R.I.P Father of Breakout.

[DJT]

Out of respect, I picked up a boxed copy of breakout with the manual off eBay.

 

Mr Jobs, you will be missed...

[disjaukifa]

That game will probably shoot up in value of the next few days . . . I played Breakout tonight in memory of Steve as well.

[BDW]

Jobs doesn't deserve the title "Father of Breakout". That should go to the Woz.

[Tr3vor]

Jobs doesn't deserve the title "Father of Breakout". That should go to the Woz.

 

whats Woz?

[The Usotsuki]

Jobs doesn't deserve the title "Father of Breakout". That should go to the Woz.

QFT

[+Random Terrain]

Jobs doesn't deserve the title "Father of Breakout". That should go to the Woz.

QFT

Oh, that means Quoted For Truth. I Googled it. I thought it meant Quit F*cking Talking.

 

Too bad he couldn't make it to 2012 when the evil aliens pretending to be good will make themselves known to everyone on the planet. They probably could have cured him.

[BL!]

Shouldn't you pick up a real Breakout arcade PCB instead? I have a couple of these (including cabinets) as well as Super Breakout! If memory serves me correctly, I think Wozniak did a remarkable job with the prototype and managed to design the game using only half of the chips, and back in the days that was worth a lot of money for a company like Atari.

 

I also want to say that this is a sad day! I started out with the Apple II in the early eighties and then moved to the MacIntosh when that was introduced, later I "left" Apple for Windows-based PC:s but my heart has always been and still is with Apple. R.I.P., Steve!

[high voltage]

Very sad indeed.

Steve Jobs worked for Atari and did Breakout, Steve Wozniak helped out during nights in return for playing arcade games for free (Who knows if it's true, but it makes nice folklore). Woz liked getting things for free, he did the blue boxes for making free telephone calls.

Edited October 6, 2011 by high voltage

[R.O.T.S]

I though Wozniak created the proto and therefore got full credit ,i need to refer to the History Of Video Games book again lol

[Seob]

iMourn in Jobs spirit.

[AlvinKarpis]

I played Breakout last night in memory of Steve as well

[ComputerSpaceFan]

It's definitely sad that Mr. Jobs passed away, the world lost a visionary, a rather rude visionary but a visionary nonetheless.

 

On the topic of Breakout though, I remember reading an article where Steve Jobs was interviewed on the App Store revolutionizing the handheld gaming scene and Steve basically said he had no interest in whether people use Apple products for gaming or not. I always thought that was weird irony given he (and Woz) made Breakout for Atari.

[tremoloman2006]

I'm sorry to hear of Steve Jobs passing and my heart goes out to his fans and family.

 

Having said that, I'm going to say I don't think he is this amazing visionary everyone makes him out to be. He got Apple back on its feet by making expensive toys for rich people. iPod? iPad? iPhone? They are all TOYS. Cool toys yes, but they are TOYS. These devices all existed before Jobs, only he made them better and popular.

 

Try editing a spreadsheet or filling out an order form on an iPad... it's downright awful. I bought one and then got rid of it a few months later. I didn't see what was so "revolutionary" about it. It plays movies... so what?!? My $40 MP3/Video player does as good a job. Granted the screen is smaller, but I can live with it and save over $700.

 

I know I'm going to get trashed so let the flogging begin.

 

If it helps, I do love breakout and Woz.

[Mirage]

OK, so you don't get it. That's okay, not everyone will see why the products are special.

[tremoloman2006]

I just finished re-reading what I wrote and I'm sorry if I came across as insensitive. I honestly meant no disrespect.

 

I support an IT department with people who worship Apple and never cease for a second to tell me what kind of a loser I am for not bowing to the man and not "getting it". I've tried to embrace their products but I always feel like it's just mostly hype. I also don't make a 6-figure salary so I can't understand why all their products are so damn expensive. I also hate the fact they that require me to give them a credit card to download free software?!?

 

I do think the iPad has made competitors finally take tablets seriously and pushed the envelope forward for better products.

 

This is supposed to be about Steve and I inadvertently semi-hijacked the thread and for this I am sorry.

I'll let it get back to the hero worship it was meant to be.

[Benzman66]

From Wikipedia;

 

In the fall of 1974, Jobs returned to California and began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club with Wozniak. He took a job as a technician at Atari, a manufacturer of popular video games, with the primary intent of saving money for a spiritual retreat to India.

Jobs then traveled to India to visit the Neem Karoli Baba^[48] at his Kainchi Ashram with a Reed College friend (and, later, the first Apple employee), Daniel Kottke, in search of spiritual enlightenment. He came back a Buddhist with his head shaved and wearing traditional Indian clothing.^[49][50] During this time, Jobs experimented with psychedelics, calling his LSD experiences "one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life".^[51] He later said that people around him who did not share his countercultural roots could not fully relate to his thinking.^[51]

 

Jobs returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little interest in or knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. According to Wozniak, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had given them only $700 (instead of the actual $5,000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $350.^[52]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Early_years

[Syntaxerror999]

Very sad indeed.

