Author Topic: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?  (Read 12619 times)

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Offline m k

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #25 on: September 21, 2022, 04:47:50 pm »
Heron of Alexandria had a steam engine and gears but since slave labour was practically free of charge the time was not right for steam engine.

Locomotive was not needed because of labour cost but because of population density.

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Offline rstofer

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #26 on: September 21, 2022, 05:05:26 pm »
The same applies to Bill Gates. What did he actually invent? Not MS-DOS, because that was made by Timothy Paterson. https://www.britannica.com/technology/MS-DOS

Two things:  He dropped out of Harvard to create Microsoft Basic for the recently introduced Altair 8800 which started an industry.  Home computing had been relegated to toggling short snippets and watching some lights blink.  And we could play music by writing very specific code and having the EMF picked up by a radio.  The 8800 came with 256 bytes of RAM!

Second:  He took the meeting with IBM where he sold MS-DOS even though he didn't have it or write it.  He bought it from someone who made a direct copy of CP/M.  Unfortunately for Digital Research, Gary Kildall, who actually created CP/M, decided to go fly his hang glider instead of taking the meeting.  Things could have been different.

Once the PC market exploded, MS-DOS was the only game in town for quite some time.  It was adequate for the time but Gates was smart enough to see the GUI on the wall and Microsoft developed Windows, the most ubiquitous operating system on the planet by a large margin.
 

Offline pcprogrammerTopic starter

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #27 on: September 21, 2022, 05:59:42 pm »
Which confirms what tom66 wrote. In the right place, at the right time. And it does deserve some respect and shows he could program, but so can many others. Still to me no reason to idolize.

And that is what I'm curious about. Why do people feel this need to idolize someone?

If you look at youtube and see these videos of the so called influencers, I don't see the why they get so much followers. Most of it is, in my eyes, to stupid to be true, if you get my drift.

Online wraper

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #28 on: September 21, 2022, 06:28:04 pm »
Which confirms what tom66 wrote. In the right place, at the right time. And it does deserve some respect and shows he could program, but so can many others. Still to me no reason to idolize.
You forgot about the right person. Gary Kildall had the chance too but blew it.
 
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Offline pcprogrammerTopic starter

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #29 on: September 21, 2022, 06:33:26 pm »
Then it should be the wrong person at the right time in the right place :)

Because in a sense Gary Kildall was the right person as he created CP/M going on rstofer's words.

Offline tooki

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #30 on: September 21, 2022, 06:41:26 pm »
Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills then they might deserve?
They… don’t?

Steve Jobs was never a tech wizard, nor did he (or anyone else) claim he was. What he was was a visionary: someone who could see the technology that exists, or was on the horizon, and envision how to put it to use. It’s very, very unlikely the computer industry would have developed in the direction it did, when it did, without Jobs. He’s the one who saw a (rudimentary) GUI and thought “everyone should have this on their desk” back when that was a preposterous idea. He’s the one who recognized that a really good finger-driven touchscreen could work as the sole input device on a phone, back when that idea, too, was considered preposterous. Another thing Jobs excelled at (though admittedly with often questionable methods) was pushing the engineers to accomplish the “impossible”. Of course, it was not actually impossible, since they did it, but they routinely did things that were considered too difficult to be practical, or under otherwise unrealistic timelines. Jobs had a sense of taste (i.e. appreciation for quality and style) and understanding of design (especially visual arts and industrial design) that permeates Apple to this day and fundamentally shaped the electronics industry today. One more thing Jobs was was an advocate for the user: he didn’t like things that were hard to use, and he was a mostly-effective foil to Jony Ive’s insane drive for extreme minimalism. (We saw what happened when Ive became the head of software design and every visual affordance vanished...) Was Steve Jobs the only person to possess his abilities? No. But having all of those in one person is very, very, very rare.

