My Take On “A Defiant Steve Jobs Confronts ‘Antennagate’”
January 22nd, 2012
Mitchell, I’m not quite sure where you’re going with that. But if you haven’t watched that commencement speech video, it is definitely worth watching. He’s opening up some very private parts of his past and offering some pretty good insights into life that I’m satisfied come from the heart. I don’t think he was acting.
You also get a look into Jobs’ Jobs-centric world view that perhaps he’s not aware of in one of his connected dots, where he talks about the possibility that if he hadn’t built multiple and proportional spaced fonts into the Mac, computers today wouldn’t have them. Windows was just a copy of the Mac, so they wouldn’t have had it, either, he observes.
Even without personal knowledge of what people were doing then, you have to know this can’t be true. Even without Steve Jobs, computers certainly would have had proportional spaced fonts. Books have had them for centuries and it’s just a little too obvious that maybe you could do that with a computer, too.
More to the point, other computers DID support multiple and proportional fonts! Has Jobs forgotten about the Xerox Star that so influenced him with its mouse and GUI? It had multiple fonts.
Even IBM’s early standalone word processing machines that I worked on in the early 70s all handled proportional spaced fonts using either Selectric, daisy wheel or ink jet printers. (The Selectrics and daisy wheels would stop and prompt you to change the ball or the wheel. But the IJ was like the ones today and could mix fonts all day; it was just expensive as all get-out, about $30K in 1975.) The only thing we couldn’t do was display it on screen that way. So this whole notion that if not for a particular dot in Jobs’ life, computers would not have multiple fonts today is just Jobs’ legend in his own mind.
But still, it’s a great speech. I felt moved, especially in the part about not living someone else’s life. If you haven’t listened, you should. It’s worth the 15 minutes.
Recommended: satsuki mitchell.
Entry Filed under: popular arts entertainment