Iconic Apple CEO Steve Jobs dies
Today the Apple website features a full-screen image of Steve Jobs and a concise tribute, calling for thoughts, memories and condolences.
He lead a company and technologies that he put squarely in the public eye and would have to be one of the best-known names in the computer industry. Things he did had impact and got talked about.
The first computer I owned for myself was a Sundox, a Taiwanese clone of an Apple ][+.* (Apple’s Roman two was written with an inverted pair of square brackets. Geeky in a Star Wars kind of way.)
Like many I went with the IMB-clones PCs when they came in (they were considerably more capable than any other ‘home’ computer of the time), returning to Apple machines for my personal use during the LCIII era. Since then I’ve used Apple machines as my personal machines, especially with the arrival of Mac OS X with it’s Unix underpinnings – a byproduct of Steve Jobs and his time at NeXT.**
Few will not know of the consumer-oriented devices that Apple has brought out over his past few years at the helm including the iPhone, iPod and iPad, along with the Macbook Air, the all-in-one widescreen iMacs among others.
In the movie industry, Steve Jobs was CE of Pixar Animation Studios, an executive producer of Toy Story and member of the board of Disney. If you want a life history, the wikipedia entry isn’t a bad starting point.
Below is Steve Jobs’ Standford commencement address from 2005. Worth viewing.
The last of the three stories he relates includes his learning of his pancreatic cancer. His hope for a ’a few more decades’ unfortunately hasn’t been fulfilled, but it seems to me that he did an awful lot left with what time he did have.
Footnotes
I have to admit I find it a bit tasteless, or at least a bit sloppy, that stuff.co.nz has advertising on the page announcing his death. Perhaps they might develop a policy of no advertising on pages announcing deaths or offering obits.
* One of the drawcards was UCSD Pascal. In some ways this attracted me as much, possibly even more, than the hardware.
** The full story is more complex, of course. I should add that I use Linux (and more generally Unix), as it’s a common academic research platform.
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13 Responses to “Iconic Apple CEO Steve Jobs dies”
Via twitter:
@RedSoxRedShoes: From now on, the “4S” is going to stand for, “For Steve.” #apple
(The newest iPhone, just out yesterday (?), is the 4S model.)
Gosh, if he found out he had pancreatic cancer back in 2005, then he had a jolly good innings. The average survival time (from diagnosis) is only a few months. (Mind you, I’ll bet he was on gold-standard chemo, but even so…)
Other writers (such as Skeptoid) suggest that for the particular pancreatic cancer he had, he might have done better had he not first sided with a “woo†treatment until the illness progressed, e.g.
“Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it’s removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a naturopathic diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.â€
I didn’t mention this as I’m not familiar with the details and he is, of course, a very public figure and, with no offence to Brian at all and for the right or wrong reasons, I would be more comfortable reading commentary of this from, say, the likes of ‘Orac’ who has a professional background in cancer research. I am aware that ‘conventional’ pancreatic cancer has a very poor prognosis (especially as a lovely family friend I passed away earlier this year from pancreatic cancer).
Yikes. Sad to hear that such a bright guy got sidetracked by the woo… 🙁
Agreed. But isn’t this low? – even for Mike Adams “the Health Ranger†(not).
Ew, yuck Grant – I followed that link & now I need to wash my eyes out! Low, indeed, even by Adams’ standards, although I recall that he said much the same thing when Patrick Swayze died (also of pancreatic cancer).
It’s an interesting mindset, isn’t it, that sees conventional treatment as the killer & ‘all natural’ as the cure? Especially when (as is often the case) the ‘all natural’ vitamins & supplements are manufactured by Big Pharma… And more so when they can’t actually point to a documented series of cures attributable to the ‘natural’ alternatives. I would have thought that the recent trial of the Gonzales protocol vs gemcitabine – for pancreatic cancer – would have laid that one to rest once & for all: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/09/the_gonzalez_protocol_worse_than_useless.php
Ahh, excellent link Alison. I read that one when it came out, too; you have a much better memory than me.
It’s good article—recommended reading. Some of the comments are worth reading too, like this one from ‘Prometheus’.
Not unexpectedly Orac is now on Mike Adam’s piece, playing a cautious line. (I agree that without the details being known caution seems appropriate.) He also backs the story/rumour that Steve Jobs initially tried ‘a special diet’ – referring to his own article on this.
There’s also Jobs Lived 8 Years with Pancreatic Cancer, Steinman for 4, But It Was Steinman Who Beat the Odds. Here’s Why, which, in turn, points to The Puzzle of Pancreatic Cancer: How Steve Jobs Did Not Beat the Odds–but Nobel Winner Ralph Steinman Did
(I haven’t read the latter yet – just passing these on.)
Orac has more to say on the matter:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/nicholas_gonzalez_on_steve_jobs_if_only.php
Steve Jobs’ biographer has spoken out saying that Jobs regretted not having taken surgery sooner:
Biographer: Steve Jobs regretted not having cancer surgery earlier
Orac has gathered some of the latest on Steve Jobs’ cancer treatment in (to my reading) a balanced and cautious manner:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/did_steve_jobs_flirtation_with_alternative_medicine.php
Still more from Orac, now having read the relevant portions of Jobs’ autobiography. He adds in discussion of liver metastases to the picture:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/10/just_one_more_thing.php