I am seeing one now. And there are these things called 'books'. A certain subset of them are on subjects related to 'history'. If you do what is called 'reading' of several, you will note, well maybe not you you, that there are times when pretty much everything changes in a matter of a few decades.
Take 1880. Say you were feeling really, really tired and you went to bed. When you woke up, it was 1925. You might notice a few changes. Like horses are mainly gone. There are automobiles and trucks. You don't have to light a lamp any more. You flip a switch. Lots of things run off of electricity, from toasters to washing machines. Refrigerators. Radios. Airplanes.
And there were a lot of things going on behind the scenes. Transistor effects were being measured in the labs. The process for growing large single crystals, like for silicon, has been developed. Physics and chemistry have changed with relativity and quantum mechanics. Genetics has gotten off the ground. Penicillin had been discovered. Basically every technology we use every day had been developed or the principles had been discovered.
And the new technologies ushered in a lot of new companies.
That is a technological singularity. We are in the beginnings of another.
You give Jobs way too much credit; I suppose because you have that affection for the Great Man theory of history. The thing is, events make those men. That and the people who create a mythology around them. If Jobs had never existed, things still would have turned out much the same. Sure, some details might have been different, but that is about it. When I first saw a Mac, I thought "cool. Someone has commercialized the Xerox Star". Xerox was shopping it around and Apple was the first one to bite. The actual machine was the result of work that the Woz and Raskin did, though. Jobs was responsible for the case. Credit where credit is due.
But, but, what about the iPhone? Smart phones existed before, you know. He did have influence on the aesthetic, but again, if he hadn't of existed we still would have them more or less the way they are now. It isn't like he invented the relevant technology. And he had the concept wrong at first. His original idea was the iPhone was a MID(mobile internet device) with telephony added. It was to present web pages and he found making the tools available to write applications for a few years. The OS couldn't even multitask for a long time. After that was added, it was cooperative multitasking and not preemptive. And let's not forget it originally shipping with EDGE and not 3g...
Jobs was a salesman. And a self-promoter. Much like Edison, the premier visionary of the last technological singularity, was a self-promoter. The difference was that Edison was also an inventor and actually worked on the things he was credited with inventing. |
