| General > General Technical Chat |
| Why do the big "guns" get more credits for their technical skills? |
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| CatalinaWOW:
--- Quote from: pcprogrammer on September 21, 2022, 03:17:06 pm --- --- Quote from: Stray Electron on September 21, 2022, 03:03:00 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. --- End quote --- 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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: tom66 on September 21, 2022, 09:45:18 am ---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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| hli:
--- Quote from: tooki on September 21, 2022, 06:41:26 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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| strawberry:
Elon got lucky with Paypal. He might be curious about rockets and stuff but he is not engineering them |
| james_s:
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. |
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