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#130526 10/05/11 05:39 PM
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pghboemike #130527 10/06/11 08:13 AM
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No matter how much you got, you can't buy good health, and a random moment comes along...

Steve realized that you can't make much money from open source, so...it not does not matter to him. What next?


John Conley
Musica est vita
John Conley #130528 10/07/11 07:26 AM
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Too bad but I can't get all that broke up about it.


- Bud
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Steve Jobs changed everything that we on this forum, and everyone who uses a personal computer do/does. Apple didn't invent the mouse or the GUI, but they introduced it to computing. Their Apple II series along with the Commodore 64 and Tandy Color Computer did more to bring computing to the masses than IBM or Microsoft. The Apple IIe in particular was a workhorse for early electronic musicians.

My stepfather was at the local computer meeting where Jobs and Woz introduced the first Apple computer. (I have seen that machine at a Fry's store in Santa Clara, California. It is literally built on a wooden plank.) This was in the days of Altair and other homebrew computers that used switches and lights for the interface, had a whopping 2 Kb of RAM and no storage. Everybody thought it was nice but couldn't see any potential.

The difference between a Gates, a Jobs, or any of the other giants in the cyberworld and the rest of us is vision. Many of us have their technical chops, but can't begin to see the potential of our own ideas. I don't think that "genius" is defined by intelligence. I think it is smarts combined with productivity that makes it. They have it; I don't.

I don't think I could have worked for the man, but I have to respect him. It is more than a bit humbling to realize that he was two years younger than I when he died.


"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."
Ryszard #130530 10/07/11 12:52 PM
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10 PRINT "THANKS STEVE"
20 GOTO 10

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No objection to any amount of praise that can be given to Steve Jobs, but a couple of minor clarifications to points made here:

The Radio Shack Color Computer came out in 1980, three years after their TRS-80 Model 1, one year after the business-oriented Model II, and about the same time as the much more popular Model III. The Color Computer, with LOGO, never really caught on. I was selling and demonstrating Radio Shack computers at the time, and opened the first retail computer store in Albany NY. 1977 was particularly fun, when I would put a Model One in the passenger seat of my car and drive to trade shows and TV studios to demonstrate it as a contrast to the original Apple Computer.

The BASIC language snippet is perhaps not as appropriate to remember Steve Jobs as some Pascal code would be, since the development of the Lisa featured Pascal and many of us learned that language as a consequence. Despite many years teaching BASIC in those early times of microcomputers, Pascal is still one of my favorites.


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Ryszard #130532 10/07/11 02:08 PM
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Quote:

Apple didn't invent the mouse or the GUI, but they introduced it to computing.





Yes you are correct, Xerox invented it. I was a tech for Xerox and they let us know all the stuff they have invented over the years at their labs. I was told they even invented the first computer virus, which was used to update all the computers on their network was the intention.
Brian


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Matt Finley #130533 10/07/11 04:20 PM
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Quote:



The BASIC language snippet is perhaps not as appropriate to remember Steve Jobs as some Pascal code would be, since the development of the Lisa featured Pascal and many of us learned that language as a consequence. Despite many years teaching BASIC in those early times of microcomputers, Pascal is still one of my favorites.




Well, the BASIC language code is my tribute because it was on the Apple II that I tried my hand at computer programming for the first time. That preceded the Lisa by some years, and was an immensely more popular machine than Lisa, if I could guess at sales numbers.

I was a 7th or 8th grade kid at the time, and the only computers that were in schools at that time were Commodore PET or Apple II. Since the Apple II had a color monitor, of course I was drawn to that. My dad was a 6th grade teacher and could bring home the schools one Apple II sometimes on weekends. I would stay up late programming or playing Oregon Trail. That was the time frame when the floating point BASIC was just becoming available for the Apple II. Up to that point in time, they only had integer BASIC.

A few years later, I did some programming in Pascal on the first IBM PC models, the one with the Charlie Chaplin advertisements. Same time frame I had a couple of friends who had the Atari 400 and we programmed in whatever version of BASIC that thing had available - I think the BASIC was on a cartridge IIRC.

Then later Turbo Pascal on PC. After that Fortran 77 on DEC mainframes, then HP Basic on HP 300 series, then Matlab on PC, and finally VBA inside of Excel.

