I was at two seminal Steve Jobs events- the introduction of the Apple I and the introduction of the NeXT. The 2nd is in the movie and I have to see if it is accurate. From videos, he was more polished in the 2000s than 1980s.
I was a science grad student at Stanford and had some undergrad digital electronics labs and digital breadboarding summer jobs. So I read about build-it-yourself computer club that met at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Auditorium. I think I read it in some mimeographed computer newsletter the Stanford Math Library received which was a predecessor to Byte Magazine. Getting to SLAC by bicycle was nasty because it was up a challenging hill.
People demoed their projects there, often Rasberry-PI-type contraptions that did this and that. I remember one group managed to get their hands on a cast-off mini-computer and would code it through front panel dip-switches to make music and light designs. A bare mini-computer in those days cost a couple of annual salaries.
Well the two Steves were demoing and almost-turnkey micro-computer board. You had to add a power supply, television and keyboard. And it was in a wooden case. Plastic computer cases were another year or two in the future. I thought a turnkey PC was boring. All the fun was soldering together your own contraption in my view then.
Several other groups were selling turnkey computer boards too. One was called CroMemCo named after a Stanford dorm. which they operated from. Apple didnt really distinguish itself until the next product the Apple II which was a "designed" product, not a boring metal case.
I had a post-graduate Stanford job 11 years later. And had been a certified Mac Developer using ObjectPascal and all that stuff in the meantime.
Steve was targeting the NeXT for the academic world, so I got an invite. Steve rented the fanciest auditorium in San Francisco- Symphony Hall (though NeXT was just off the Stanford campus). No one had seen the NeXT computer yet. Most PCs up until then were some kind of off-white plastic slabs. When the NeXT was unveiled it was a dark-gray magnesium cube. (The Borg were still three years in the future.) The presentation began in a darkened auditorium. Then a computer screen started talking. It displayed something that looked like a Mac screen. PC multi-media was still crude then, so audience erupted at the high quality computer speech. The speech said something about how the new NeXT woud supercede all previous PCs. Then the light came on with NeXT cube unveiled and Steve launching into a product speech. Besides the high multimedia capabilities of the NeXT hardware, Steve also promoted the NeXTSTeP operating system and software-development kit. It was object-oriented top to bottom, pretty rare then, save for a few things at Xerox. This was supposed to make writing educational applications a "piece of cake".
The NeXT never really panned out at universities becasue it was expensive and slow. I became a certified Objectve-C developer for them too. I remember the first models taking forever to compile code, because it swapped files onto a an optical disk. The NeXT became a hit a financial services firms due its advanced software. Eventually the hardware itself was discontinued and they just sold the OS and SDKs, which Apple purchases to get into the 32-bit world.
Excellent behind the scenes write-up and I really appreciated the tone of elaborating on all the movie staff/crew doing their bits. Big productions are big! The fact checking and world making is something I'm also studious about when working on fictionalization of actual events or trying to establish a believable world. For instance, my projects include origin of the 14 Los Zetas, the Enron scandal, rigging the lottery, and others.
That noted, I really wish he'd had a chance to read the script. I'm...not a fan of Aaron Sorkin's approach to writing, to put it mildly. Time will tell, but if there's one "Oh, this could've been so much better" potential criticism, I get the feeling it'll be with Sorkin's material. Hipster cred claim: I was into Danny Boyle before it was cool.
Danny Boyle sounds great. A friend of mine actually saw him on the tube a few weeks back. She had been one of the performers in the London Olympics opening ceremony which he directed, and saw that he didn't look busy, so went up to him to thank him for the experience. She said he was really nice, and was on his way to a film festival[0].
After the Olympics opening ceremony I remember thinking that he deserved a knighthood for it. And apparently he was offered one but turned it down[1].
It's interesting to think about how a period piece can be very accurate at a micro-level, which takes a ton of effort by a lot of craftspeople, but inaccurate at a macro-level due to a poor screenplay.
The NeXT cube was often faster in perceived UI speed than my 2.3GHz MacBook Pro (this was after the 68040 upgrade). And the dock was more intuitive because it could be dragged into your desired position. And application menus were more useful because they could be detached.
27 years after its original introduction--color came maybe 25 years ago--and NeXTstep is still looking pretty good.
Ah, nostalgia! I still have a NeXT cube and monitor in my home office.
