Happy Birthday, Mac; you changed the world

T.A. Barnhart

On January 22, 1984, I was living in a shared house on SW Oak, just down the street from Central Catholic High School.  I was working retail but had that Sunday afternoon off, which worked out well that day: Super Bowl Sunday.  The Raiders were playing the Redskins that day, and I'd made two $10 bets on the Raiders, at that time my second-favorite team.  I won those bets, which was nice; that was the game in which Marcus Allen made the amazing 70-some yard run through a bewildered Redskins defense, probably the greatest single run in Super Bowl history.  Winning 20 bucks is always nice (although that's like 47 cents in 2009 dollars), but that's not why I remember that Super Bowl.

Some of you already know why I remember that day, because you have the same memory.  Perhaps you were as overwhelmed as I was, the one and only time a commercial has changed my life.  It was, as anyone who has seen it knows, no ordinary commercial.  Anyone paying attention to technology and the personal computer since the early 80s know the product was nothing ordinary, either.  The commercial, since judged repeatedly as the greatest ever produced, introduced a product that changed the world and led, you can argue, to the election of Barack Obama.

A stunning commercial is one thing; there have been plenty of great commercials over the years, many becoming part of pop and even political culture for a time ("Where's the beef?").  What set the first Macintosh commercial apart is the subject of the ad: the future.  For those of us who transitioned from children's to adult literature via science fiction -- for me, beginning with Robert Heinlein and then moving on to Harlan Ellison -- the arrival of the personal computer was the key step into the future.  The Macintosh "1984" juxtapositioned of Huxley's no-longer-future novel with the kind of sf device we were still waiting for 15 years after Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.  On Super Bowl Sunday, the future at last was ... now.

I used my first Mac at Reed College a few years later; they had an entire lab of them set up (a Reedie was a major part of Apple and apparently helped the college get them).  I was helping produce a newsletter with the family of Ben Linder, a Portland native who had been murdered by the contras in Nicaragua.  His family, eld by his brave mother, Elisabeth, were working hard to draw attention to the crimes of the Reagan-Bush Administration in Central America and how it had brought terrible tragedy to their family.  John, Ben's brother, had gotten permission for us to work at Reed's Mac lab; he wanted the best possible product.  I had been doing the Oregon SANE/Freeze newsletter on my Leading Edge PC (using the hot-wax method of layout, fun in its own way but a lot of trouble).  My Leading Edge was cheap and effective, but not the computer I wanted.  However, we had a baby, so that was my first computer; John got us into the lab to use the better machine.

Early Macs were, of course, a pain in the ass.  No hard drive.  Two floppy drives, but you needed 3 disks: one for the operating system, one for the application and one for data.  The teeny RAM allowed only some of the necessary data required to be stored at any one time, so the user would frequently get into the disk-shuffle routine: the data disk would be ejected so the app disk could be read, then ejected, more data written....  Like I said, a pain in the ass.

I loved it.  My Leading Edge computer was cheap, functional and boring.  I could do word processing, some spreadsheet stuff and bare-minimum database-type activities (usually in WordPerfect, which, by the way, insisted the word "Packwood" should be corrected to "pokeweed").  The Mac was over-priced, insufficiently hardwared and probably the most amazing and fulfilling technology-related experience of my life.  How cool was it?  Even today, as we await the next version of the Mac OS ("Snow Leopard") yearnings for the early Mac OS lead to things like this:

Leopard-marbleUI

It's hard to explain just how exciting that OS was.  Clunky, black-and-white (no grays), and demanding huge amounts of patience; yet there was nothing with which to compare it.  It was beautiful, transcendent even.  Yes, I know I'm sounding like one of those Mac people, but guess what?  I am one of those Mac people.  I've spent over twenty years being mocked for being one of them, but my devotion to the Mac -- I've owned 6, plus an iPod and now an iPhone -- mute the mockery into a dull whisper of pointless noise.  I cannot explain about how I feel about the Mac: it is love, and it is spiritual, and it has shaped the way I've lived my life since I bought my first Mac, an SE, in 1989.  (With a student discount at PSU.  It took me several months to convince my wife to let me make the purchase, and we had no trouble selling the pc.)

