[pupppet]

After more or less six years of running this demo, a designer (Steve) steps in and makes a couple suggestions that very much improved the experience, suggestions that took only a few seconds to implement in Alan’s own words. Alan seems to poopoo Steves’s visit but it highlights exactly why the computer industry needed Jobs.

[copenja]

Do you feel that the value of Steve Jobs is underappreciated? In the mainstream media he has received perhaps more attention and praise than anyone else in the computer industry. He is widely considered to be a genius and given nearly sole credit for a wide range of innovations.

I think it's okay for the guys who invented the GUI to also get a small fist bump.

[pdpi]

In mainstream media, Jobs is a god amongst men. In technical circles, he's demonised. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle, and the HN audience in particular is one that probably needs reminding that he did have valuable input to contribute.

[michaelmrose]

"The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle"

This statement ticks me off to an unreasonable degree. The truth is complicated. Any clear spectrum drawn between 2 points is an artificial construct. There is no reason to suppose that the truth would just happen to lie in the middle of an artificial spectrum. In fact if it did on average it would be incredibly strange.

Further the world is full of morons who espouse clearly ridiculous things and the truth doesn't lie somewhere midway between sanity and insanity.

Jobs is a great businessman who excelled at turning other peoples ideas into piles of money not at making the world a better place. People like kay changed the way people interact with computers.

Jobs isn't halfway between god and demon hes just not that important.

[blackguardx]

I'm not sure what you mean. There are plenty of people here that recognize Jobs' positive contributions. In fact, most HN threads about Jobs devolve into acolytes fighting detractors.

[cptskippy]

I think the demonization you're referring to is rooted in the fact that he receives or takes credit for innovations he helped refine but definitely didn't invent. Where as the inventers receive little to no credit of appreciation for their contributions.

[mehrdada]

> The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle

I have found [irrespective of this case] that this statement is just not true. Often, the truth is not in the middle but at one of the extremes, or even beyond them.

[tyingq]

I don't discount Jobs' influence, but I think people tend to dismiss the degree to which luck is involved. Jobs certainly made plenty of mistakes, but was in the right place, at the right time, enough times to overcome them.

I tend to think if you take Jobs, or Gates, or any other icon out of the picture, somebody else would have filled the void. And the end state might be slightly different, but not that much. Maybe Kildall, CP/M, and GEM would have filled part of the Apple void, for example.

[protomyth]

Every successful person had some event(s) that are lucky. Dismissing a person's accomplishments because they got lucky in some way is disingenuous. Unlucky people get hit by cars and never fulfill their potential.

Jobs defined how the mass market 8-bit computers looked for example[1]. GEM wouldn't exist without the Mac, and well, CP/M was actually the first choice but some people have one bad day.

If the giants of the industry didn't exist then we'd be living in an alternate reality with different pillars to support later people. I often think about Rome. They had all the technology to move to something like the steam engine. Maybe someone in the empire got close and just had some bad days, but it never really got done until much later. People who see something different are not interchangeable. You might get close, but all the experience that brought someone to a point isn't going to be duplicated. Parallel inventions happen, but even they are not exact duplicates (e.g. a different notation for Calculus).

1) it is almost a iPhone type display on how 8-bit computers looked before the Apple ][ and then after. This is no way says anything about my opinion of which 8-bit computer was the best.

[fragmede]

A slightly more "we're-living-it" example is to look at Elon Musk and Tesla. Mr. Musk has succeeded in convincing the auto industry to make electric cars. Not all by himself, mind you, certainly the EU emissions regulatory environment had something to do with the "convincing", but nor were those regulations dreamed up in a world where Tesla did not exist.

Fisker tried and failed at around the same time Tesla was making the roadster, so while there is certainly an element of luck to Elon Musk's success, saying it's all due to luck undercuts the fact that he's also worked very, very hard to get where he is - there are stories about him sleeping in the factory so he can do QC inspections himself.

I'm doubtful that electric cars would be in the same position they are in today, if this single individual, Elon Musk, had not existed, but that's impossible to prove - there were hobbyists who were converting Mazda Miatas and Honda Civics to electric engines, without Mr. Musk, would one of those hobbyists have "made it big" and managed to the auto industry into the future?

[rljy]

But this still potentially "luck". Or perhaps "luck" is a very bad term. Imagine that Musk had a twin name Allen who happened to start a company called "pay-now". And "pay-now" was hit with a lawsuit related to the patent on eshops and had to shut down. Allen would never have started Tesla. Would we even know about Allen? He wouldn't even be rich. His behavior, timing, actions ect. were identical to those of Musk, but his outcome was greatly different. There are probably several Allens out there. Now, consider, what if Musk was identical, but he had never started paypal at all. Instead he, after studying electric drive trains for 20 years, made a proposal to investors that an electric car company should be started. This Allen would be MORE qualified than Musk to start an electric car company, but lacking capital to back the investments, he would be LESS likely to succeed!

