October 5th 2011

[Lunkhead]

Steve Jobs died. I've been a Mac user since I started really using computers, in high school, and learned to touch type and do some BASIC programming on Apple II's before that. My Kool-Aid started to wear off around the time of the iPhone and dropping "Computer" from the company name, but even still I think the Mac is the best personal computer and I'll be hard pressed to find anything that will work as well for things like multitrack audio recording any time soon, I think.

QOTD: Has your life been effected somehow by Steve Jobs, Next, Apple, Pixar, etc.? If so, how?

[Spud]

I am dumbstruck. Regardless of my feelings about Apple computers (I had been using computers for several years when the Mac first came out. It was the first computer I had ever seen that I couldn't sit down at and make it do something - I was completely baffled (and still am)), I had an enormous respect for Steve Jobs. I referenced him in my design classes, even though I loathed his designs. Call it genre bias, if you want. There goes one of the good ones.

[fluffy]

I'm not a fan of Apple and yet I'm always surrounded by Apple computers by my own choice. They just suck less. I use an iPod Touch as an alarm clock. I switch between an iPod Classic and an iPod nano (second generation, pink) for my music listening. At home I actively use a MacBook pro, two Mac minis, an Apple TV, an Airport Extreme, and two Airport Expresses, and also have a PowerMac G5, an older Apple TV, a PowerMac G4 tucked away in closets somewhere, as well as a bunch of other iPods. Each thing that is still in use is used for its own purpose, that it does quite well (although one of the Apple TVs and the PowerMac G5 aren't in use).

Sometimes Apple stuff infuriates me with its single-mindedness but at the end of the day it still does everything I want far better than any of the other things out there.

I also stick to OSX because of its UNIX roots and because it has good music software. Logic Studio wasn't Steve's doing but the eMagic acquisition and the subsequent Applefication of the user interface probably had Jobs' hands in them.

A singularity of vision is pretty rare these days, and being able to execute on that vision is almost unheard of. And that is what Jobs brought to the table.

[roymond]

I totally understand Spud's and others' not being aligned with Apple design, etc. We're all wired different(ly). And I am exactly out of alignment with most everything the other platforms did. Apple brought design to the digital platform.

I learned programming on mid sized machines (PDP11s, etc.) with punch cards, then remote terminals, then the original IBM PC. I started coding digital typography on PCs in the early 80s and produced journals and magazines that way. I went to grad school for programming and digital imaging, again, on big machines that were more or less forced to do what they did. But the Mac changed all that and changed my career big time. I spent close to 10 years at Time Inc. during the desktop publishing revolution, when PC World was published...on a Mac, like nearly every other magazine. Images, typography, illustration, color were all enabled by the Mac. Plug-in architecture (as we know it today) started at Quark and Adobe, on Macs. We had off the shelf Macs running as powerhouse servers for years, when MS servers had to be rebooted every week. Their remote access controls, headless utility, and fabulous memory management couldn't be beat other than by the Sun servers, which they ran along side of.

I started midi music recording on the IBM in 1985, but within a couple years I changed to the Mac. Sound, music, midi, color, fonts were baked into the OS. It just worked. I was baffled when friends would have to upgrade their video card or install a sound card. Wtf? Apple was born with this in its DNA and didn't need much more than a power outlet.

I didn't drink the kool-aide, I just had to get things done. Enjoying it was something I took for granted.

What was the question, again?

[BBABM]

I really don't know if it had to do with him in even the slightest, but I had an Apple II, and a Macintosh ( what later became the Mac classic) as my first computers. My dad was a big Mac guy. I played countless hours of "crystal quest". Literally countless. I have looked for that game, and can not find ... Not to mention Carmen Sandiego was my bitch... I use an iPhone and an iPad, But now I consider myself a pc guy. I still have a huge respect for Steve Jobs, and the way he thought about people. He may not have known everything about everything, but he knew what people liked. He knew how to market things as powerful enough for the enthusiast, and easy enough for grandma. I am on the grandma end of computers.

[fluffy]

Apple II was a collaboration of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The original Mac was Jobs' pet project.

The Mac Classic was technically NOT the original Mac, but a later model that was a return to the iconic style but with somewhat more modern hardware (it had a much faster version of the same CPU and significantly more memory). The original Macintosh, Mac 512K, and Mac Plus were pretty meagre by comparison. However, the Mac Classic came out when Jobs was in exile.

There's plenty of information about the old Macs at http://lowendmac.com/early-macs.html

My high school switched from PCs to Macs while I was there, and I pretended to be too cool for them, but secretly I liked them a lot, despite outwardly acting as if they were just for stupid people. I actually got my start at digital art on one, because one of the classrooms had a Quadra AV with a Wacom tablet and Fractal Painter (now Corel Painter). So even though I only personally switched to Mac in 2001 (because I wanted a laptop that could run a UNIX-like operating system without too much trouble), Macs had been a pretty important part in my development.

Oh, and I always loved NeXT computers, which is probably why I love OSX so much - it has much more in common with NeXTstep than what used to be called Mac OS.

[Manhattan Glutton]

I didn't "get" Apple until I had to develop for the iPhone for my job. The development side is as beautiful as the UI and hardware. There is a lot of love put into their APIs, unlike other unnamed companies. After attending WWDC 2010, I was a convert and now I'm looking to buy a Mac. There is something to be said about doing things the right way, despite deadlines and pressure.

Sent from my iPad.

[Billy's Little Trip]

! ( % % - @ ) ! !
Death is imminent, but it's nice to know that you left behind a legacy and made a difference during your stay on this planet.