41–50 of 54 posts
11:00 in the video is a fascinating example of someone standing up to Jobs' reality distortion field.
That's Joanna Hoffman, who was also part of the Macintosh team. The Isaacson bio shares an anecdote about how the Mac team would annually give out an award to the team member who had proven most able to stand up to Jobs, and Hoffman won it the first two years. It was fun to see an example of why.
I see a bit more stuff about NeXT getting posted around, I suspect this is because of Jobs' passing. It got me wondering : although a commercial failure, this computer made a big impact. I wonder if, in 20 years time, all the cool kids will have an old NeXT on prominent display in their home? What other bits of hardware/software combos are going to be classics?
"Take a really expensive technology and pull it down to a price point that is affordable". That's what he did with the iPad too.
That might have been NeXT's goal, but they didn't achieve it. In the video, Jobs says that three grand is the upper bound on what their polled potential customers are willing to pay. The first NeXT cube had a base price of $6,500.00. They also didn't meet their original deadline either, going over by more than a year.
I recognised his trademark passionate speech (02:43) about using technology to improve education. Laden with superlatives, it's just like every Apple product launch since the iPod. It's a great pity that education hasn't actually changed a bit in the intervening time. Computers are pretty much just used for teaching computers, as electronic typewriters and libraries, and to cut down on admin. They really are not used…
I have to disagree with that. In my wife's second grade class the kids have electronic voting controls at their desk and a giant touch screen hangs on the front "chalk" board where kids can interact with various group learning applications.
Wow, in the 4th video, where he's showing off NextStep mail application, the definition of smooth scrolling has definitely changed over the decades.
Granted, change for change's sake is not always a good thing, but for a video made before I was born it seems strange that even the mail.app that ships with Lion still hasn't fundamentally changed from its neXt forebears - we still have the three large horizontal textboxes on top of a large textarea for the body, and everything seems to function in exactly the same manner.
No wonder people my age barely use email anymore. A subject line? really?
I see a bit more stuff about NeXT getting posted around, I suspect this is because of Jobs' passing. It got me wondering : although a commercial failure, this computer made a big impact. I wonder if, in 20 years time, all the cool kids will have an old NeXT on prominent display in their home? What other bits of hardware/software combos are going to be classics?
Wow, in the 4th video, where he's showing off NextStep mail application, the definition of smooth scrolling has definitely changed over the decades.
I recognised his trademark passionate speech (02:43) about using technology to improve education. Laden with superlatives, it's just like every Apple product launch since the iPod. It's a great pity that education hasn't actually changed a bit in the intervening time. Computers are pretty much just used for teaching computers, as electronic typewriters and libraries, and to cut down on admin. They really are not used…
I see a bit more stuff about NeXT getting posted around, I suspect this is because of Jobs' passing. It got me wondering : although a commercial failure, this computer made a big impact. I wonder if, in 20 years time, all the cool kids will have an old NeXT on prominent display in their home? What other bits of hardware/software combos are going to be classics?
I think there were only about 50,000 NeXT machines ever sold, so there may not be enough to go around for all the cool kids.