Steve Jobs RIP 1955-2011

http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Steve%20Jobs&detail=medium

The Folklore site, a creation of one of the members of the original Macintosh team, is a great window into how Jobs and his team interacted back in the early 80s. Software development was a different beast back then, and the team coupled those developers with hardware developers in a way that doesn't necessarily happen these days.

One of my faves:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Pineapple_Pizza.txt&characters=Steve%20Jobs&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

Jobs challenges his team to work until they have the first circuit board up and running, and takes them all for pizza.

ha i read one on that site before abt how s jobs thought the way the wiring was done inside one of their early computers was aesthetically unpleasing and the engineers were all but no one can see it and he was like but i know its there redo it

He was always a super-secretive guy, but I found it curious that this article (from last August) notes that there is no public record of any charitable giving on Jobs' part:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving/

What's more, the article notes that when he returned to Apple in 1997, he ended the company's philanthropic programs and never restored them:

Mr. Jobs’s views on charity are unclear since he rarely talks about it. But in 1997, when Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he closed the company’s philanthropic programs. At the time, he said he wanted to restore the company’s profitability. Despite the company’s $14 billion in profits last year and its $76 billion cash pile today, the giving programs have never been reinstated.

I'd be interested to learn if he's been secretly up to charitable stuff, but apparently Apple has long been considered one of America's least philanthropic companies.

Jobs had some random bizarro ideas about money and business and especially charity!

my only comment here is that ppl were putting flowers on the sidewalk outside of the Boylston St Apple store last night and I really don't understand doing that, like not even a little bit

RIP Steve Jobs, you were a scary smart dude

im totally not trying to defend this morally at all but as way of explanation cutting philanthropic giving from apple was v much in line w/jobs' larger approach at the company which was that he cut almost everything, honing the company down to just a few core things they focused intensely on, giving just wasnt you know an ipod

curious to hear who he left his fortune to tho

On another note, the blog post from the Gizmodo guy, Brian Lam, really reveals how Jobs felt about relating to people in business and as people. The story I got out of it was that Lam thought it was a big enough story to leak the iPhone 4 crap that it was worth sacrificing the cachet his site had with Steve fucking Jobs to get a bunch of hits the one time. The fact that Jobs had the note written acknowledging ownership of the phone rather than going down a legal route was pretty much Jobs writing the guy off.

Still seems like an idiot move.

well, uh, it was a "big enough" story

it was a huge story--basically the biggest story a gadget blog could possibly have--and its not like steve jobs was... giving them tons of exclusive interviews or anything. the "cachet" was basically that once he told brian that he liked the site.

stupidest fucking thing, tho "I knew I could tell Steve Jobs what to do so I was going to". He already had the scoop and the story. This was just him going "cry uncle, bitch".

see like, if this was about finding out what next year's beanie baby was going to look like, i'm sure we'd all agree it was stupid. but because it is about A MAGICAL DEVICE THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE we agree that it's news.

yeh, the scoop *was* news. Pushing for a "Apple CONFIRMS that our IPHONE 4 IS APPLE'S" headline was just k-lame.

ha i read one on that site before abt how s jobs thought the way the wiring was done inside one of their early computers was aesthetically unpleasing and the engineers were all but no one can see it and he was like but i know its there redo it

― ice cr?m, Thursday, 6 October 2011 14:48 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha yeah that is a good one. bet he paints behind his radiators too.

Woz: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/wozniak-remembers-steve-jobs/2011/10/06/gIQAAINvPL_video.html

Well, if he wrote for a blog about beanie babies and made his living writing about beanie babies, it'd be a big deal.

more a strategic error than lame imo, but as lam says, the follow up they did was pretty shameful.

Funny how Lam would come out with a story like that only now that Jobs is no longer around to dispute it.

Awesome lucid posting by lamp / amateurist and the computer historians. It's difficult to make fun of those acting like a friend just died because the grieving seems real but the whole phenomenon is a bit scary IMHO.

I've posted it elsewhere, but my computing history was basically "wanting a Mac -> using PCs during the dead period of the 90s -> lusting after a used NeXT system -> buying a Mac" and it pretty much coincides with Steve Jobs' tenure with the company.

Can you imagine what Pixar would be like if someone else had bought George Lucas's computer graphics division?

Or, god forbid, it stayed a Lucas property.

remember whiney's thread a few weeks ago where ebbybody got butthurt about Horkheimer/Adorno and whether they thought referencing Marxist theory was pretentious frontin or not? Well, I kinda wish TA were around right now to say some profound shit about the commodification of mass production, and the anointed son cult of personality around Jobs.