Here are my Macs thru the years:

My-macs  


Using a Mac was the first time in my life that I felt like I was really in-touch with my dreams of the future: technology empowering the human spirit.  So what if it wasn't perfect?  So what if it cost too much?  So what if most of the world was deciding to go cheap and soulless?  That has never been my concern.  If 90% of the computer-using world wanted to hand over their money and computing experience to Microsoft, well, god help them but that's their problem.  For me, the Mac was more than a machine for word processing and number crunching.  I could create things.  MacPaint, of course, and then -- oh how I loved and spent way too much time on this -- Hypercard.  I love making websites, but nothing compares to the exhilaration of using Hypercard (and going through two editions of Danny Goodman's wonderful guide books).

I still love my Mac.  To be able to fly with ease from Mail to Photoshop to iTunes to Facebook to iPhoto to Scrivener to prepping my iPod for the day to....  Well, you get the picture.  Yes, I could do this on a Dell or HP or custom-built PC, but the problem is: I'd be on a PC.  I have used Windows for years, and I do appreciate how much it's improved over time.  But it's still Windows.  Imagine you went to the doctor, and the doctor told you:  "You're going to be just fine.  Don't worry.  But ... You do have to take these pills daily.  Please try not to exert yourself.  Oh, and we don't know about the side affects -- What?  Yes, of course, there will be side effects.  Please describe them to us as you experience them."  With the Mac, the doctor tells me to exercise, eat my vegetables, get my rest; there's nothing wrong with me at ll.

It's especially gratifying, as a True Believer (I might as well get that phrase out of the way; I know it's going to be used at some point), to see the Mac integrated into society.  Simplicity, ease-of-use, beauty; these are characteristics of all Apple products and we see the result: People want them.  Millions of iPods and iPhones, the most innovative computers, designs that are mimicked in products from vacuum cleaners to automobiles to the new traffic signals in downtown Portland.  But that's the most superficial aspect of the Mac Effect on the modern world.  More fundamentally, the true effect of the Macintosh, and Apple, on the world is the design of objects and systems that make technology a means, not an end. 

Technology that requires the user to focus on the tool, the object, is a failure.  If we had to focus the kind of thought and energy Windows so often requires of us on, say, a car, most of us would be riding the bus.  Or a horse.  All people want is to flip the switch and have it work.  That's what Macs and iPods do.  And that philosophy, that goal of getting the technology out of people's way -- and making it sexy to look at and hold -- is what sets Apple apart.  It's why websites like Flickr and Facebook are so popular: a little set-up and you are posting thousands of pictures, talking to dozens of friends.  AOL's one continuing success is AIM: just start it and start chatting. 

Or go to barackobama.com, register in a few easy steps, and become part of the largest political change effort in the history of the world.

Would that have happened in a world without the Mac?  Well, given that Jobs and Wozniak got many of their critical ideas from Xerox's PARC labs -- the mouse, the graphical user interface (gui) and more -- it's entirely possible.  But the one key ingredient -- Steve Jobs -- is probably the unique feature not to have been replicated under different circumstances.  Had he not been the vision behind Apple, we may have had easy-to-use computers, but computers that are Macintoshes?  I don't think so.  And if instead of the Mac we had really nice computers that were easy to use, would our conceptions of human-technology relationships been of the kind that would have led to a gui-based Web, to user-friendly devices and pages?

Impossible to say, of course, and moot.  We have Macs, we have Jobs and we have the understanding that to make technology successful, it needs to be as transparent to users as possible ("we" in this sense does not include Microsoft, of course).  In 2003, we had some clever people who helped capture the national energy behind Howard Dean and demonstrate what is possible for a political campaign to accomplish.  Then in 2007 and 2008, the Obama campaign picked up the Dean program and took it to the house.  The White House.  And yet, that's really just the barest glimpse into what is possible.  That was a crude instrument of social change: gather lots of names, lots of money, lots of volunteer hours.  Pound the people until you win the damn election.  In 2009, the goal is to refine the potential.  It's not enough to simply get 270 electoral votes; now Pres Obama needs a vast and diverse array of Americans to provide energy behind specific, and multiple, policy efforts.  This campaign, if successful, will not merely result in political change; it will demonstrate how the world can be reshaped in unprecedented ways.

