September 8, 2010 at 16:35Steve Jobs has not developed any projects.
Attention! this is not a post of evil!
The wonderful book Programmers at Work, consists of a short introduction and the following 19 interviews with various programmers, an average of 15-20 pages each. It was published in 1986 during the golden age of microcomputers, and contains interviews with such personalities as Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc), Gary Kildal (CP / M) and even Bill Gates (while he was a hacker and main author of Microsoft BASIC) .
The interview with Gates is certainly very exciting, but the conversation with Jeff Raskin, creator of the Apple Macintosh project, can attract your attention much more. Raskin in it criticizes Steve Jobs himself!
Recently, more and more talk has been going on around Jobs’s personality and his contribution to the company: that the new vision of the company and the revival of Apple began thanks to his unique ideas and developments, that Apple, if you want, practically Jobs’s toy and all products coming from the company are his merit, grown out of his hobby. It was generally agreed that Jobs's vision was the driving force behind the Macs.
This could be true, and we all think so, but Ruskin said that everything is not quite so. Here is literally what he said in his interview in that distant 1986 . (excerpts from pages 229 to 231):
Now, hardly anyone can say how true this is. We don’t know enough about Apple’s history to form our own opinions and determine where the truth is and where the fiction is. It is also worth emphasizing that this interview was done 24 years ago , and it is likely that Ruskin’s opinion changed at the time of his death in 2005. Nevertheless, for many it was a big surprise to read about such a diametrically opposite opinion about the history of Apple from the lips of one of the key players in the history of the company.
via The Reinvigorated Programmer
The wonderful book Programmers at Work, consists of a short introduction and the following 19 interviews with various programmers, an average of 15-20 pages each. It was published in 1986 during the golden age of microcomputers, and contains interviews with such personalities as Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc), Gary Kildal (CP / M) and even Bill Gates (while he was a hacker and main author of Microsoft BASIC) .
The interview with Gates is certainly very exciting, but the conversation with Jeff Raskin, creator of the Apple Macintosh project, can attract your attention much more. Raskin in it criticizes Steve Jobs himself!
Recently, more and more talk has been going on around Jobs’s personality and his contribution to the company: that the new vision of the company and the revival of Apple began thanks to his unique ideas and developments, that Apple, if you want, practically Jobs’s toy and all products coming from the company are his merit, grown out of his hobby. It was generally agreed that Jobs's vision was the driving force behind the Macs.
This could be true, and we all think so, but Ruskin said that everything is not quite so. Here is literally what he said in his interview in that distant 1986 . (excerpts from pages 229 to 231):
When I proposed making a computer [Macintosh] that would be easy to use, combine text and graphics, and sell for about $ 1,000, Jobs called my idea crazy that we could never sell it and we didn't need anything like that. He tried to close the project.
So I left Jobs away and went to the then chairman of the board, Mike Markula, to discuss the details of my idea. Fortunately, he and then-President of the company, Mike Scott, told Jobs not to bother me.
We went to another building and built prototypes of the Macintosh and its software, and having received approval gave the project a go. [...] We tried to save our project from Steve’s intervention. The first two years, Jobs wanted to “kill” him, because he did not understand what we were actually trying to create.
If Jobs wanted to get a loan for what he did for the industry, he would hardly get much. But it turns out that he is assigned the merits of the others, which is very unfortunate. I was very amused by what he said in a recent Newsweek article: “I still have a couple of new projects for the future.” But he never had any projects. He did not develop anything concrete. Woz (Steve Wozniak) developed Apple II. Ken Rothmuller and the rest did Lisa. I developed a Mac with my team. Wendell Sanders made the Apple III. What did Jobs do? Nothing.
Jobs's only contribution to the Macintosh project was that he tried unsuccessfully to cancel it.
Now, hardly anyone can say how true this is. We don’t know enough about Apple’s history to form our own opinions and determine where the truth is and where the fiction is. It is also worth emphasizing that this interview was done 24 years ago , and it is likely that Ruskin’s opinion changed at the time of his death in 2005. Nevertheless, for many it was a big surprise to read about such a diametrically opposite opinion about the history of Apple from the lips of one of the key players in the history of the company.
via The Reinvigorated Programmer