A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder what span of time will have been the most exciting for humanity. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the silicon age turned out to be it.
Veering a little further off-topic: In general I think the rule must be that for the average human (however you determine that) excitement and enjoyment levels over a given time window rise monotonically as you slide that window forwards in time, of course over some minimum size, probably 5-10 years, to smooth over catastrophic dips such as the most recent global recession.
People (my past self included) always instinctively think that periods in the past must have been better, freer, more exciting than the boredom and drudgery of today (all the ideas have been taken, all the frontiers explored, all theories examined) but in fact this is a line of thought that has persisted throughout human history (there's a famous quote about Physics being 'done' from the 1920s which is obviously amusing to think about almost 100 years on) and even when we think of the people who had it best in history, the kings of nations even, the average working person in the first world is vastly, vastly wealthier in many more ways and has more options on what to do with their time than those individuals could have dreamed of.
tl;dr - life for the average person only gets better, more exciting and more enjoyable as time goes on! Try to remind yourself of that often, when it seems like it's not the case, and never take it fore granted.
Well I am actually different in that I am jealous of the future but wonder how much better things can actually get?
Think about the pyramid of human needs from food and shelter to travel and entertainment.. How much better can food get, how much more enjoyable can a TV show get after breaking bad? haha
I hope I am wrong but I feel we have achieved 90% in each of the 'categories'. The last 10% will probably take 90% of the time it too to get here.
I agree, save for some breakthrough technologies that will be completely different, like truly immersive VR, robot helpers, good AI, space travel (where the average person is currently experiencing roughly 0%) I think most of the fundamentals are very well covered in the year 2015 - over 90% of where we'd want these things to be, definitely.
I'm inclined to think that now we need to focus more on time, and our enjoyment of it. At the risk of sounding like an incorrect and broken John Maynard Keynes record, the next golden age of humanity, and our goal, frankly, should be a future of plenty where we drive down the cost of these fundamentals to the point where we have to work a lot less, or even not at all, to enjoy them as a practically free baseline.
There will always be new toys to 'work' for and the economy (a version of it) will always keep spinning for those interested in such things, but a future where good food, shelter, travel, entertainment are free as a base to the average person is an utter paradise by today's standards - we're not even remotely close to that - it's attainable only some of the time, and then only in theory, only by significantly-above-average earners in the richest countries (by which I mean taking significant periods of time out from work, and having enough saved that these things are all still attainable).
I'm very jealous of a future where we all achieve that, to be honest. I hope we do.
I bet a thousand years ago, people will look at our era and be nostalgic, like they're nostalgic right now for knights in armor, the Renaissance, the age of exploration, privateers, explorers, and all that.
And just like now, I bet they're nostalgia will be completely misplaced because they fail to realize how much better their own time is, and how damaged their recollection of our time is. ;)
>Anyway, the story is that one day Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee, who had recently transferred to Cupertino from Paris, had just parked his car and was walking toward the entrance of the main office at Apple when Steve buzzed by him in his silver Mercedes and pulled into the handicapped space near the front of the building.
>As Steve walked brusquely past him, Jean-Louis was heard to declare, to no one in particular - "Oh, I never realized that those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped...".
Wasn't that Steve's building in the first place to do anything he wanted with?
If he didn't take the last available such space or actually cut off some handicapped Apple employee wanting to park there, then it's more about "playing by the rules" than actually hurting anyone...
Well the parent comment doesn't say how many handicap spots were open. Giving Jobs the benefit of the doubt, he may have seen a pattern where there were always multiple spots available. And the spot locations don't come down from God either. They are decided (at least in the state where I live and have worked on this subject (a work parking lot)) in an arbitrary fashion in order to meet certain requirements. It's (once again where I am) a loose specification for placement. And you can always exceed the number required. For all we know Apple could have put in more spaces than required and Steve was simply taking advantage of that knowing that nothing would happen. And that he further didn't care about any fine he received assuming the Police even had normal access to that part of the parking lot when they were on patrol.
Edit: Further to my point it's easy to assume "arrogant big shot rich guy" just hearing a story like this.
Is there anything in particular that makes handicap laws any different than, say, speeding or breaking any other law that won't land you in jail? People break speeding laws every day because a) they can and b) they feel they have a reason to and c) they don't feel the speed limit is just.
