Steve Jobs' bio man tackles geeks who 'created the digital revolution' This is an enthralling but slightly flawed read written by Walter Isaacson – of Steve Jobs' authorised biography fame. Computers first entered human consciousness just over 170 years ago, when Charles Babbage was working on his mechanical difference engine and Ada Lovelace described programming. Since that seminal time, the …
FWIW, +1.
Some (very little) of these mechanisms survived, in very poor condition.
Please do a Google search for 'Antikythera Mechanism'. The Antikythera Mechanism is a special-purpose computer, and it is more than 2000 years old.
Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
It is presumed - though not proven - that the Antikythera Mechanism is based on engineering designs by Archimedes.
Indeed. Some forty years ago I first encountered 'lagniappe!" in a Harlan Ellison story, "On the downhill side" (fairly depressing, second-law-of-thermodynamics kind of thing).
At the time I was pursuing a conjoint arts/science double degree, the BA in modern languages and the BSc in Physics and math. It piqued my interest enough to scramble for my Skeat's etymological dictionary - it wasn't there but I found it in Big Ox. Mark Twain had licked his lips over the word in "Life on the Mississippi" and I'm guessing Mr Ellison pinched it from Twain. It's since become quite widely used in science fiction.
What made me remember this was that 'lagniappe' came to English via New Orleans French, which got it from the a spanish creole, which ultimately formed it from the Quechua language spoken in Peru. This was peculiar. Peru is a hell of a long way from New Orleans. Also Quechua was one of three important languages considered to use SOV at the time (the others being Turkish and Japanese). What a wonderful journey that word had been on. Sort of illustrated Ellison's point.
it is doomed to fail I tell ye, doomed.
The Fandrod community will be unhappy with the great Satan (aka S. Jobs) on the front cover so that won't help sales either. They will have to go into therapy and chant 5000 times every day , "Apple do not Innovate Ever' in order to ward off the Devil.
Bell was 1st because they had bought in more recently produced purer Germanium.
The French about the same time as Bell Labs. But admittedly not very good transistors (they were recycling the Germanium out of diodes in WWII proximity fuses)
Westinghouse and RCA hampered by "bean counters" wanting them to use existing stocks.
Gradual Materials Science developments more than any one person enabled transistors and ICs.
With ICs the 6502 and 8080 based PCs that pre-dated the IBM PC were inevitable. The idea of transistors and ICs was in 1930s, but materials where not good enough and valves cheap (almost fully automated production, films transferred to video on YouTube). The Wartime 1940s era computing made transistor research very attractive. No-one really wanted 20,000 valve computers.
MS Basic was a port of Dartmouth Basic, a cut down beginers version of Fortran for Dartmouth (USA) students on their University Computer (Anyone know if it was IBM mainframe or DEC minicomputer? I think only the UK much used George on ICL, Students there having actual Fortran.in early to mid 1970s
Wozniak was a hardware guy.
The so-called "innovative ideas" Jobs is undeservedly credited for - graphical windowed user interface, mouse HID, networking, were stolen by Steve Jobs directly from Xerox PARC. Not one of these ideas were his. Nor did he ever write any code to implement these ideas.
However, Mr. Jobs did "innovate" quite a bit in other areas. Here's a short list of "innovations" Steve Jobs deserves full credit for:
- backdating stock options for himself and his friends (a criminal act), and avoiding prosecution for securities fraud
- coercing Silicon Valley companies into unlawful no-hire agreements, for the sole purpose of keeping rank-and-file employees' salaries stagnating and low (another criminal act)
- threatening to sue, and suing, any company who developed a competitive, and/or better product
- creating the Cult Of Personality CEO
Are any of these "innovations" mentioned in Mr. Isaacson's book?
> Apple did not steal anything from Xerox.
Yes, Apple and Steve Jobs did steal from Xerox PARC. It's documented fact, acknowledged by none other than Jobs himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpMeFh37mCE
Go back to your Apple PR boss and tell him/her "we need a new strategy in dealing with this".
One of the first great computers is the chess playing mechanical turk. Smoke and mirrors, but at the same time more real than Babbage (collectible) industrial garbage.
This kind of books is a modern form of religious litterature, with creational myths and his pantheon of deities-saints to be explained and quoted to the believers.
We need more women in software design, UI design as well as alpha/beta testing. IMHO I feel most of today's poor UI design choices (Ribbon, etc.) are due to male egotism's lower empathy - I like the UI, so therefore it is best, is not an unreasonable assumption to the average UI's development. Women would bring a fresh esthetic, a new viewpoint on both interaction and design, one that is sorely needed in all too many examples of modern software engineering. As women usually express greater ability in communication than many men, they will understand how a UI's poor implementation in some spots hinders its ability to function efficiently across a wide range of users due to an inability to clearly delineate and communicate its function.
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