JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Steve Jobs passed away today...

UN-related to music ...except that he's facilitated a LOT of music in the recording industry via hardware and software through Apple... Steve Jobs just died today at 56.

Thought you should know if you hadn't heard yet.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-apple-ceo-dies/story?id=14383813

Heard it on CNN tonight, Mz Linda!

Even a sorta-Secret Liver Transplant didn't get him through his last 4 tough years with Cancer. Quite sad to lose such a great Innovator!

Heard him being compared with Thomas Edison as the eulogy continued. Very Apropos, methinks!

He'll be missed!

Best Wishes, Big Hugs,
Stan

Sad day indeed. His products helped many of us to make amazing music.

As the first artist without a label to get on iTunes thanks to Derek Sivers and Steve Jobs, I have to say Kudos for helping musicians like me even the playing field.

RIP Steve.

I heard it on Fox... and CNN... and CCTV. (Yes, the Communist Chinese!) They are a better source for world news than our own media... provided one does not believe everything they say... LOL!

It is a sad day for America and for Apple. He was a talented and resourceful individual and will be missed.

I have it on good authority that St. Peter is needing an individual with Steve's talent to head up a new database development team.

This is worth watching. 2005 Stanford University Commencement address: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Some things he says:

"Nobody wants to die. Even people who what to go to heaven don't want to die to get there". And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it and that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new".

Sad news indeed. Not only was he quite awesome but unlike many rich successful people he was genuinely liked.
I love the photos of him building early compact computers in his garage.

Too bad he wasn't a politician. We need GENIUSES who are insightful and genuinely liked by all in this world.

Dude changed the world. In very real ways that pretty much EVERYBODY (in the West) can easily see.
How many folks can you say that about?

Sad day.
R.I.P.

I have such a different image of him in my mind than I do Bill Gates. One I see as more visionary (Steve) and one I see as more predatory (Gates).

Jobs has a music connection beyond I-Tunes also. It has been said he would have married Joan Baez if not for the age difference and how it would affect his having children. You can check it out.

I agree with that. But then, I come around to remembering about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (with which he is actually very involved) and remember that Gates is probably a pretty good guy.

That said, I am a Mac guy.

A New York Times feature editor who covers technology said that the word "visionary" is overused when applied to most people, but when we talk about Jobs, it is perfectly fitting.

Again, if you get a chance to see Steve Jobs address to the graduating class of Stanford in 2005, you will get a rare look into his personal life as he tell "three stories" about himself. He went to Reed College in Oregon for 6 months before dropping out formally, but continued to attend every class that interested him. He tells us how that decision to pursue only what interested him actually "paid" off in an unexpected way a few years later when the Macintosh was developed. I would say that Gates developed the personal computer but that Jobs developed personal technology with style and art.

There is so much of Steve's leadership style that is applicable to almost every creative endeavor. What really amazed me was not just his vision, but his ability to execute, to get things done. I think he really saw the potential of computing devices as amazing, lifestyle-changing and world-changing things.

"Real artists ship." That's probably my favorite lesson from Jobs. It's not good enough to make awesome things. You also have to push it out into the world. I try to apply this to my own professional and creative life as well.

NO..... I would not agree --- it was Job's baby from the start --- he saw it as the tool EVERYONE could have on their desk to use.... Gates was the Money man

A modern day story of a brilliant self made man who started in his dinky garage with an idea and lots of drive (pun intended). Thank you Steve! You left too early.

This is somewhat "off topic" but a couple of you mentioned Gates vs. Jobs and who "invented" the Personal Computer. It was neither one of them. I can't remember the names of the two guys credited for this significant accomplishment but the operating system was called CP/M. (Control program for Microprocessors)

Gates came up with DOS and quickly migrated to Windows in all of it's myriad versions. Jobs and his partner came up with a DOS version for the first Apple. Then came the MAC and it's operating system using that fabulous Motorola Chip. (same one as the Amiga)

This is not meant to disparage either of these great guys and their contributions to mankind through so many of the technological advances we enjoy today.

I hope Apple can find the leadership it will need to maintain the pace required to continue to propel Apple products. Steve will be a difficult act to follow.

It's very sad that Steve passed away, he accomplished much during his short life.

I work with a fellow who was there that day watching his daughter graduate.

Below is the text to his address:

Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford Commencement address from June 12, 2005.
CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

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.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

I guess MY point is REALLY that Steve Jobs was the visionary who SAW the invention of the computer as the Tool for Everyone's desktop......... I think xerox passed on the Idea

The genius of the modern hobby computer is spelled out here.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa120198.htm

I remember the 1975 issue of popular Science where the hobby computer was on the cover. That to me was the start of the revolution because $400 would buy a computer. You had to write your own software but that was exciting back then. Nobody could anticipate how fast things would move. I don't see either Gates or Jobs as any kind of computer God but imagine how Job's for instance, went from himself and a partner to a company with 4000 employees in less than 5 years. That takes a lot of confidence and vision.