Have you noticed how many "not really handicapped" people use handicap spaces after getting a note from their Doctor? You seem to be indicating that there is something rare and special about handicapped spaces and that the entire idea of allocating them is fair to begin with. You know that's not the case, right? Also why the need to call Jobs "a rich asshole"?
My neighbor worked for Apple's real estate (facilities?) organization during this time. His only Steve Jobs story is that one day Steve came into the real-estate office extremely angry. Apparently SJ had received a parking ticket for parking in the handicapped space. He barreled into the office and slammed a stack of tickets on the desk and screamed at them that they needed to fix these tickets and stormed out.
That makes a pretty interesting personality triumverate of 1. Auto laws are for little people, 2. Manufacturing jobs are for sweat shops, and 3. Collusion is okay when I do it. All the makings of hubris.
You mean like any other tech company in the US and worldwide? Because this Taiwanese company called Foxconn builds stuff for nearly all of them, and in the same facilities in China, Taiwan and elsewhere...
If it was his building, he should just put up a "Reserved for Steve Jobs" sign in one of the normal parking spots, not take one of the spots that are legally required to be reserved for handicapped people.
The practical answer to this is that the movie ends with the iMac introduction in May 1998, and Google was not founded as a company until September 1998, so the movie is not likely to cover the illegal "anti-poaching" deal between Apple and Google.
I don't think 'gorena's point should be rebuffed just like that, Steve Jobs was not the friend of us engineers, after all it was him who said things like: “If you hire a single one of these people, that means war”. Many of us might be getting paid were it not for him and his actions.
I do wish this was touched in the movie somehow. (I'm presuming it wasn't, as that's what it seems like... I haven't seen it yet so can't say for sure)
edit: I'm getting down-voted. Indeed, I think I went over the top. Steve Jobs did go on to create exceptional products that have heightened a lot of people's productivity, so he was net good. Sorry for the comment - I'll leave it there anyway though.
Also: the movie is real time across three scenes and those three scenes are just behind the curtain at "pivotal" keynotes.
It's not a life story. It's not an epic tale. It's three set pieces each operating in 30 minutes of character time in sync with 30 minutes of screen time per episode.
What a terrible example to support a very valid point.
What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by the french government's weak response to this public humiliation.
Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore, France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a histoical mistake.
There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations' prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.
>Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore
It's still an era of neo-liberalism and employees return workplaces to medieval work practices (down to child labor and 14 hour workday) whenever they can get away with it.
And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.
This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked up this is for everyone?
>And they can get away with it only because their unions have created precedents where they create havoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.
And why NOT (ocassionally) create havoc in the streets of Paris? Because it disrupts business as usual and results in some small scale damages and such?
France and Paris, especially, has a long history of championing people's rights with street protests. From the Bastille day, to the Commune all the way up to May 68 and beyond. Tons of things we take for granted would be illegal without such ocassional "havoc".
People that think that protests and demonstrations should be "a thing of the past" because now "we live in a full democracy" are just repeating what has been said all the way from the 19th century -- even if blacks had no rights, women had no rights, gays had no rights, there was no social security, immigrants had (and still don't) rights, etc.
Democracy is not some magic thing that solves from within the parliament. Especially the mockery of democracry we have (with representatives elected once every 4 or 5 years based on a platform that bundles all issues together - so if you agree with them on X and disagree on Y you can't get to vote individually on those things), with political influence bought by corporations and big players, and without being held accountable for not keeping on their promises (you just get not to vote for them at the end of their term).
Democracy needs active citizen participation, and protests and demonstrations are one such method of making people's opinions heard.
What plan did the executives produce that would see the worker's being laid-off being ok? I'd guess that France has some type of forced severance or decent unemployment insurance scheme, but did the executives pretty much just dump their (now former) employees onto the street with nothing?
How long had those employees worked there? Is management really so incompetent that they can't plan for and manage such a scenario without having to cut off life support to thousands of their former colleagues?
There's a huge difference between not having internal recruiters call up employees in a company directory to try and poach them, and preventing those same employees from choosing to apply. The former doesn't affect wages, but the latter would. The latter didn't happen.
How do you know that employee-initiated applications & interviews weren't stopped by recruiters calling back & forth "OK to hire this guy?". The only reason the "no cold calling" agreement was made public was Ed Colligan spilling the beans & the D.O.J. making a half-assed attempt to investigate. Plenty of the disclosure docs are still sealed.
