lalitha

thanku blueman this was really beautiful

mdawrcn

Oh wow. Thank you for posting that bluemoon. What beautiful tribute to a very special person.

bluemoon

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html?pagewanted= all&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB

bluemoon

I think the intuitive interaction with the machine is a about Jobs vision.

chelydra

I intended to to sit this one out, thinking I had little to add here. But it just occurred to me that Jobs changed my life. I was one of the few people who bought one of his NeXT computers, and possibly the only one in the world for whom is was their first-ever computer. I looked and looked, and NeXT was the only computer I didn't loathe. All the rest seemed grubby and almost slimy in contrast, and not just in their grayish-beige plasticky exteriors. With the NeXT (bought with help of a 40% academic discount), I discovered I could not only bat out fliers and leaflets in no time flat (some of the software was better than anything I've seen since!) but also use a scanner and the built in indexing system to figure out which local politicians and real estate developers were in league with which of the New York crime families. I spent about a year feeding in documents of all kinds (this was pre-internet) and used the information to stop some huge evil boondoggles that seemed to be done deals before me and my NeXT (and our allies) blew the whistle on Mob involvement. This was the culmination of over 20 years of local grassroots activism, and the Next computer turned what would have been defeats into stalemates, and stalemates into victories. This was a direct result of Jobs' obsession with quality and clarity and user-friendliness. The company's best customer (by far) was the CIA, which was probably using that magical instant-indexing system the same way I was, although for different purposes.
That same miraculous operating system is now being phased in as the Mac OSX, which is gradually starting to become almost as good as the original version. I broke down and bought a Mac ten years after the NeXT (just before OSX) and I felt I had gone BACKWARDS ten years in time. The NeXT is still in perfect working order, and if it had an internet connection it might still be my main 'puter. Jobs was certainly not the only genius involved, and I think perhaps he wasn't even a genius himself, but someone with a rare talent for assembling and motivating geniuses (which is arguably more important).