Prototype

Someone asked Jobs “whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted.”

“No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit on your lap, with a keyboard and screen hinged together like a notebook. “This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties,” he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.

— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Thirteen: Building the Mac

He wasn’t even 30 when he dreamed up the laptop. He truly had such vision, it’s amazing. Amazing for self to read the history of her most precious “own” — her MacBook Air.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

The Jobs Aesthetic

When Jobs took over the (MAC) Project, he decided to sacrifice portability for a distinctive design that wouldn’t take up much space on a desk. He plopped down a phone book and declared, to the horror of the engineers, that it shouldn’t have a footprint larger than that. So his design team of Jerry Manock and Terry Oyama began working on ideas that had the screen above the computer box, with a keyboard that was detachable.

— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Twelve: The Design

“Reality Distortion Field”

Andy Hertzfeld on his boss, Steve Jobs:

• The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.

Walter Isaacson:

• To some people, calling it a reality distortion field was just a clever way to say that Jobs tended to lie. But it was in fact a more complex form of dissembling.

The thing is, self loathes Trump but understands Jobs. Jobs gave her laptops that traveled with her to Dharamsala, Venice, Pasadena, New York, the Philippines etc It did belly flops on concrete (It was brand new, too! Self thought for sure she’d have to get a new one, but no), got beer spilled on it, got left behind (once) at Shannon Airport in Ireland, got left behind again in Don Salvador Benedicto (Negros Island, central Philippines). The product is not a grift; it delivers. In addition: she can walk into an Apple store anywhere in the world — Paris, London, Dublin — and the staff there will know how to get her the right product to interface with her MacBook so that she is more efficient. This is beautiful. It’s better than a cult.

Walter Isaacson:

• He intuitively knew when someone was faking it or truly knew something.
• People who ended up not being crushed ended up being stronger . . . In both his personal and his professional life over the years, his inner circle tended to include many more strong people than toadies.

To Steve Jobs, making laptops was an art. He didn’t apply to Stanford because, he said, “The students were not artistic.” He had “a passion for making a great product, not a profitable one.”

Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day: STEVE JOBS, p. 99

Apple’s engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even drop them into folders.

— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter Eight: Xerox and Lisa

As someone who had to use computers a lot, in every job self held, that innovation was truly revolutionary. It made for fantastic ease of use. Even a child could do it.

Stay tuned.

They Do Not Make Them Like This Anymore

Steve Jobs had BO. He never bathed. At his first job, with game-maker Atari, all his co-workers complained about the smell. Yet, the boss liked him. So he kept his job.

He decided to quit his job and go to India because a friend who’d just returned from there had raved about a guru. He spent seven months in India, traveling on the cheap, no fixed itinerary, searching for an elusive spiritual enlightenment.

During his seven months in India, he had written to his parents only sporadically, getting mail at the American Express office in New Delhi when he passed through, and so they were somewhat surprised when they got a call from the Oakland airport asking them to pick him up. They immediately drove up from Los Altos. “My head had been shaved, I was wearing Indian cotton robes, and my skin had turned a deep, chocolate brown-red from the sun,” he recalled. “So I’m sitting there and my parents walked past me about five times and finally my mother came up and said, “Steve?”

— Steve Jobs, Chapter Four: Atari and India

Rag Tag Daily Prompt: COLUMNS

Thank you to Ragtag Daily Prompt Thursday for the Prompt: COLUMNS.

Self has been on a kind of nostalgia trip since beginning the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. Today, she went back to her old stomping grounds on the Stanford campus and took pictures of anything that could pass for a column. She went to Hoover Tower and saw an exhibit on the Cold War. She photographed the covered walkway in the School of Education. She photographed a skateboard rack. She photographed the Clock Tower, a favorite meeting place for self and her friends.

Summer 2022: Reads

So far this summer, self has read 13 books.

Six of those were Dr. Ruth Galloway mysteries (Thank you, Elly Griffiths!)

Two were Gone novels.

One was Becky Chambers’s latest, a continuation of her Wayfarers series.

One was biography (self’s current read, Steve Jobs)

She read Where the Crawdads Sing because of the movie (which she still hasn’t seen)

The 9100A

Woo hoo! Self is loving this book. She’s still on Chapter One.

The first desktop computer was HP’s 9100A. It was nothing but “a glorified calculator” and “It was huge, maybe forty pounds.”

Can you imagine a computer weighing 40 pounds? Self wants to scream. Even her first MacBook Air was just eight pounds.

The best laptops are Apple, but the the best printers are HP. She bought her first HP laser printer from Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto, which has since gone out of business, alas! Those laser printers can go on forever, they NEVER break down. Self used them to print page after page of her fantastic stories. Nowadays they print, they fax, they scan, they send and receive email. One printer is in the garage (it still works) and two are in her office. She is definitely an Apple and Hewlett Packard girl.

Wowee, what else is she going to learn from this book, she’s only on p. 17.

Frederick Terman: Brilliance

This book is incredible. It keeps dredging up memories of self’s young adulthood, that season of first-coming-to-the-States and being a grad student at Stanford (two nieces followed in self’s footsteps, hurrah), but it also explains why the big building on *that* side of the Stanford campus is called Terman. That’s what all the students called it: Terman. Not Terman Engineering, not the Terman Building. Just TERMAN.

In a move that would help transform the area into the cradle of the tech revolution, Stanford University’s dean of engineering, Frederick Terman, created a seven-hundred-acre industrial park on university land for private companies that could commercialize the ideas of his students.

— Steve Jobs, Chapter One: Childhood

The Secret Lives of Engineers

Steve Jobs: Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a simple guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him down — saying “She’s here, but you’re not coming in.” He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.

— Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Chapter One: Childhood