Got to say, I'm not now and never have been a fan of Mac/Apple computers. I don't have an iPad or an iPhone, and don't really want either one. But I still feel compelled to pay a tribute to one of the people who invented the 21st century.
I don't know anything about Steve Jobs. Have heard he was hard-driving and somewhat eccentric -- that is, very individualistic. And I suspect that's only part of what it takes to accomplish what Steve Jobs accomplished.
A man who worked for Xerox's PARC laboratory told me a story about many years ago, two fresh-faced kids touring the facility. PARC, by the way, was Xerox's very high-tech research center. It's closed now, I believe, and Xerox sold the patents and licenses on some of the remaining undeveloped concepts produced there.
At any rate, according to this man's story, these two computer geeks, Jobs and Wozniak, barely beyond their teen years, visited PARC and were given a demonstration of a very primitive graphic interface that employed icons and stuff like that instead of making users go through those long, long lists of DOS files. Xerox had no plans to do anything with it, but it was interesting.
Next thing that happened was the Macintosh, wtih that "user-friendly" interface featuring little cartoons of file folders, spinning hourglasses, and tiny hands to push things around the screen. It was cute. And more than that, Jobs and Wozniak made it useful.
Anyone but me recall that 1984 Super Bowl ad with the woman running into the grim, smoky meeting room... a scene taken from the movie, 1984, complete with Big Brother pontificating to the masses on a huge TV screen. The woman runs up and tosses a hammer into the screen, smashing conformity and introducing the Mac.
Fast forward to about 1997 or so, and I clearly recall writing a brief item on corporate quarterly reports for a business publication. In the last quarter of that year -- a short and apparently very painful three months -- Apple lost $700 million. I couldn't even conceive of it and suspected we wouldn't be hearing much from Apple anymore. The corporate market was using the Windows platform -- the concept of the user-friendly interface borrowed from Apple -- and Macs were rapidly becoming a niche product for graphic artists. The Mac remains the preferred system in the graphic arts. Macs have more power, really, to move big color files around and manipulate images.
So Jobs returns to the company and comes up with the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone. And Bill Gates jokes about, "Gee, I wish I'd thought of that."
It's just amazing to me -- all of it is. I'm older than Steve Jobs, so he was born, grew up, prospered, and passed away all within my lifetime. And he changed the world.
And all without a government subsidy.
The world needs more like him. And we need an America ("the last, best hope of earth") where he or she will be free to dream and to turn the dreams, the what-ifs, the wouldn't-that-be-cools into something useful, beautiful, and profitable -- for everyone.
Save the Republic.
No comments:
Post a Comment