[jimbokun]

"Apple II, Macintosh GUI, Pixar, iPod and now the iPhone"

Have to admit, that's one hell of a score card.

Gates can take credit (as much credit as Jobs gets for above) for Windows, Office, and XBox. Then I'm sure Thomas Watson gets credited for some insane amount of stuff during his time running IBM.

Any other technology leader deserve to be in the above conversation, in terms of overseeing products with an outsize influence on the industry?

[weegee]

Macintosh GUI was pioneered at Xerox PARC, not at Apple. But Steve was smart enough to see the value in it and bring it into the marketplace with the Lisa. The Lisa flopped, and over in another building there was a team developing Macintosh. Steve got involved and the rest is history.

[redrobot5050]

And the original design for the macintosh was utter trash and it wouldn't have even made the history books. The idea behind it was supposed to be a "toaster with an friendly interface". It would be like doing a $300 netbook, but with 1980s technology. It was going to compete with the Atari, not IBM.

Cut and Paste made the Macintosh. Double-clicking made the Macintosh. Beautiful (for the time) typography defined the Macintosh. The "Start-up" chime. The Fast boot sequence. The abandoning of legacy 5.25" floppies. All of these design decisions were Steve's. And love it or leave it, he made something remarkable and lasting. Something that inspires people to sign on for the "cult of mac".

[weegee]

well I was 15 years old when my dad bought our Mac, the Mac 512k. I thought it was a brilliant design, it easily fit on a desktop, was portable from room to room, it had a gorgeous display (compared to other computers at the time), and it came with a good word processing (MacWrite) app and a fun graphics app (MacPaint). I think making the computer small made it easier to approach for a lot of other people. You know, less intimidating. I've read quite a few books about the Mac, and they had their eyes on IBM, not Atari, as their primary competitor. And I think we have to credit Jef Raskin for a lot of the design decisions, after all, he was the one who started the Macintosh project in the first place, although his original vision for it was more like a netbook than what it eventually became. I still have my Mac Plus at home, sitting in a box, and it still works perfectly as it has since 1989 when I got it before entering university. It's the same form factor as the original Macintosh, and it's a design icon in the computer world.