He was always a super-secretive guy, but I found it curious that this article (from last August) notes that there is no public record of any charitable giving on Jobs' part:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/the-mystery-of-steve-jobss-public-giving/

What's more, the article notes that when he returned to Apple in 1997, he ended the company's philanthropic programs and never restored them:

Mr. Jobs’s views on charity are unclear since he rarely talks about it. But in 1997, when Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he closed the company’s philanthropic programs. At the time, he said he wanted to restore the company’s profitability. Despite the company’s $14 billion in profits last year and its $76 billion cash pile today, the giving programs have never been reinstated.

I'd be interested to learn if he's been secretly up to charitable stuff, but apparently Apple has long been considered one of America's least philanthropic companies.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, October 6, 2011 8:49 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

was gonna post about this too. apple is pretty much the only major company in the u.s. with no charitable giving. and the big deal isn't that he ended the philanthropic programs to cut corners, it's that he never restored them even once the company became one of the most profitable companies in the world.

And I think people who make fun of NeXT computers often don't understand the workstation market, that it existed, and that it was dying.

― dan selzer, Thursday, 6 October 2011 13:59 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

who made fun of next? i kill them.

those machines are literally the reason i have the job i have today.

stupidest fucking thing, tho "I knew I could tell Steve Jobs what to do so I was going to". He already had the scoop and the story. This was just him going "cry uncle, bitch".

― stet, Thursday, October 6, 2011 10:06 AM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well, right, the whole essay is about how kindly SJ treated him even though he was--as he admits several times--an enormous dick

some of my fondest academic memories from college involve working on graphics projects with my roommate in a lab full of NeXT workstations

Funny how Lam would come out with a story like that only now that Jobs is no longer around to dispute it.

― James Mitchell, Thursday, October 6, 2011 10:13 AM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, its funny that lam would write an essay about what a nice guy steve jobs is when steve jobs isnt around to say "im actually an asshole"

i think, at least since Princess Diana, there has been a trend towards a histrionic public grieving of celebrities. I don't know what it means but it does seem significant of something. im actually tempted to connect it to Julian Jaynes type theories about the gods really just being dead chiefs/leaders, except that now these are tabloid celebrities or face behind our mass consumption.

http://www.achievement.org/newsletter/audio/jobs-aud.mov Jobs in 82.

IS there really a huge groundswell of grieving here, though? I mean I've seen a few bunches of flowers about the place, but we're not talking Diana or Jacko or something here.

Or, god forbid, it stayed a Lucas property.

Was wondering about that on the way into work. I can see Lasseter now, just a behind the scenes man on some of the DVDs talking about the great challenge it was working on Jar Jar Binks.

i think, at least since Princess Diana, there has been a trend towards a histrionic public grieving of celebrities.

Poor Elvis, nobody cared.

for my own part im a little sad because Jobs was too young and obviously brilliant, and cancer sucks. I have no illusions about his or Apple's role as a corporation seeking profit (nor my own complicity in that and the likely suffering those systems cause).

i wasnt around for Elvis! point taken though.

i mean, i guess we could go back to Valentino if we really wanted to.

Jim Morrison, maybe?

Look I just wrote a poem about this : D

Step forward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend.
Are you also a good friend of the good people?
Hear us then: we know.
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall. But in consideration
of your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.

Don't think he would've wanted anything more tbh

So does this mean that the iPhone5 will shoot to the number one position?

I lol'ed in spite of myself.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/eternal_flame.gif

what a weird comic. is that a reference to some movie i don't know? is that what the new cupertino campus is going to look like?

Wonder if the NeXT Cube I bought for 20 bucks is going up in value.

It's labelled "Eternal Flame" on the XKCD site xp

cf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/JFK_grave.jpg

ugh comparing jobs to kennedy makes me feel ill

Local Apple Store has their the lights, as if they're trying to create some weird chapel-of-remembrance atmosphere in there.

At work today I have had about ten times the usual number of requests for new iMacs & MacBooks :S

has dimmed their lights

i would think they'd take the day off at the apple store

Whoa whoa whoa there's money to be made here.

ask not what your ipad 2 case can do for you

symbolism:

the flame that does not go out vs. the browser that always beachballs

Whoa whoa whoa there's money to be made here.

― You people are supposed to be some kind of music culture intelligentsi (Phil D.), Thursday, October 6, 2011 8:25 AM (2 minutes ago)

in a somewhat tacky confluence of marketing, i received an iPhone4S spam mail around the time of Jobs' death yesterday.