And yes, the possibilities frighten me as much as they tantalize me.

Recall the "1984" ad.  The context: a grey, dull world of oppression and thought control.  What happened when the screen was shattered and the truth revealed?  Did everyone suddenly find themselves in paradise?  Well, when I got my Macintosh SE, my class assignments were no easier to write than with my pc.  Through the years and all the improvements in the Mac OS (I remember the excitement of OS 6 and 7, the breakthroughs that made simply playing on the desktop so much fun), it's never changed the sad simple truth that I still had to take the time and use the energy to write a letter, finish a project, do the work myself.  The Mac is not a panacea for anything but a Microsoft-free life.  You still need displine, education, resolve, creativity, all them hard-work virtues that are impossible to escape if you actually want to accomplish something and not just think about it.

Happy Birthday to the Macintosh.  Argue about which platform is best, which is most effective or efficient (no insult to Linux users out there, but I've no experience therein), which is bla bla bla.  I don't care.  Love your pc?  Hooray for you.  It's so not the point.  The world did indeed change with the introduction of the Macintosh computer.  Whether these are the best products or not, it is clear to me that they have reshaped technology and thereby changed the world.  Ok, the Mac SE is not responsible for the election of Barack Obama, but I find it hard to believe his campaign could have happened in a text-based, keyboard-controlled, non-gui world.

An ad for the 20th Anniversary Mac said it best:  "...Apple design engineers have been building bridges between what people dream about and the technology that can make those dreams reality."

Before January 22, 1984, I only dreamed of the future.  Beginning that day, I lived it.

Hello-mac

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    i have to add: the PB 180 with gray-scale (16 grays) and active matrix was one of the great advances in computers ever. it was heavy, the hard drive was too small, the battery lasted like 30 minutes and i paid way too much for it (and mine was a refurb, always a great way to get a Mac). but it was the best damn laptop for a writer you could get at the time. the display was awesome, even in bright light. i used longer than any other Mac i've owned. i went thru 2 or 3 trackballs, and finally the shiftkey went south. by that time, it just wasn't feasible to get it fixed. i was able to get my iBook a bit later (which i murdered with a glass of water), and i look forward to my next Macbook: probably the 15-inch version, with the touchpad & aluminum case. but that's going to have to wait a while.

    if i die a death like Kane, my last whispered words will be "Powerbook ... 180...".

  • tb (unverified)
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    Blech. I'm half as efficient on a Mac than I am on a PC. I'm sure that lovely one button mouse or track pad looks really nice and all, but it makes selecting web text for a google search a big pain compared to the joys of right clicking on a PC. Likewise, my Mac laptop's (which I have to use for work, ironically) lack of page up, page down, home, and end keys totally sucks.

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    Allen's run was 66yd if I recall right, and the greatest single run in a Super Bowl is without doubt the 4th and 1 for 43 yd by John Riggins against the Dolphins in 1983. That was ballet.

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    I don't recall right; it was 74yd. But that was a blowout.

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    writing to you from the iBook G4, the best computer I've ever owned, yet I'm drooling over all the Powerbooks I see out there, but this will last me a long time. Thanks for that interesting post - am looking forward to sharing it with my brother and housemate, both Mackie's from the getgo.

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    I remember the game, but not the ad. I think the blocked punt was the key play - BOOM!, as Madden would say, the Raiders were off and running. And of course the game was inspiring for old guys everywhere - Jim Plunkett at 45 or whatever he was.

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    like i said, tb, whatever floats your boat. my mouse, btw, has 2 buttons & a scrollwheel. as for the flaws of your mac laptop, at least you don't have to worry about viruses, windows and other evils. there are trade-offs in all of life. i just like coming out ahead when i can. i do with the mac.

    and tj, however balletic Riggins was on his play, it was not the pure footbally goodness of Marcus Allen. you're going to have a hard time convincing many fans Riggins' run was superior.