(As for Xerox: they didn’t invent the GUI either, though they developed the first commercially available GUI-based system. However, it’s categorically incorrect to say, as is often parroted, that Jobs “copied” it: while his visit to Xerox is what exposed him to the concept of the GUI, the actual GUI Apple went on to develop and sell has essentially nothing in common with Xerox’s GUI — the similarities pretty much end at them both using a bitmap display, a mouse, and having on-screen things to point at. Nothing else works the same, and if you or I sat down at a Xerox Alto, we would not know how to operate it. The interactions are radically different from what we use today. Apple’s GUI, on the other hand, became the model upon which ALL the modern mouse-driven GUIs were based. All of the basic interaction patterns we take for granted — click a thing, drag it or select a command to apply to it — were what Apple, not Xerox, came up with. I’m sure their researchers looked at all the prior art that existed at the time, but they came up with something unlike anything before it. The only real exceptions to the standard Mac/Windows interaction models are CAD software, and that’s because a lot of it predates the Mac. So many of them use the verb->noun (choose command, then choose what to apply it to) interaction model that was common in extremely early graphical software, rather than the noun->verb (select item, then do something to it) model that is prevalent in most software today.)

As for Woz: his skill was in accomplishing the same thing using a lot simpler hardware, thus making it more affordable. A famous example of this was the Apple II disk controller, which (combined with strategically  offloading of some controller logic to the software) had more functionality using 8 ICs than IBM’s disk controller that used 50 chips!
 
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Online wraper

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #31 on: September 21, 2022, 06:52:29 pm »
Then it should be the wrong person at the right time in the right place :)

Because in a sense Gary Kildall was the right person as he created CP/M going on rstofer's words.
He was a right person for programming the thing but wrong person to make a business out of it. You may be the smartest scientist or engineer ever but totally waste your skill on doing something mediocre when employed by somebody mediocre. Kildall blew his chance twice actually. There was a copyright issue with the, clone so Kildall eventually got the deal with IBM for selling his OS alongside with MS-DOS/PC-DOS but with 6 times higher price :palm:. Not smart to set the amount without considering quantity sold and competitors. So of course MS-DOS became mainstream despite being somewhat inferior. Gates on other hand was very smart about this. He sold rights to "his" OS to IBM instead of just licensing copies... but the deal was not exclusive  >:D.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2022, 06:58:17 pm by wraper »
 
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Offline pcprogrammerTopic starter

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #32 on: September 21, 2022, 06:53:46 pm »
They… don’t?

Steve Jobs was never a tech wizard, nor did he (or anyone else) claim he was.

Quote
The next generation of programmers

I was intrigued to see what the next generation of Bill Gates's, Steve Jobs's, Linus Torvalds's etc. are cutting their teeth on:

Quote from the thread I referred to https://www.eevblog.com/forum/programming/the-next-generation-of-programmers/msg4426867/#msg4426867

To me that implies to be a claim of seeing him as a tech wizard.


Offline pcprogrammerTopic starter

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #33 on: September 21, 2022, 06:57:06 pm »
Then it should be the wrong person at the right time in the right place :)

Because in a sense Gary Kildall was the right person as he created CP/M going on rstofer's words.
He was a right person for programming the thing but wrong person to make a business out of it. You may be the smartest scientist or engineer ever but totally waste your skill on doing something mediocre when employed by somebody mediocre. Kildall blew his chance twice actually. There was a copyright issue with the, clone so Kildall eventually got the deal with IBM for selling his OS alongside with MS-DOS/PC-DOS but with 6 times higher price :palm:. Not smart to set the amount without considering quantity sold and competitors. So of course MS-DOS became mainstream despite being somewhat inferior.

Safe guarded this one  >:D If I'm not mistaken you deleted it a couple of times to get the text right.  :-DD

So we can agree on the fact that Gates was the better salesman and Jobs was a visionary.

