Thanks Steve for everything and especially for making home computers something more than typewriters.

We will 'stay hungry, stay foolish'. Thank you, Steve!

It’s not unexpected, but still… My heart goes out to his family and friends. Fiftysix is way too young.

Mail your condolences, thoughts, etc. to

rememberingsteve@apple.com

He gave so many people the freedom to tap into their entrepreneurial spirit and make a living for themselves. I for one, will be eternally grateful.

The phrase "He changed the world" can't be applied to many, but he really did.

R I P Steve.

Nick, and he changed it for better, that's rare indeed!

Steve was the real deal. I felt - and still feel - a kinship with him because we are both adopted children and there's a mindset that most adopted children share. I can see it in the things he wrote and said and the disparate technologies he connected together into great products.

A bad day.

Well yeah, sad indeed, although not entirely a surprise.

He was a boomer like many of us, a dopehead college dropout who lived some of the hippy ethos through his work—he talks about the Last Whole Earth Catalog in his famous Stanford speech, and the Aquarian mindset informs the functionality of all Apples, in particular through his development of the Graphic User Interface as central to the "user experience". But first, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?

An article I wrote about the Apple interface in 2002, Deeper into the Paradigm.

How many universities have some kind of meeting between their design and business schools? Are there schools that teach “Design for Business Majors” and vice-versa?

But first, are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced?

Not necessarily stoned, just beautiful.

It really hits home to think about where we would all be, and not be, had it not been for this man's vision, and his quest («crazy», indeed) to make it real. I am very grateful; and very sad. Thank you, Steve. May you rest in peace.

I still can not believe it.....

>How many universities have some kind of meeting between their design and business schools?

I think Keith Tam's school in Hong Kong does this. They have an annual conference on this subject every year, if I remember correctly.

Not to speak ill of the dead, but "better" is a relative concept. Personally, I feel fortunate to have grown up in the world that I grew up in, rather than the world of today. Conformity has become an expensive commodity, and nonconformity has come to mean something like virtual nonexistence. But, to each his own: Progress is what you make of it. At my age—if not for today's technology—I would probably be wearing an orange vest and greeting people at the front door, if I were lucky enough to have a job at all…

A homage to Steve Jobs on my site http://typemade.mx/ :-(

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating." Steve Jobs 2005

and we are all the better for Steve's interest in typography -

>and we are all the better for Steve's interest in typography

...true, but the second part of that quote seems a tiny bit of a stretch. Would there really be no proportional, beautiful fonts on computers if Steve hadn't taken that class? I guess we'll never know.

In answer to that: Because Apple (SJ) made fonts and the way they were essential to the WYSIWYG-paradigm such a big deal, Microsoft HAD to invest millions in fonts and the way they printed and presented to make their late-effort-reproduction called Windows a better product/choice (at least — to millions of consumers who could not be bothered to spring for the real thing).

Because Apple (SJ) ... Microsoft...

I don't think you can have an account of the development of typography in personal computers that doesn't include Adobe. I suspect John Warnock's hiring of Sumner Stone as Director of Typography in 1984 had a much greater impact on the direction of digital typography than a calligraphy class that Steve Jobs took once.

I seem to remember something Adobe invented...PostScript?

and Steve Jobs put Postscript into the first Macs and along came Pagemaker and we had desktop publishing rather than $80,000 computer type setting setups.

sii> "Would there really be no proportional, beautiful fonts on computers if Steve hadn't taken that class? I guess we'll never know."

Just my opinion, but I think one'd never know without you, Paul Shaw
(re: Arial) or someone else baiting just the right person ;)

John> "I suspect John Warnock's hiring of Sumner Stone [...] in 1984 had a much greater impact on the direction of digital typography than a calligraphy class that Steve Jobs took once."

Well, I guess I've done my own homework on that one;) IMHO Warnock brought the digital outline together with another Reed College calligrapher-turned-Autologic-type director Stone, and got a lot of great clones, revivals and interpretations of the standard fair. After the dream of an Adobe-dominated PS/Type1 font market dies, Warnock pretty much disappears until a font is named after him. Stone was pretty important to Adobe though, that's for sure.

Jobs made of the standard fare, and then added a whole bunch of non-standard fare, the daring though sometimes hideous scripts and decorative faces of the "city fonts", all as optimized bitmaps, perfect for the screen he was targeting. Then, when he needed to, he got proper licenses to the closest designs, as outline fonts, keeping consistent designs and names across the technical and cultural gap between the first generation of pcs and printers, from Apple, Xerox, IBM and HP, (all too puny to deal with outline fonts + 300 dpi output), and the second generation, 1986 Mac, that was just barely able to use postscript fonts and talk to high res. output.

And then, Jobs took the classy-font-thing to Apple's web presence, and then to mobile devices. All because of one class. ;)

John: ‘I don't think you can have an account of the development of typography in personal computers that doesn't include Adobe.’
 
And I don’t think that you can have an account on this development without mentioning URW, especially Dr. Peter Karow. At the DTL FontMaster conference of 2009 in The Hague, Peter Rosenfeld’s presentation titled Re-inventing Technology was about the early days of digital typography. On page 30 of the PDF you will see a photograph from the 1980’s, which shows quite some very important people from the font business, including some visitors from Adobe who came to learn the trade in Hamburg.
 