  • Ron Morgan (unverified)
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    I was living in the Virgin Islands in January '84, sitting in a bar drinking rum and whooping it up during the game. Since my Niners weren't playing I defaulted to cheering for the Raiders. I recall staring slack-jawed at the Mac commercial, but what is imbeded more deeply in my brain is right after kick-off for the second half power went off all over the entire island. I think the whole island groaned at once...

    Oh, BTW, Huxley didn't write 1984, Orwell did. Huxley wrote Brave New World, which I suppose is apt since one could posit that the Mac saved us from one dystopia and plopped us into another...

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    In 1983 I worked on MS's outsourced Windows 1.1 at Tandy and wrote Calculator, Notepad and Paintbrush. I was hired as a human factors psychologist, so, if I have an attitude on the subject, it speaks to betrayal of a dream.

    When the first two were written we honestly thought the platform would be BSD Unix. It was only when we realized it only had one programmer definable signal (and more install disks than you had ever seen) that we resorted to MS-DOS. Paintbrush 1.0 was so hacked that I stored flags in the unused bytes of the video memory. Guess they had to rewrite that one. In those days Comdex was in the Fall and MS knew that Tandy had to have the hardware working, so by having us on the line for the software meant it would get finished on time. Back then, I thought everything would have the kind of intuitive interface that calculator and notepad have. Still peeved they took the "paper tape", side display off it that showed a running copy of your calculations.

    That all shows how far Apple was ahead. Tandy literally had computers that you were supposed to buy, take home, turn on, and it would sit there and blink at you. Then you would chose an OS. Then buy $500/copy application software, that you had no idea what it did! Who would spend that on Lotus 1-2-3 when they had never seen a spreadsheet? Gates saw the integration that Apple had started day 1 with, realized he was behind the game, and decided that if you write the OS you can control the application environment and bully the hardware manufacturers. MS cared most about their application software. MS OFfice has accounted for more of MS's revenue to date than any other product line, including Windows. 25 years later, it is sad to see everyday people dealing with what we considered our personal, private headache, which we termed "Microshafting".

    I do all my work today on Ubuntu Linux, using Wine to emulate Windows. Windows has become a complete abuse of a discipline invented for that abuse, imho. If the Motorola/Apple world had dominated, I really believe the very poor standards for software these days would not be accepted. I'm putting my money where my mouth is and not taking anymore Windows, .Net, C#, ASP, etc., contracts because I just can't rationalize it in good faith anymore.

    Thanks for the post. Maybe a good gov angle would be to mention the open source movement. I have no doubt it could reduce our budget deficits by more than many, many of the remedies proposed.

  • BOHICA (unverified)
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    Before January 22, 1984, I only dreamed of the future. Beginning that day, I lived it.

    I'm still waiting. But then I have a different vision of the future. Until the human race evolves beyond wholesale slaughter of each other, there is no future.

    Re: the topic, its a tool. All tools are only as good as the user. Most people only use a minuscule part of what is available to them on their Personal Computer. Email, word processing and web browsing is about all 75% of the people I know use on a consistent basis. Throw in Quicken or the like, and media players and that's about it.

    Yes, I could do this on a Dell or HP or custom-built PC, but the problem is: I'd be on a PC.

    The one thing MACs have over those generic systems from HP, Dell, etc is hardware quality control. A custom built PC can have the cheapest or the best hardware, you get what you pay for. I've been building custom PCs since 1992 (SIPP memory anyone?), mainly for architects and engineers using Autocad. Quality components kept the customers coming back. The biggest problem with the generic boxes from the big boys is all that bundled crapware/trialware that they load (I hate Symantec). My old Pentium 4 2.0 ghz system I built in 2001 is still running without any problems because I built it with quality components and didn't load it up with crap and it has been running 24/7 since I built it. I have only replaced the power supply (noisy fan) and added bigger hard drives as I never delete anything and a DVD burner . I also back up everything, something the average user could use some lessons in, including MAC users. It has now been donated to a no-profit where it is still chugging along. Built a new system and it can render audio and video much faster which is the only reason I upgraded. I work on both platforms as well as Linux servers and they are just tools. Content is king.