My brain works in structured top-down design as it pertains to programming. The most difficult one to learn was the VBA, because of this. To have so much flexibility on subroutines that weren't really even 'sub', was hard to wrap my brain around. It's what the kids do by 2nd nature now, but I still have a hard time thinking of a GUI as the heart of a program.

So, for me, the 'illegal' endless loop was first discovered in BASIC, on an Apple II that bragged about the 64 (kB?) of RAM that it had on a sticker that was slapped onto the space bar. Late into the wee morning hours. That's my first impression of the Steves. While we were encouraged to fill the screen with "Hello" with a loop like that, later on we would get smacked down hard for illegal loops like that, even though the language and run-time compiler allowed for it. So, in defiance of my 'official' programming teachers, I gave the endless loop in Jobs' spirit as a tribute.

-Scott

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Sounds great, Scott. It's fun to think back on those times, isn't it? Turbo Pascal was indeed one of my favorite programs of all time.

The only thing I might maliciously modify in your endless loop BASIC code would be to put LPRINT instead of PRINT. That will get you thrown out of the computer lab right quick, and maybe even start a fire!


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Matt Finley #130535 10/07/11 06:01 PM
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I was one of the guys that thought 'computers suck' back then. Just text, with no real features. I remember mailing cassette tapes to people on a list so we could all get into a 'chat' (BBS) at a scheduled time and discuss the project of the week.
Boy did I ever learn better.. and thanks to the original PT, I learned quick!
I'm just now learning actual programming, having been focused on the recording side of things for years.
While you guys were programming stuff, I was threading tape from one machine to another and trying to run sync tracks to get multiple machines to line up. I remember my buddy Jeff showing me his new appleII and telling me it could do more than we were doing with all those tape machines. I suppose it could (I *think* it was Passport that was pretty much the only the music program back then), but it wasn't ready for audio yet.
You guys make me feel old and obsolete.
Get off my lawn

Last edited by rharv; 10/07/11 06:04 PM.

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Matt Finley #130536 10/08/11 08:35 AM
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Quote:

The Radio Shack Color Computer came out in 1980, three years after their TRS-80 Model 1, one year after the business-oriented Model II, and about the same time as the much more popular Model III. The Color Computer, with LOGO, never really caught on.




Depends on whom you ask. True, the CoCo never had the mass appeal of the C-64 or the Apple II. To the cognoscenti it was marketed as a programmer's machine. IIRC, LOGO was presented as an "easy to learn" programming language for children. What almost no one knows is that it supported OS-9, a Windows-like color environment years before either Apple or IBM advanced beyond monochrome graphics. Though it only supported 8-bit graphics, there was a fast switching mode between two color sets, so a devoted hacker could display high-resolution 16-bit color images.

I got started with them as a gift from my stepfather--the EEE who was at the meeting where the first Apple was introduced? He set our family up with two 64 CoCo's hotrodded with 128 Kb RAM each. I later picked up a CoCo 3 with 512 Kb and two fast 5-1/4" double-sided floppies. I wrote a book with that machine, and also learned several versions of BASIC. I even learned DEC VAX, to which OS-9 was amazingly similar, for a computer science course.

A large part of the machine's downfall was that it used cartridges for programs as well as for a hardware interface. If the cartridge became dislodged while the power was on it smoked the CPU. The Motorola MC-6809 chip could be easily and inexpensively replaced by a hobbyist, but this was hardly family friendly.

I think that this is in part relevant to this thread. Hobbyist magazines of the time would present programs in several versions of BASIC so that users could adapt a routine to whatever machine they happened to own. Being the insanely voracious reader that I was I would read and retain everything, so I could program, at least at a rudimentary level, in BASIC on whatever machine I happened to be sitting at. It was a lot of fun.

I always lusted after an Apple IIe and the music hardware and software that was available for it, but by the time I could afford it I was into PCs instead. (I traded a very nice Takamine 12-string for my first PC. Sometimes I wonder about that decision, but in the end it has been worth it.) That slowed me down as far as computers and music production for about a decade, but that path led me directly to where I am now as a BIAB user and forum member.

As always throughout this course of events I am grateful to be a part and intensely curious to see where it will all lead.


"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."
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