On Oct 5, 2011, at 5:52 PM, Bosch, Juergen wrote: > http://www.apple.com/stevejobs/ > > May innovation continue to lead the future. > > Jürgen
I've been quite saddened about this all evening. Even though we knew it was coming, it is still incredibly sad, especially at his age (only 56). Although I never met him, through OS X, he made a fairly significant impact upon my life and career development (such as it is). The advent of OS X has had a significant impact upon both my professional and personal lives. Although I have worked with unix systems since the mid 1980s, it was only when OS X came along, and I made the switch (from SGI's Irix, which many of us remember fondly as a total pig of an OS), did I really come to enjoy using computers. As a crystallographer, a unix operating system really is essential I think, and when OS X appeared, a fundamental change took place in my office as a young assistant professor: I only needed one computer. Before, I had an enormous SGI sitting on a table, for doing science. With its stereographic hardware and dials, it put me back (well, actually, the taxpayer) about $12K for an R10,000, which had a 150MHz RISC processor. The sony trinatron monitor did a good job heating the room, especially in the summer. Then I had this little colored hunk of plastic, the first generation bottom-of-the-line iMac, upon which I wrote my papers and grant proposals, sitting on my desk. This left very little room in my office to mope and feel sorry for myself, which my wife tells me are the only things I am good at. OS X came on an extra CD packaged with an iBook I bought just before the Sept 11th attack. I remember, because I gave my first presentation using OS X 10.0.3 or something like that on that day, in Grenada, Spain, right next to the Alhambra. It was the worst talk I ever gave, but it wasn't the fault of the software. I was excessively nervous, so much so that my arch-competitor I guess took pity and tried to calm me down. Maybe I sensed something bad was about to happen. Anyway, it was an inauspicious start. I eventually made it home and put it on that colored piece of plastic in my office and discovered it really was a real unix operating system, albeit in its infancy. I sort of got lost in it for months at a time, and was determined to get all of the software used in macromolecular crystallography running on OS X. O was about the only thing at the time that seemed ready. What evolved from that was a crystallography on os x website, which started off as a chronicle of my pain, which I seem to feel an almost moral obligation to share and inflict upon everyone around me. (I work at a university that, frankly, isn't very good at infrastructural support, to put it mildly, and I wound up having to learn to do everything the hard way, by myself.) I think it is fair to say that Steve Jobs and OS X were some of the main things that made this, and my survival, possible. I've primarily used OS X I guess from the bottom up, but at the same time I was a bit of an Apple fan-boy in the sense that I got the first iPod when it came out, the first iPod Touch, the first MacBook Air, the first iPad, etc. I've never regretted any of those purchases, nor the purchase of the 20 or so Apple computers that I've acquired for work and family over the last decade or so. My newest OS X adventure has been into computer audio. I really still don't know much of anything about it, but again Apple has made it an enjoyable experience. I bitch and moan about iTunes as much as the next guy, but if you stop to think about it, it transformed the entire music industry, and turned what began as a network of illegal file sharing (Napster), something I regrettably missed out completely, into a legitimate business model. Some might look at this as co-opting, but I think there is a bit more to it than that. In any case, both from the perspective of hardware and software, Apple/Jobs completely changed how I listen to music. During that same decade I was starting out as an academic scientist, I had more or less given up on music almost completely. My oldest son now likes music (Pearl Jam, Joy Division, REM), but at the time he couldn't handle listening to it at all, probably as a consequence of being somewhere on the autistic spectrum. OS X provided an escape from all that for me, but it eventually also provided a relief for him I think, and through it he came to enjoy (some) music and now plays cello and electric guitar. So, I guess Steve Jobs has had a large, albeit indirect, influence on my life, and that of my family and research group. I never met him, but I've learned a bit about him through a former VP. I doubt I would have liked him very much personally. Obsessive secrecy and temper tantrums aren't my favorite personality traits. But as I continue to age, I realize superficial likability isn't really that much of an asset. I'm kind of worried about the future of my favorite platform. A friend once said to me that Apple and The Gap were the only companies that successfully marketed to my generation (those left to pick up the shattered pieces of the world left to us by the rampages of the infinitely self-entitled baby-boomers). Hopefully Apple doesn't go the way of The Gap. That is the trouble with a personality cult. I hope this is something different, and more sustainable. -- Bill
