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Steve Jobs passes....such a brilliant individual LIP
Steve Jobs of course had no personal knowledge of this, but in 1987 he was directly responsible for the excellent documentation of the San Francisco 911/Public Safety radio system. Numerous engineers and technicians from Motorola observed at the time that our radio system had the best documentation that they had ever seen.
This all was done on my very first Mac- a "Macintosh Plus" with 4mb ram and a 20mb hard drive. The San Francisco bureaucracy in all of it's wisdom had decreed that IBM pcs were to be the City's official platform, but the IBM had no mouse, one (count it, one!) font, and absolutely no graphics capability. So I bought a used Mac myself, and it still works (though not very hard) to this very day.
The documentation project was started using the basic drawing program that came with the MAC, and the Police Department, seeing the initial results, then purchased and gave me (literally: "here, we thought this would be a help for you") an $800 CAD "program" which was almost half the cost of the computer itself. It definitely was a huge improvement, and I still use that same CAD program for various small documentation projects.
Reply to @bee: Yes, he did, and sharing his drive for the best possible product I was determined to use his computer to create well designed, good-looking and user friendly documentation. My greatest reward came a few years after that project, when one of our newer and younger technicians thanked me for the "Hall of Justice Survival Guide", which had allowed him to diagnose and repair a problem in the very complex communications equipment which supports 911 dispatch, even though he was not familiar with that particular installation. Made it all worth while. Absolutely could not have done it without Steve Jobs and that little Apple Mac.
Reply to @Old_Joe: Thanks for bringing back to mind what a usability miracle the original Mac was. It looks clunky now in a picture side-by-side with the photos of the current generation of gorgeous Apple products. But it was an amazing leap for consumers. Back in the day, my wife broke her leg and was hospitalized right before her graduate school applications were due. She had some almost complete documents on a Mac disk I had to finish up for her with no time to spare. I had never used a Mac before -- I only had experience with minicomputer-based text formatting programs and early DOS versions of WordPerfect. So I had some trepidation about walking up to a computer in a university computer lab running an operating system I had never used, to start up a word processing program I had never seen and complete important documents for someone else. I remember being absolutely amazed by the experience -- from the funny little ? Mac icon on the screen on through saving and printing -- I never had the slightest doubt about what to do with generic operations with the computer or writing using MacWrite.
Jobs' great gift to the culture was demanding on our behalf that technical products be both very usable and be beautifully designed. By making this the Apple hallmark, he has raised all our expectations -- made us more demanding. I think even if Apple eventually fades, this bar he raised stays up, and other technical innovators will continue to strive to clear it.
Comments
Died at 56. He could do so much more.
We were probably all expecting this but nevertheless, it's a terrible loss. He was the Edison of the Information Age.
rono
This all was done on my very first Mac- a "Macintosh Plus" with 4mb ram and a 20mb hard drive. The San Francisco bureaucracy in all of it's wisdom had decreed that IBM pcs were to be the City's official platform, but the IBM had no mouse, one (count it, one!) font, and absolutely no graphics capability. So I bought a used Mac myself, and it still works (though not very hard) to this very day.
The documentation project was started using the basic drawing program that came with the MAC, and the Police Department, seeing the initial results, then purchased and gave me (literally: "here, we thought this would be a help for you") an $800 CAD "program" which was almost half the cost of the computer itself. It definitely was a huge improvement, and I still use that same CAD program for various small documentation projects.
Steve, thank you.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/steve-jobs-apple-pixar-and-inspiring-innovation-video/2011/08/25/gIQArkNwdJ_blog.html
Jobs' great gift to the culture was demanding on our behalf that technical products be both very usable and be beautifully designed. By making this the Apple hallmark, he has raised all our expectations -- made us more demanding. I think even if Apple eventually fades, this bar he raised stays up, and other technical innovators will continue to strive to clear it.