inside the various products from various companies mentioned in this thread
are devices and software designed by large teams of engineers. The true success
of many of these products relies on the very high levels of integration within the
chips and their packaging. Semiconductor engineers year after year have
managed to make geometries smaller and smaller, fitting more and more
functionality onto a device whilst using less and less power but running at faster and
faster speeds.

Some of these engineers will be veterans, but many will be very young, fresh out
of university and only in their early twenties. The pace of development in the
semiconductor industry is so relentless that many will effectively burn-out
by their late twenties as coal-face designers and will take on senior chip architect or
management roles. With Non Refundable Engineering (NRE) costs on chips now
at multi-millions of dollars for the first prototype device - just one team member
makes one mistake and you kiss millions of dollars good-bye - the pressures
on these young engineers to deliver on-time and on-budget is enormous.

Many of the electronic products that will dazzle us a decade from now will
end up being designed by people who are currently only 12, 13, 14 years old and don't
even know they will be engineers yet.

[gary]

Hi Chris,

It was actually a little trickier than this. Without sufficient processing power
and given the limitations of the amount of available DRAM, you could run into
a situation we referred to as "page too complex" that would prevent you
from successfully outputting a page at all.

The LaserWriter's controller used a 12MHz Motorola 68000 and the LaserJet
an 8MHz Motorola 68000 and both used the same Canon CX Engine, but the
Apple LaserWriter sold for US$7000 but a HP LaserJet sold for half the price.

The primary difference was the amount of DRAM their controllers had. 128K in
the LaserJet but 1.5MB was required in the LaserWriter.

I designed a large number of laser printer controllers and I use to spend a large
amount of my waking hours and many of my sleeping ones thinking about
memory. Memory was very expensive. It dominated the cost of a laser printer controller.

The problem for the controller is that once you issue the print signal to the printer
and the motors start turning, you are committed and can't switch them off in
the middle of printing. You have to rasterize in real-time. And if you have less DRAM
available than what it takes to represent a 300dpi A4 bitmap, then you will need
to rely on a lot of processing grunt (either via processor or ASIC) to render a
band at a time down the page trying to keep just ahead of the print engine.

If on the other hand you had the luxury of enough DRAM to represent the entire
bitmap plus some for the data input buffers and some for the processors
stack and memory requirements, you had to worry less about real-time
constraints, but it made for a very expensive laser printer. Adobe used this later
approach and years later, everyone else did once the DRAM became more affordable.

But in that first decade, by designing laser printers that required less DRAM,
it meant companies like HP could sell them for less. This strategy, amongst others,
ensured HP got a stronger foothold in the market and thus allowed it to become the
world's number one printer manufacturer whereas others, such as Apple missed
the boat.

Once HP introduced scalable fonts, except in areas such as the graphics arts
market, CAD and a few other niche areas, few consumers required or for that matter
appreciated the differences between PostScript and PCL.

So in some ways it might be argued that Apple had a perfect opportunity to
monopolize on the laser printer experience out of PARC and to their credit they
chose, at least by way of PostScript, a technically very elegant solution.
But as a commercial, money in the bank, share price at the end of the day decision,
someone at Apple - perhaps it was Steve Jobs - made the wrong call.

[Omaroo]

Hey there Gary

It's certainly interesting hearing of your intimate connection with this technology.

I was involved with getting DTP off the ground here in Australia, primarily through various Apple houses such as Avanté Systems and Logical Solutions. We were only really interested in vector output to offer to the large magazine and newspaper publishers who were looking at divvying out previously-expensive proofing duties to cheap but capable laser printers - rather than clogging up their Atex and Agfa RIPs and imagesetters which were too busy producing bromides to go to plate. Plain paper mono vector proofs were suddenly acceptable where PCL really wasn't as it was device dependant. PostScript was seen as the real answer as it gave realistic comparisons with the big Agfa and Atex cousins as PostScript was designed to output to any PostScript device in exactly the same way. We needed apples for apples as it were.

HP LaserJets were heavily employed at the advertising houses for proof of concept and general design and desktop publishing work. We sold many, many of these at Avanté and Logical. We sold plenty of LaserWriters to News, Fairfax, ACP and Pacific Publications, as well as large agencies such as Mojo and Neville Jeffress - again for reliable, consistent plain paper proofs.

Admittedly, the call for PostScript in the general office or home was minimal. The cheaper printers sufficed there, and at that juncture still had a hell of a time removing dot matrix from the equation for general printing.