What if Steve Jobs had stayed back in Benares?

13 Comments

“In the early

13 Comments

  4. Imagine the surprise of the doctors when they enter Steves room only to see that his head has expanded to three times it’s normal size. (and this article is clearly seen on his 17″ Powerbook)

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  5. Way back in Early 70’s, the MIT Architecture Machine Group (which evolved into the Media Lab) was already developing mulitmedia interfaces for computers. For example, my Master’s Thesis “Spatial Data Management” in 1978 was a full-desktop implementation, in colour, with 8’x11′ rear-projected video screen, speech-recognition, Captain Kirk control chair with touch-sensitive joysticks and touchpads, 8-channel sound, dual 16″ colour touch-sensitive navigation monitors, recursive expanding resolution digital images, virtual frame buffer, and on and on. Check SIGGRAPH archives for my earliest paper publication.

    Alan Kay said of my work – ‘This has my vote for the “best all around and most beautiful” UI of the 70s — too bad it was
    just a demo — but what a demo! Andy Herzfeld has said he was
    influenced by it’

    And there were many other groups building or considering the construction of mulitmedia computers with graphical interfaces, for example Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC).

    So, Steve’s real contribution was in building a forward-looking company and Macintosh team, with panache and style, and a true understanding of what “real people” wanted in computers.

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  6. That’s right Bill, but what a cool and funky interface it was. Unfortunaltly we could not port it into the Apple II with its amazing 64K RAM card that controlled the registers of the two laser discs of the Aspen project . ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />

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  8. Apple didn’t invented the floppy disk. In fact, IBM had 8″ floppy disks and drives far before. What Woz did (with the help form someone else) was to substitute the way the drive coded the 1’s and 0’s to the disk drive. IBM at. al. uses electronics to code and write to the disk, while Woz decided that software can do that, so the drive’s electronics became so simple.

    Woz chose a writing method that don’t permit to write two consecutive zeroes or ones (because the reader would read just one. One of the tricks was to code the data extended it so there were not two consecutive zeroes.

    Maybe Apple didn’t invented GUI from scratch, but at least they took what were out there (Xerox’s PARC) and developed it and popularized it. The same applys for the device already known as mouse (developed on the 60’s at IBM).

    Sometimes it is much more important to bring those technologies to the masses than it is to hold them in drawers.

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  9. If Jobs had stayed back in Benares, computers would probably still be room-sized devices running spools of tape (Apple invented the floppy disk drive), their secrets known only to cultish initiates. Even if computers became smaller, there would be no mouse, no graphical user interface, which Jobs introduced with the Mac. The internet would be something that only the Pentagon and universities would be using,” writes OutLookIndia.com.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Hhahahahah This is such bullshit.. that’s like saying if it werent’ for MS, we would have 13 different OS’s.. one for each hardware maker..

    the mouse, the GUI (inspired by Xerox) and… oh jeez.. THE INTERNET… would have come in time…

    As it happened.. SJ spearheaded the first two.. but the INTERNET!?

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  10. This article is quite uninformed. While Apple did release the technology publically, a lot of it was created from already existing technology. We should thank the great business men who gave away the graphical interface and mouse for free.

    However, a more interesting spin on this article would be, IF Steve Jobs never started up Apple with Steve Wozniak, Microsoft would not be the conglomerate that it is today (Bill Gates recreating the Mac OS after getting a test version of the first Macintosh to develop his business applications). You could even say the world would of been a better place if Steve Jobs never came back.

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  11. Given his intense charisma and pathological need for control, had Jobs stayed in India he would have founded a fanatical cult of zealots. Most adherents would be vegetarians, and there would be ceaseless strife with followers of other religions over which one was really “for the rest of us”. Oh wait…I just described India.

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  12. i love the apple but
    -xerox invented the mouse, the gui
    -ibm the diskette
    “Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh” as it is said in each press releases…

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