Steve Jobs worked for Atari and did Breakout, Steve Wozniak helped out during nights in return for playing arcade games for free (Who knows if it's true, but it makes nice folklore). Woz liked getting things for free, he did the blue boxes for making free telephone calls.

 

LOL! I used to make those...memories! (actualy I made red boxes... tone generators for simulating the tones when you inserted coins... i think blue boxes were for tapping into trunk lines... its been a while)

[Cynicaster]

I'm sorry to hear of Steve Jobs passing and my heart goes out to his fans and family.

 

Having said that, I'm going to say I don't think he is this amazing visionary everyone makes him out to be. He got Apple back on its feet by making expensive toys for rich people. iPod? iPad? iPhone? They are all TOYS. Cool toys yes, but they are TOYS. These devices all existed before Jobs, only he made them better and popular.

 

Try editing a spreadsheet or filling out an order form on an iPad... it's downright awful. I bought one and then got rid of it a few months later. I didn't see what was so "revolutionary" about it. It plays movies... so what?!? My $40 MP3/Video player does as good a job. Granted the screen is smaller, but I can live with it and save over $700.

 

I know I'm going to get trashed so let the flogging begin.

 

If it helps, I do love breakout and Woz.

 

 

In Canada, a 64 GB iPad 2 will run you north of $900 after taxes, last time I looked. I find that utterly indefensible and absurd. It just might be the worst bang-for-your-buck quotient in the history of consumer electronics. But hey, nobody ever said being hip would be cheap.

 

It's tragic when anybody succumbs to illness at such a young age. Steve Jobs was obviously a talented and innovative businessman, and there is nothing wrong with people paying their respects to the man by saying “RIP Steve, you will be missed” or something similar. But there comes a point where it gets a bit ridiculous. I’ve read some teary-eyed, long-winded articles and blog posts from common folks like you and me that have really got me shaking my head. He was a business man out to get rich, not a saint.

 

If you think I’m being crass, fine, but the way I look at it is this. The man didn’t give a crap about me. He wasn’t my friend, he wasn’t my uncle. My relationship with him consisted of a few impersonal, anonymous business transactions at Best Buy. I more than fulfilled my responsibilities in our relationship by over-paying him for his disposable gadgets. I don’t owe him a eulogy any more than he owes me a new iPod touch to replace the one I bought that lasted less than 2 years before the battery wouldn’t hold a charge.

[magnusfalkirk]

Jobs doesn't deserve the title "Father of Breakout". That should go to the Woz.

 

whats Woz?

 

Woz, otherwise know a the "other" Steve, is Steve Wozniak the man who actually did the work on the Breakout arcade machine circuit board and the inventor of the Apple I and the Apple II.

[+LS650]

If it wasn't for Jobs, we wouldn't have had the Macintosh. That alone has had an enormous impact on the way we use computers, and is well worth recognition.

Did Jobs invent the GUI? No - but he sure knew how to market it and make it a new paradigm.

[DJT]

I'm sorry to hear of Steve Jobs passing and my heart goes out to his fans and family.

 

Having said that, I'm going to say I don't think he is this amazing visionary everyone makes him out to be. He got Apple back on its feet by making expensive toys for rich people. iPod? iPad? iPhone? They are all TOYS. Cool toys yes, but they are TOYS. These devices all existed before Jobs, only he made them better and popular.

 

Try editing a spreadsheet or filling out an order form on an iPad... it's downright awful. I bought one and then got rid of it a few months later. I didn't see what was so "revolutionary" about it. It plays movies... so what?!? My $40 MP3/Video player does as good a job. Granted the screen is smaller, but I can live with it and save over $700.

 

I know I'm going to get trashed so let the flogging begin.

 

If it helps, I do love breakout and Woz.

 

The ipad isn't meant to replace your computer.

 

I travel as a regional sales manager and I find it to be an effective tool in my industry to communicate.

 

I have a zagg.com bluetooth keyboard that allows me to effectively type emails, memo's etc etc. all the boring stuff you do when you're a businessman. I show presentations on it and all in all, it's like a "lite" version of my laptop.

 

It's a toy, yes, but it also saves me the trouble of breaking out a laptop everytime I need to reference something for work.

[DJT]

I'm sorry to hear of Steve Jobs passing and my heart goes out to his fans and family.

 

Having said that, I'm going to say I don't think he is this amazing visionary everyone makes him out to be. He got Apple back on its feet by making expensive toys for rich people. iPod? iPad? iPhone? They are all TOYS. Cool toys yes, but they are TOYS. These devices all existed before Jobs, only he made them better and popular.