Online wraper

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #34 on: September 21, 2022, 07:19:19 pm »
So we can agree on the fact that Gates was the better salesman and Jobs was a visionary.
The thing is they had the right combination of skills/traits. Had been Gates just a salesman, it's extremely unlikely he would had succeeded. Or Mark Zuckerberg, had he not have a lack of conscience, he would not have Facebook. Basically he was hired to make something similar, so he got paid to do the job but just stole the idea and made the thing for himself instead. After a while he screwed his business partners too.
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #35 on: September 21, 2022, 08:33:06 pm »
There are a large number of inventions or discoveries that have been made by more than one person sometimes almost simultaneously and other times centuries apart, but for various reasons that person or that country failed to develop that idea.  The "Connections" TV series featuring James Burke went into the history of many of those and often talked about why one failed and the other succeeded.  A couple of things that I recall, Charles Babbages' Analytical Engine failed as a commercial product because it was too complex to be built in quantity by the mechanical production methods of it's day.  2nd The Chinese invented a large number of items long before the west but they remained novelties in China whereas the west produced them in large quantities and it became an everyday item that was available to enough people so that it often changed history.  Paper, books, and mass printing and magnetic compasses are a good examples of that.  You could even argue that the simplicity of written characters in European languages was a great advancement over the complex characters of Egypt, mid-eastern, China and Japan and that beginning in about the 14th century that lead to many more books become available and more readership and all of that in turn lead to more rapid technical, social, religious and economic  development of the west over the east.

You somewhat stretched what I wrote, and at the same time proofed the rest of my post.

I was referring to it being impossible to repeat the exact same time frame/location setup, with a different set of parameters as to see if it would bring a different outcome or not.

Your history lesson shows that computers and the software for them would still have evolved to what they are today with or without a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs, and that is what I also think. Because it is not a single person who determines the path taken.

Software and computers could very easily have taken a different path.  We very nearly ended up with a model based on timesharing on large computers with thin terminals.  Which would have been unlikely to expand to all the application areas that occurred when everyone owned their own hardware and software resources. 
 

Offline Sal Ammoniac

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #36 on: September 21, 2022, 08:45:54 pm »
There's nothing in life that says someone has to succeed just because they are a good programmer.  And they need to be driven.  I know engineers/programmers who are quite comfortable taking a salary without risk every month, if you want to do something as crazy as start a company like Apple, you need to be prepared to live in a shoebox for a few years, and throw all of your time and effort into it, for maybe a 1% chance of success.

The willingness to accept risk is a big part of it. Ever heard of Ronald Wayne? If not, you're not alone--almost no one has--yet he's one of the founders of Apple. He was so risk adverse that he sold his shares back to Woz and Jobs 12 days later. If he'd stayed, he'd be a billionaire today.
"That's not even wrong" -- Wolfgang Pauli
 
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Offline hli

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #37 on: September 21, 2022, 09:29:28 pm »
Steve Jobs ...  He’s the one who saw a (rudimentary) GUI and thought “everyone should have this on their desk” back when that was a preposterous idea.
I would say this award shpould got to Alan Kay and the team at Xerox PARC. Look at the Dynabook and at A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. I'm willing to say what these people envisioned was far more visionary than what Steve Jobs did. What he did, though, was to actually commercialize it into a real, sellable product - thats where PARC failed (and there is a talk IIRC from Kay where he explain why this was so). Steve Jobs itself admitted in a late interview that from the three great ideas which were presented to him at PARC he only understood, and took away, the GUI (but missed e.g. the networking).
Going back to the 'right time, right place' issue - it still needs the right person (as can be seen with Kildall vs. Gates - both where in the same spot, at the same, but only one of the was actually prepared to do the right thing). Many inventions have many parent, but it still needs the right person to actually connect all the dots and threads. And thats still hard work, and in many cases its just this persistence which made the difference (even Edison is often quoted with 'Genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration.'). Yes, many _could_ have created the Apple II, but only Wozniak actually did come up with the technical solutions.
 