Question of the day for this forum: can you name the VIP’s on the photo?
 
FEB

Cleo Huggins is my pick ;)

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-jobs-death-apple-calligraphy...

Okay, I get it: Jobs changed so many things in so many ways, all—presumably—for the better. Unfortunately, Progress often has unintended consequences, as well as Collateral Damage. The price of Conformity has gone up considerably; Childhood will never be the same. For what that's worth…

@Mark- Steve spoke about his calligraphy class in his famous Stanford speech.
@oldnick - too true.."childhood will never be the same" - indeed...I grew up without computers (of course in the 1940's and 50's), and no tv (in the global boondocks) and childhood was wonderful.

I grew up when personal computers showed real promise - it was magical.
Now we're all stuck with bloated fashionware sh*t. That's what makes me sad.

hhp

There's always enough anti-Apple folks to ruin a nice thread.

I wasn't being anti-Apple. Windows is just as bad as OSX,
and all these stupid shiny boxes are as deeply inspiring
as a muddy puddle. If you had grown up in the Bay Area
in the 70s you might understand what I'm feeling.

That said, in my book any kind of individual-worship
does indeed stink to high heaven. Saint?! Jobs himself
was wise enough to look down on that.

hhp

But isn't any emerging wave of innovation magical, only to be commoditized at some point? I think we all tend to be overly nostalgic for the past. I dunno, name brands aside, when I can pull up google maps in my hand and see exactly where on the planet I'm standing, I still find that a little magical.

Sure, childhood will never be the same. But that's what parents were saying in the 80s too. And 60s. And 40s. Etc. ;)

It's just sad to watch Mankind's most incredible
invention turned into yet another vapid cash cow.
Such sadness vastly outweighs the passing of any
individual, no matter how gifted.

hhp

"It's just sad to see Mankind's most incredible
invention be turned into yet another vapid
cash cow."

Well, at this point, I'm not entirely sure what we're talking about, but let's assume it's the consumer devices Apple is known for.

I agree that it can be seen as sad that we've invented computers that allow us to send robots to Mars, yet for the most part, they're used for porn and facebook.

And the iPad, as an example, is certainly a device focused mainly on our modern mindless entertainment. Jobs changed the world of music, gaming, reading, etc. He certainly didn't invent world peace or anything of the sort.

That said, what he did build is being used for some rather remarkable things that aren't necessarily great mass market ads. A specific example is children who don't have the ability to speak. Many of these children have had to rely on sound boards...large boards with pictures on them that they have to touch to have a computerized voice speak for them. The problems with these devices were their size, limited vocabulary, and incredible expense.

Then came the iPad. That with a $100 app and this child now has the ability to communicate more than they ever could before. And there's even a good side to the "fashionware sh*t"...this child is no longer that weird kid with the wheelchair. He's now that kid with the iPad.

So, it's all about perspective. What people do with the technologies is good and bad. Useful and pointless. But the technology is there now and accessible in ways that we may not have even imagined if it hadn't been for Steve Jobs.

> let's assume it's the consumer devices Apple is known for.

You see what I mean?! NO.

--

I prefer Wozniak.

hhp

"You see what I mean?!"

Obviously, I don't. Clue me in, if you'd like.

I meant the unique invention of something physical that
reflects our own existence, the "thinking machine".
Not some specific vacuous instance(s) of that.

hhp

I read an article the other day about the trend in California for the heads of Silicon Valley companies to send their children to Waldorf Schools, where there are no computers and learning focuses on physical experience, movement, music, etc.

@hrant:
I meant the unique invention of something physical that reflects our own existence, the "thinking machine". Not some specific vacuous instance(s) of that.

And here, I always thought that a computer was simply an automated adding machine. Not something that can actually think in the sense of being conscious.

That is not to say, of course, that computers are not wonderful inventions. They are so versatile that, in fact, they could indeed be used to create a conscious "artificial brain" - sometime in the future. Not necessarily the very far future, either, with the rapid progress of microelectronics.

But the computer as it is now is not really an echo of the human soul.

I myself don't believe in Artificial Intelligence in terms
of replicating actual intelligence, philosophically. But if
one defines AI as the ability of a machine to simply appear
intelligent -which does have fundamental social implications-
then at least according to the Turing Test we're already there:
Elbot and Cleverbot -as primitive as they are compared to what
will be- can fool about 1/3 of people long enough to matter.
Now one might point to something like Siri, but the problem
is nothing controlled by a corporation can ever hope to be
allowed to make real social change for the better.

> But the computer as it is now is not really an echo of the human soul.

I think that's actually a very good way to put what it could be!
However it is not given the necessary freedom anymore, a freedom
it did have before the average Joe realized there's money in it.

hhp

It seems that Jobs did not live up to your vision of a technologically advanced socialist utopia free of corporate influence. Fair enough.

Still, for a lot of people, he left a mark, and that's what he's being remembered for.

I'm just happy I don't have to draw lettering with a ruling pen on frosted mylar anymore. I'll let all of you big thinkers discuss your disappointment with the personal computer.