Many have painted Steve Jobs with the glorious brush of an Edison or Ford -- Edison because of his technical genius, Ford because of his design and manufacturing acumen and perhaps his quoting of Ford that if he had asked his customers what they wanted it would have been a faster horse.
But perhaps the more significant comparison is that Jobs was the latest incarnation of Gutenberg. Before Jobs, computer type was mono-spaced, often 80 columns of drab cold numbers and numeric-like text. Drudgery. Jobs brought letter and line spacing to digital text. And cut, copy and paste. He did the same with numbers and lines and circles and rectangles. MacPaint and MacDraw defined how graphic arts would henceforth be done. When the Macintosh first arrived posters, flyers, programs, menus, annual reports, suddenly had italics, shadows, boldface, underlined, etc. In effect, everyone became a publisher. This because Jobs audited a typography college class and dropped acid. Later when the mainstream corporados ousted him from his own company, he went on to do the same thing with video and audio processing, computer programming itself (NEXT) and animation (Pixar). The results of his vision and its implementation are everywhere--especially in the products of his competitors. What is Microsoft without Windows, a haphazard shell over antique coding to make it look and feel like a Mac? The result is constant catastrophe. (My friends in the PC consulting business freely admit that if Windows was as trouble free as Apple's operating system, they would have to find other work!) It took a century or more to feel the full effects of Gutenberg's moveable type. It'll be a while before most of us get what a profound change was wrought by the first Mac and Job's insistence that things be done right. If we are lucky his penchant for honest quality control will seep over into how we govern ourselves for the benefit of all. Dan Scanlan Sent from my iPhone _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