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Offline strawberry

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #38 on: September 21, 2022, 09:55:07 pm »
Elon got lucky with Paypal.
He might be curious about rockets and stuff but he is not engineering them
 
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Offline james_s

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #39 on: September 21, 2022, 10:47:23 pm »
This is just human nature. The celebrity types, the people with the looks and charisma, those that were in the public eye, they become well known, fame brings attention and more fame. That doesn't bother me nearly as much as all the nitwit "influencers" and reality stars and whatnot that are famous for what, being famous? At least people like Jobs and Musk and whatnot DID contribute something technical. Charismatic businessmen are needed and they do make a valuable contribution. Without businessmen like Steve Jobs, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and others, the brilliant creations of guys like Wozniak and Tesla would be nothing more than laboratory curiosities.

Edison in particular seems to get shit on a lot these days, and while it's true that he was generally a bit of a jerk, his perfection of the incandescent lamp is secondary to his realization that a lamp is of no use without sockets, switches, fuse boxes, meters, distribution, dynamos, and everything else. He saw the business side of things and realized that for the light bulb to be a viable product that people could actually buy, there had to be an entire system developed and marketed alongside it. Woz was certainly technically much sharper than Jobs, but had he not partnered with Jobs, the Apple computer likely would have sold a few dozen to several hundred units to computer enthusiasts and then faded into the footnotes of history.
 

Offline Bud

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #40 on: September 21, 2022, 11:13:01 pm »
Both Apple and Google would be nowhere today if it were not the investors who showed up at the right time. THEY were the ones responsible for the success.
Facebook-free life and Rigol-free shack.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #41 on: September 21, 2022, 11:24:55 pm »
Both Apple and Google would be nowhere today if it were not the investors who showed up at the right time. THEY were the ones responsible for the success.

None of this stuff happens in a vacuum. Investors are a fungible commodity, it's true that they are needed for most businesses like this to succeed but you may as well credit the company that built the trucks used to transport the goods, the contractors that built the homes in which various garage based businesses started.
 
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Online rsjsouza

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #42 on: September 22, 2022, 12:22:06 am »
As hinted before, the problem is the cult of personality. Nobody is perfect and the various paths that someone takes to reach a level of popularity will leave scuffs and marks in the society and in the people around them.

In the age of information, positive PR is easier than ever to be created and distributed, thus exponentially feeding to this phenomenon for the non-cautious. Fortunately it can also work the other way and deconstruct this aura of perfection and über abilities or qualifications.
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Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #43 on: September 22, 2022, 12:54:00 am »
As hinted before, the problem is the cult of personality. Nobody is perfect and the various paths that someone takes to reach a level of popularity will leave scuffs and marks in the society and in the people around them.

In the age of information, positive PR is easier than ever to be created and distributed, thus exponentially feeding to this phenomenon for the non-cautious. Fortunately it can also work the other way and deconstruct this aura of perfection and über abilities or qualifications.

While the negative side of PR does provide a counterbalance to the positive PR, the exponential nature of both can lead to excesses in either direction.  It is another form of the differences of large numbers problem in numerical analysis.  Small errors in either or both of the two quantities meant to cancel can lead to very large residuals.
 
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Offline boB

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #44 on: September 22, 2022, 01:09:46 am »

The big gun has to have some brains, obviously...

After that, the main thing is that the person (people) that start the company have to take the risk of devoting time and money to getting the product(s) ready to sell.  If there are investors, they will be part of that risk and get rewarded as well.

Of course, the company has to design something that people will want to buy and also have some business chops.

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Offline vk6zgo

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #45 on: September 22, 2022, 03:50:31 am »
Id argue many early  inventors were no more than patent thiefs who had enough cash to pay off the original inventors,marconi didnt invent radio,bell didnt invent the telephone and edision didnt invent anything but all get credited for others work

Nobel invented something.
(1/4)

Tesla also.

