Steve Jobs had such a way with words. I personally love this quote:
"This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."
I loved the metaphor:
"It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. No one will see it, but they will stand on it."
I think this is so true. Tech is about building on what others have done. Picking up where on person left off. It's a never ending cycle.
I also like the line "it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist". In 100 years when historians are looking back on the tech boom that we are currently living in, it'll be very interesting to see what goes down in history books as the most influential invention, device, software etc that really started this revolution.
Okay, I appreciate that Ritchie was a genius and that C was revolutionary and is foundational to modern computing.
But seriously, C arrays not having bounds checks has probably caused more security disasters than anything else in the history of computing, with the possible exception of end-users. Was there a good reason for this, and if so, what was it?
C was introduced in 1972, that's a year before I was born (and it had been in development for a couple years prior).
The first computer I programmed on ran at 1 mhz and had 64 kilobytes of RAM.
Is it really so hard to see why C didn't historically have bounds checking? Bounds checking was pretty controversial in languages even as late as the early 2000s because of the runtime cost.
It's interesting you say your first sentence there, because I was thinking exactly the same thing: Steve was always so good with words. I think that, combined with his impeccable taste for new product design and iterations, was his greatest strength.
Oh absolutely. There are so many classy lines from him. And some of these lines are going to impact our industry for years to come.
Take for example: The 'Post-PC era'?
Damn just those three words. They paint an altogether new story that is going to be written all over again! It gives an excitement and pumps blood back into what our industry does best - wow the users.
> "This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."
Steve Jobs might not be right about this. Apple's latest and greatest operating systems still implement quite a bit of functionality from Unix, which is much more than 10 years old. They still implement and use ASCII, JPG, TCP/IP, etc.
Most mathematical papers, paintings, and churches don't inspire awe 200 years later. The vast majority are lost to time. Only the most original, revolutionary, or useful cultural artifacts last a long time. I think software is probably not very different. We're still using Unix and TCP/IP today, and probably will be for many decades to come. Angry Birds, maybe not so much.
I think you're missing his point. None of what you listed is what Steve Jobs made. He made Apple I, Apple II, MacIntosh, etc. He was talking about his legacy. And he was right about it.
I think if you had asked him specifically about software engineers working on underlying technology, he probably would have recognized that. After all, he was working on NeXT there, which was using that same technology.
This clip actually made me respect his intelligence more than I had prior.
“This, milord, is my family’s axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine-hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y’know. ”
Written by Terry Prattchet, spoken by the Low King in The Fifth Elephant.
But again, NeXTSTEP was not his product, the entire machine was.
So while part of the NeXT Cube or Pizza Box that were his products live on in today's Macs and iOS devices, nobody except "those rare geologists" is still using those workstations that were the result of his work.
In a way, his work supports the work of UNIX and Ritchie. He states that tech work on a large scale is often like setting pavement. UNIX APIs are a progression of that. The fact that many can use a computer without understanding the underpinnings of an OS is a testament to Jobs.
Why is it a testament to Jobs? I doubt he wrote even a single line of code any of Apples OSs. Did he design the UIs or did he hire someone and then just approve what THEY worked on and designed?
I hate how people talk about Apple and give Jobs all of the credit for what Apple produced. What about all of the talented engineers, designers, etc. who actually did the work? Sure he had final approval and his design taste and whatnot were important factors, but he would have had nothing to approve or chose from if all of the brilliant employees didn't produce the work.
Yeah - every tech company with talented employees produces results that are just as good. Management and CEO talent is irrelevant, as we can all see. Jobs deserves only contempt.
You can just look at Apple design pre and post Steve's return just to see how big an impact having him around had. Suddenly Jony Ive had someone to play ball with.
The work of a lifetime is paradoxical like that. It is very rare that someone achieves something truly memorable when they set permanence as their primary goal.
Steve Jobs' sedimentary rock analogy might deflate the egos of some developers. We work so hard on developing innovative hardware and software that will be relevant in the future. On top of that there's a lot of hyped-up business rhetoric about disrupting whole industries and changing the world with our products. Yet, even when we do manage to shake things up, what Jobs said is true: Our innovations will get buried under new innovations, like layers of sediment in a cliffside.
But I think there's something important, albeit humble, about becoming that thin layer of sediment in a rock formation. The layers may not have any obvious utility, yet they tell geologists a vivid, detailed story about changes in a landscape. That story may even help the geologists predict future changes and disruptions.
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Sure, we may not use the original Apple products, but to technologists with the right knowledge and experience, they offer fascinating, useful insights about the future and past of technology.
Just last night on IRC I was commenting on the stinkeye I received at a company once when I suggested their tagging functionality mimic Stack Overflow's. Even though their product was a multiuser version of something that had existed at 1:1 scale for a decade, never did I hear it described in terms of what already existed. Based on more than this one example, I am convinced that there is a beautiful-farts narcissism in startups today where everybody thinks they're doing something new when they're really just making a drag-and-drop Megaupload, in-browser Sublime Text, Flickr-with-animation, or whatever.
Or to loosely paraphrase Joel Spolsky, you can describe what most startups make today as "web sites where users enter something and then that's presented to the other users."
To stretch the metaphor: I think we're lucky if what we do becomes real sediment that others build upon. Most programming work is throw-away business code that no one will ever build upon and will be whisked away by the wind.
It doesn't matter though, we do what we do for the love (or compulsion) of creation. I'm quite certain Michelangelo loved painting above all else, and that's the necessary but not sufficient fact for him to achieve something like the Sistine Chapel. Who knows how many great painters are completely lost to history?
To me, this speaks of the difference between artists and craftsmen. Artists attempt to create the ideal, something that is perfect and that people can stare at for hours just appreciating every nuance. Craftsmen create things to be used, and it is in their use that they derive joy, even if the same said use eventually destroys the creation.