[fragmede]

I hate to break this to you, but the American myth; that if Allen is just as smart, and works just as hard as Elon Musk, then they both get to be just as successful, is a sham; a lie. There are definitely many Allens out there, but shame of failure means we barely ever hear that story. There are people dumber and lazier than you or I, that have far more money than you ever will, or at least did far less work to get there. Not to be cynical about the world, but there's more to life than fame or fortune.

There is undoubtedly luck involved in business, I can agree with that. FedEx's Vegas story from their early days could easily have gone the other direction, and then they wouldn't even rate a mention in a book about the history of shipping.

However, I disagree about studious Allen - someone who studied drive trains for 20 years is less qualified than serial entrepreneur Mr. Musk, who had two successful businesses under his belt before coming on board Tesla simply due to his experience running businesses. That Mr. Musk was already wealthy from those businesses which gave him a leg up with Tesla seems unfair to everyone who didn't start off independently wealthy, but c'est la vie. (There have been several articles recently about the dearth of new software company IPOs, due to how much the big 3 control the industry.)

Starting an auto manufacturing business was never going to be a bootstrapped operation the same way a two-person software startup in a garage could be, so having funding to hire a good drivetrain engineer is simply part of it. Having studied electric drivetrains for 20 years, maybe Allen ends up a very early employee at his brother's car company, and if that goes public, then Allen will be very rich - say he's still holding on to 50k shares of pre-IPO TSLA, he's doing quite well for himself, despite not being famous. Not nearly as well as Elon Musk, but he's doing well enough.

That's not to say Allen couldn't learn about news skill so he can run a business, or about, say, the intricacies of lithium battery manufacturing, but studying drivetrains for 20 years doesn't make a CEO. CTO for a drivetrain subcontractor perhaps, but sales and marketing and managing people; all those soft skills that aren't hard-core engineering building a product are actually vital to a company's success. (There was even a post on HN early today saying just that very thing.)

Elon Musk's success with SpaceX's success comes from rejecting prevailing industry knowledge - that reusable rockets just won't work. Everyone else in the industry, especially those that had been studying rockets for 20 years, knew that as fact.

[tyingq]

I wasn't dismissing his contributions. Just that luck does play into it. Meeting Woz, for example, was fortunate for him. Jobs likely would have been successful anyway, but maybe in a completely different field.

[microtherion]

And yet... consider what products Jobs was associated with without Wozniak, Atkinson, or Hertzfeld (to name only 3 of the deservedly famous techies who worked with him) involved. Then consider what products these three were associated with without Jobs involved.

At some point, "luck" ceases to be a particularly viable hypothesis.

[carussell]

What are you saying? Did Jobs's suggestions improve things so much that they wrapped around to being terrible or something?

Because virtually every single desktop or mobile UI in the world—including Mac and iOS—does the Smalltalk thing and highlights the text, not the Jobs thing to put a box outline around it.

This is embarrassingly unrepentant idol worship.

[torgoguys]

1. Jobs' suggestion of outlining text is not the norm today.

2. Pixel by pixel scrolling is, but that it was done line-by-line on the Xerox computer could have been a deliberate performance concession for this 70s era hardware. Redrawing large sections of the screen over and over (for every pixel of scroll) was very slow by modern standards and not redrawing every pixel was often preferable on those systems even if you could do it.

[timthelion]

Pixel by pixel scrolling was so hard, that one of the parts of the original MSWindows drawing api was "shift up/down by one pixel" for the purpose of scrolling and this was to hardware accelerated on systems that supported it. The API was otherwise completely low level.

[alankay1]

See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for other reasons.

[agumonkey]

I don't like to shit on steve jobs, he was a cultural father (like gates, or other figures of that cherished era). That said, what jobs saw was the outer layer, the shallow experience. It has hard consequences:

- it's what the user wants to feel quickly: beauty (it drives sales also)

- it's not what the user wants to have: understanding (it's .. non existent for a commercial market)

both are true, still the elusion of the underlying layer saddens me to no end.

Another example: the copy key, in mainstream OSes you copy some text, in PARC OS, you copy an object, the whole graph; it's life altering in capabilities and simplicity. It even has a dedicated key !

[robotresearcher]

On the Mac desktop copy and paste has long (always?) worked with file & folder icons, i.e. objects.

[rudedogg]

I think the parent is talking about that behavior, but extended throughout the entire OS. You can see this in some apps, one that comes to mind is Sketch and its concept of "symbols".

I think the complaint is that copy/cut/paste was weak in the beginning, and generally just worked with plain text. This weakened the metaphor to where now we don't expect much else, but it could have been much more powerful.

[agumonkey]

I believe it was a per application design. File explorer could copy folder and files (windows too). But you can't copy anything out of the box.

[robotresearcher]

The macOS Finder comes in the box. Copy paste a file icon to replicate a file. I just tried it and it works.

[agumonkey]

can you copy an application ? a window ? a structured paragraph ?

[lostlogin]

Yes to an app, no to a window and I don’t know what a structured paragraph is. I can’t explain how but being able to copy a window seems like it would break the metaphor.

[robotresearcher]

An application (*.app), yes. Window, no. Structured paragraph, yes.

Shrug.

[alankay1]

See my comment above, including the last paragraph