Is Lavoisier a big name?
At least he kicked flogiston out.
(3/6)

It's publicity and herds that want to be with winners.
Nah!
Tesla took the already invented concept of polyphase power & made it a practical reality, just as Marconi did with radio.
Tesla talked a lot about how he "invented radio", but he played around a bit & let it lapse, without using it in any practical way.
 

Offline pcprogrammerTopic starter

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #46 on: September 22, 2022, 05:59:38 am »
The big gun has to have some brains, obviously...

After that, the main thing is that the person (people) that start the company have to take the risk of devoting time and money to getting the product(s) ready to sell.  If there are investors, they will be part of that risk and get rewarded as well.

Of course, the company has to design something that people will want to buy and also have some business chops.

You left out the workers to make the product. Without them you can have all the brains you want, but end up with nothing to sell.

Yes there certainly is risk involved so you need someone with the proverbial balls to make it happen. It is often also EGO that drives it all. There are examples of some with just an average brain, but a lot of ego to make things happen even after failing with some adventures. Then there is of course GREED that also drives a lot. Take the latest with Elizabeth Holmes. Here the investors thought there were big bugs to be made due to a well told fairy-tale.

This is just human nature. The celebrity types, the people with the looks and charisma, those that were in the public eye, they become well known, fame brings attention and more fame.

Sure human nature, but there are many levels in this from having some respect, to sheer adoration, and the latter I don't grasp. But that is psychology :)

That doesn't bother me nearly as much as all the nitwit "influencers" and reality stars and whatnot that are famous for what, being famous?

Yes this is something that is completely beyond me too. How this works I mean. In the Netherlands at some point there was this very asocial family with nothing to bring to the table then well being asocial. Can't remember how it came to be, but they appeared on TV, and the next thing you know is that they where invited to events to make an appearance and the crowds went crazy over it in some sort of adoration :palm:

But again, that is psychology and above my pay grade :o

At least people like Jobs and Musk and whatnot DID contribute something technical. Charismatic businessmen are needed and they do make a valuable contribution. Without businessmen like Steve Jobs, George Westinghouse, Thomas Edison, and others, the brilliant creations of guys like Wozniak and Tesla would be nothing more than laboratory curiosities.

Yes without doers we would be nowhere, still living in a cave most likely. But the doers would be nowhere without the thinkers. So we basically need each other to get things done.

Offline strawberry

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #47 on: September 22, 2022, 08:54:34 am »
Quote
Yes without doers we would be nowhere, still living in a cave most likely. But the doers would be nowhere without the thinkers. So we basically need each other to get things done.
if it is physics property, everything should balance eventually
 

Online wraper

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #48 on: September 22, 2022, 09:18:04 am »
Elon got lucky with Paypal.
He might be curious about rockets and stuff but he is not engineering them
He is. You may say his job title of chief engineer at SpaceX does not resemble reality but he actually decides what will go into the rocket and what will not. He's at Boca Chica rocket site most of the time BTW. Here is a video he talks about how rocket engine works, it gets more technical at about 9 minutes mark.

 

Offline m k

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Re: Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills?
« Reply #49 on: September 22, 2022, 04:26:26 pm »
Id argue many early  inventors were no more than patent thiefs who had enough cash to pay off the original inventors,marconi didnt invent radio,bell didnt invent the telephone and edision didnt invent anything but all get credited for others work

Nobel invented something.
(1/4)

Tesla also.

Is Lavoisier a big name?
At least he kicked flogiston out.
(3/6)

It's publicity and herds that want to be with winners.
Nah!
Tesla took the already invented concept of polyphase power & made it a practical reality, just as Marconi did with radio.
Tesla talked a lot about how he "invented radio", but he played around a bit & let it lapse, without using it in any practical way.

Heron of Alexandria
(jet engine)
(4/8)

E,
Pythagoras
(5/9)
« Last Edit: September 22, 2022, 07:30:21 pm by m k »
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