But the use doesn't destroy the creations! It's not like they printed off a finite number of Apple IIs and waited for all of their caps to blow 20 years later. They got thrown in the landfill when they were running on all 4 legs.
The song "Jed the Humanoid" (by Grandaddy) captures my attitude pretty well.
Maybe there is more to this Renaissance analogy than he thought. During the period, which ultimately led to the Age of Enlightenment that made today's society possible, a lot of development happened and a lot of things that were lost from antiquity were rediscovered (we may never completely know the extent of it because of the Alexandria infocalypse). But the point is, the discoveries of today are usually obsolete tomorrow, in the sense that origin and context are lost while the discovery itself remains in place as a hidden stratum on which the technology of tomorrow is built.
Maybe it has never been different, it's just that in IT the process is much easier to observe due to its speed. But who really "invented" steam power, optics, advanced mechanics, or programmable systems? The more you dive into those things, the less clear the answer becomes - precisely because almost all of our advances are stratified.
You know, the same is to be said for everything we do as programmers. Every new thing we build is not lost, but it will become obsolete.
My take-away though, is that Steve saw this as a great opportunity to never rest, but continuously learn and grow. That's what I want to pattern my life after.
Nobody would try to fly one of the original Wright brothers' kites or planes, yet, this does not diminish our ability to admire their contribution to the aviation industry.
I find it ironic that a buddhist laments the lack of permanence of the product of his work!
"I was threatened with legal action and personal attacks via email from the president of the Silicon Valley Historical Association over the above review (which is against not only the 1st Amendment, but also Amazon's policies), and then my review was removed. Therefore I am posting this review again (...)
In my opinion, if you are looking for a film about Steve Jobs, this is NOT it. In this hour-long film, there is only 15 minutes and 57 seconds of interview footage of Jobs. The rest is footage of the filmmaker himself, some cheesy stock video clips, interviews with other Silicon Valley founders, and historians/academics talking about the growth of Silicon Valley and comparing it to the Renaissance era and the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. After about 40 minutes into the film, there is hardly any discussion about Jobs at all. There is, however, a nearly 20 minute long segment of various random people explaining why they think the Information Age and Silicon Valley is EXACTLY like the Renaissance period, followed immediately by a clip of Jobs saying, "Nah, it's not like the Renaissance AT ALL." The film is wrapped up quickly with no real conclusion leaving the viewer wondering what the hell they just watched. And to make the whole thing worse, every interview has really annoying music (think screeching saxophones) playing behind it, which becomes so distracting that you stop listening to what the interviewee is even saying.
The one good thing I can say is that it is very interesting to hear what Steve Jobs has to say in these interviews...."
> There is, however, a nearly 20 minute long segment of various random people explaining why they think the Information Age and Silicon Valley is EXACTLY like the Renaissance period, followed immediately by a clip of Jobs saying, "Nah, it's not like the Renaissance AT ALL."
The computer industry kills art and it sounds like Jobs knew it. What perhaps the others saw as incredible works of art (like sculpted marble that will withstand the centuries) were actually just the most disposable consumer goods we've ever known. Computers are about cheap, disposable crap. For some reason, this also means software needs to be cheap and disposable, but that's another point entirely. The only layers of 'sediment' our creations will be found in are in the landfill. The only 'rare geologists' are likely going to be the picked-the-last-straw developer (or the terminally curious) that has to go knee-deep in the sewers of old code and comes upon a neat hack. This might sound real glass-half-empty, but it doesn't bother me. What's wonderful to know is that everyone else thinks we're all Michelangelos!
I bought the audio version a while ago and agree with most of this. I bought it through some other site (probably whatever the SV Historical Society site linked to) and found it virtually impossible to post a review, due to errors about illegal characters in the text. I did find the 15 or so minutes to be worthwhile, but I wished it had been clear that it wasn't an hour-long interview. The person who answered my e-mail was apologetic and comped me another interview.
I was referring to the fact that this was posted multiple times around HN after Steve Jobs passed away. It's definitely not "never before seen footage" of SJ.
Nice metaphor, but is it right? I don't think mountains ever get built by laying down layers of sediment. Sand castles, maybe, but mountains? Those need earth quakes, or at least plate tectonics.
In some sense, Jobs was an earth mover who could shake up the earth and make what previously was a sandplain into maybe not a mountain but at least a hill.
"The rocks making up the mountains were formed before the mountains were raised. [...]
The Rocky Mountains took shape during an intense period of plate tectonic activity."
Sediment (from the Latin sedere=to sit") doesn't move up a hill to turn it into a mountain. The wind may blow it up a bit to form dunes, but there is no way it forms anything resembling a mountain. I am not a geologist, though, so educate me.
That's different. This new posting is a different clip (although seemingly from the same interview).
It begins with "The following clip has never been publicly shown before." It's less than 2 minutes, and you'll probably enjoy it. Buying the full interview (Production Date: January 2013; Playing Time: 60 Minutes) would support Silicon Valley Historical Association:
It is insightful for software engineers because we feel like we're building things when in fact we're just providing a service which will likely be gone and forgotten 10 years from now. That's why I find it's important to also have other pursuits that allow you to point at a permanent physical object and say "I made that"
"This is not a field where one paints a painting which will be looked at for centuries...This is a field where one does his work and in ten years it is obsolete."
I loved the metaphor:
"It's sort of like a sentiment of rocks. You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher. No one will see it, but they will stand on it."
I think this is so true. Tech is about building on what others have done. Picking up where on person left off. It's a never ending cycle.
I also like the line "it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist". In 100 years when historians are looking back on the tech boom that we are currently living in, it'll be very interesting to see what goes down in history books as the most influential invention, device, software etc that really started this revolution.