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    d'oh, of course Orwell wrote 1984. Orwellian & all that. sheesh.

    i could go on about open source all day, B. the key to living MS-free is two-fold: go Mac (or Linux) and replace Office etc with open source. i use NeoOffice (OpenOffice 3 still seems twitchy to me). and given that OSU has a major open source lab (and file-hosting facility), it's a big deal here in Oregon. worthy of far more discussion (i gotta check; i believe i posted here about that some years ago).

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    I think there's no greater fan than Steve Sabol, and if you Google "greatest run Super Bowl," you'll see that he and his friends specifically eliminate the Allen run because of circumstance--and Sabol explicitly names the Riggins run as #1 (and 2 overall, to Tyree's helmet Catch last year.)

    It was 4th and one. It's one of the most famous Football images ever.

  • mac mccown (unverified)
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    another little nibble .... didnt you meant to say SE Oak. BTW, i cashed a few bets on the game as well/

  • Jamie (unverified)
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    I heart Mac.

    My fav lines from Jobs and Wozniak, circa 1984:

    "The best way to predict the future is to create it. Apple is busy at that."

    "The Mac is not perfect; Windows just makes it seem that way."

    BTW, TA: I recall having ALL my apps and ALL my working files on one floppy (512k!) disk that I carried in my pocket. Talk about portable memory devices!

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    I visited PARC in the early 80s to discuss micro processors. They were a pretty incredible bunch whose focus was management of organizational documents. From that perspective you can see the motivation for a graphical user interface with cabinets, drawers and folders and a pointing device. We were armed with 16-Mhz and 16-bits and were laughed out of the room. Xerox management simply did not have the vision to see the scope of what they had created nor could we have predicted a 20-year roadmap for the microprocessor.

    There is some sadness that Xerox did not defend their intellectual property but they waited until it was too late. By the time they realized that Apple was serious, Xerox had lost control. Had Xerox not relied on the copier for their future, the PARC team might have built something incredible and enduring. Instead, they are history and someone else became wealthy on their ideas.

    Jobs certainly deserves credit for capturing a great idea and exploiting it. However, Apple in his absence was mediocre and now stands out for the iPod and iPhone, both of which now have cheap Asian copies. I’m skeptical that the company can survive without Jobs.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    Posted by: Jamie | Jan 26, 2009 8:36:26 AM

    I heart Mac.

    My fav lines from Jobs and Wozniak, circa 1984:

    "The best way to predict the future is to create it. Apple is busy at that."

    "The Mac is not perfect; Windows just makes it seem that way."

    BTW, TA: I recall having ALL my apps and ALL my working files on one floppy (512k!) disk that I carried in my pocket. Talk about portable memory devices!

    Brings back memories. My favorite line was something to the effect that if software were designed right, there would be the same volume of tech support working for the software corps as there are driving instructors working for the auto makers.

    Yeah, Xerox PARC did the human factors work that became the windowing environment, which was used by Apple and cloned by MS. Shows Apple's vision. Xerox did the research but there was never any thought of using the interface on a Sigma 9. T.A. also makes a good point about their popularizing HTML. It's an underestimated bit of the 'net. I was regularly on the 'net from 1980 to 1995, before Al Gore's "information superhighway" address, and it never would have turned that corner without HTML. In 1983 it was estimated that there were 500 regular users of the 'net.

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    Steve P

    i think there'll be a big difference in a Jobs-less Apple this go-round. the first time, a bunch of corporate idiots thought they knew better than Steve. turned out, not so much. i think when people saw his nExt computer (and omg it was so frikkin gorgeous), they realized he was the only person to lead Apple back from the brink.

    this time, however, Apple is stacked with people who understand what Steve Jobs was trying to do. he, after all, did not actually design or engineer the iPod, etc. these were team efforts, and the creative strength to create those projects remains -- and, importantly, has full support. so although Apple may no longer be able to rely upon Steve's unique perspective, i think they'll continue to innovate and, every few years, simply stun the world with something special. the latest Macbook is an indication this should be the case.

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    mac mac - you know, i should have googlemapped the address. i was unsure of myself; it was a few years ago. but yes, i did live on Oak, not Ash. i wouldn't mind being back in that neighborhood again; it's only improved over the years.

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    Mac SE is nothing compared to what was created on January 19, 1983: The LISA.

  • Tom Vail (unverified)
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    In February 1984 our company had two Kaypros and were trying to use CPM to do some of our spreadsheets and quote letters. I had to browbeat people to get them to use the damn things. I brought my brand new Mac (single floppy - diskchange elbow, etc.) into my office to use. About a week after I brought it in, I returned to my office from a meeting and two of the people I couldn't beg to work on the Kaypros were hard at work trying out my new toy. For the next 20 years, we ran that business on no less than 20 different models and over 200 macs. Even today, my macbook pro is a great tool. The only problems I have are with the MS programs I still use (Word, Excel, Entourage, and PowerPoint).
    Great ad! And, yes, it did change the world. Like Apple or not, no sane person can say that Apple did not force everyone else to keep up.
    Remind me how to turn off a PC - oh, that's right. You just push START.

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    Tom, see if you can find a copy of WriteNow -- the best word processor ever for the Mac (or perhaps any machine). a great product, optimized for Classic Mac, so did not evolve to PPC & beyond.

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    Posted by: tb | Jan 25, 2009 10:10:56 PM

    Me thinks you haven't touched a Mac in a awhile, because Macs have right-clicking capability.

  • fbear (unverified)
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    I love Macs, and can't imagine a scenario in which I would own a PC, though I've used them at work.

    One thing that doesn't get mentioned is that apps use space better on Macs than on PCs--even MicroSoft apps, so for the same screen size you have more usable space. It's less of an issue with desktop machines, but for laptops with limited screen size it makes a huge difference.

  • Tom Vail (unverified)
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    T. A Barnhart-

    For probably 15 years, I used nothing but. It always amazed me that I could write a four page letter on WriteNow and save it in 15kb of space. If I, for some unknown reason, saved it as an MSWord file, it took up 200+kb of space. It was faster, more flexible and far more intuitive than anything ever written by MS.

    A couple of years ago when I went 100% to OSX, I tossed all my old Mac Software. WriteNow was the hardest to see go.

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    Tom, i too grieve for WriteNow. the first program i've found that i enjoy in the same way, but for different reasons, is Scrivener, linked above. it's got amazing abilities, from basic writing to adding research, document organization, scriptwriting (JJ Abrams' entire team uses it) and more. i love it, and i've barely tapped its potential. give it a try.

    cool part? created by a non-programmer who could not find the writing tool he wanted, so he made it himself. you gotta love guys like that.

  • ElGordo (unverified)
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    That Reedie with the connections was Steve Jobs. He attended the school for maybe a year before he dropped out and got to work.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    Posted by: lestatdelc | Jan 26, 2009 8:16:33 PM

    cool part? created by a non-programmer who could not find the writing tool he wanted,
    

    That's definitely the best software. I got started that way when I was working for a medical school whose data were so bad that BMDP and SPSS wouldn't touch it.

    Google and Expedia arguably owe their size/advantage to doing everything in Python. If ever there was a "this all sucks, I'm writing my own" language, it's Python. I was fortunate to work with Guido van Rossum in Am*dam when he was developing it and still can't believe how much it has caught on in the last 10 years. Rolled my own development environment until Eric came out for free, which is better. Gotta love a language named Python, where the editor is named Eric.

    Now if this thread were somehow connected to "that other" topic that's hot at the moment, I would compare the protagonist with Java. It was a great idea. Emphasis on vision.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    Sorry, don't know how the attribution got mangled. Computers.

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