 

Try editing a spreadsheet or filling out an order form on an iPad... it's downright awful. I bought one and then got rid of it a few months later. I didn't see what was so "revolutionary" about it. It plays movies... so what?!? My $40 MP3/Video player does as good a job. Granted the screen is smaller, but I can live with it and save over $700.

 

I know I'm going to get trashed so let the flogging begin.

 

If it helps, I do love breakout and Woz.

 

 

In Canada, a 64 GB iPad 2 will run you north of $900 after taxes, last time I looked. I find that utterly indefensible and absurd. It just might be the worst bang-for-your-buck quotient in the history of consumer electronics. But hey, nobody ever said being hip would be cheap.

 

It's tragic when anybody succumbs to illness at such a young age. Steve Jobs was obviously a talented and innovative businessman, and there is nothing wrong with people paying their respects to the man by saying “RIP Steve, you will be missed” or something similar. But there comes a point where it gets a bit ridiculous. I’ve read some teary-eyed, long-winded articles and blog posts from common folks like you and me that have really got me shaking my head. He was a business man out to get rich, not a saint.

 

If you think I’m being crass, fine, but the way I look at it is this. The man didn’t give a crap about me. He wasn’t my friend, he wasn’t my uncle. My relationship with him consisted of a few impersonal, anonymous business transactions at Best Buy. I more than fulfilled my responsibilities in our relationship by over-paying him for his disposable gadgets. I don’t owe him a eulogy any more than he owes me a new iPod touch to replace the one I bought that lasted less than 2 years before the battery wouldn’t hold a charge.

 

We all want to get rich...he was more than that though. He was a philanthropist as well...but he visioned technology that could change the world, or at least, change the way we traditionally use it.

 

I think to that degree, he was successful - and he got rich doing it.

 

I'm pretty envious.

[jaybird3rd]

He was a business man out to get rich, not a saint.

Well, I knew there was bound to be a backlash sooner or later, given the coverage Jobs has gotten these past few days. I also knew that somebody was going to seize upon the fact that he made lots of money, as if that's a bad thing. Inventors and businessmen like Jobs create more real social value through the products they create than any saint ever did, yet somehow, it's the saints who are always held up as the virtuous ones. You can accuse Jobs of being "greedy", but merely being greedy wouldn't have put one extra dime in his pocket unless he also worked hard to create products people wanted, and as we've all heard, the fruits of his work have benefited millions of peoples' lives in countless ways. That is why he deserves this degree of recognition and gratitude.

 

Here's an item about Jobs which speaks to this point better than I can:

 

Jobs was sometimes criticized for not being a philanthropist along the lines of Bill Gates. Take this article, for example:

 

Last year the founder of the

Stanford Social Innovation Review

called Apple one of “America’s Least Philanthropic Companies.” Jobs had terminated all of Apple’s long-standing corporate philanthropy programs within weeks after returning to Apple in 1997, citing the need to cut costs until profitability rebounded. But the programs have never been restored.

CNN, being CNN, misses the point. Mr. Jobs’s contribution to the world is Apple and its products, along with Pixar and his other enterprises, his 338 patented inventions — his work — not some Steve Jobs Memorial Foundation for Giving Stuff to Poor People in Exotic Lands and Making Me Feel Good About Myself. Because he already did that: He gave them better computers, better telephones, better music players, etc. In a lot of cases, he gave them better jobs, too. Did he do it because he was a nice guy, or because he was greedy, or because he was a maniacally single-minded competitor who got up every morning possessed by an unspeakable rage to strangle his rivals? The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that that question does not matter one little bit. Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values.

[Cynicaster]

He was a business man out to get rich, not a saint.

Well, I knew there was bound to be a backlash sooner or later, given the coverage Jobs has gotten these past few days. I also knew that somebody was going to seize upon the fact that he made lots of money, as if that's a bad thing. Inventors and businessmen like Jobs create more real social value through the products they create than any saint ever did, yet somehow, it's the saints who are always held up as the virtuous ones.

 

To be clear, I was not and am not faulting Jobs for making lots of money. That's kind of my point: he was a businessman, and that's what businessmen do. They make money. If they don't, they're failures as businessmen.

 

People are allowed to buy and appreciate his creations all they like, I'm all for free consumer choice. All I'm saying is that I strongly feel these people across the blogosphere weeping on their keyboards need to get a grip. In the same way that Facebook has cheapened the sentiment of "happy birthday" by means of allowing 150 people you haven't talked to since high school to post those words on your wall when the automatic reminder pops up in their newsfeed, it cheapens the concept of mourning death when people get all gushy over the passing of a man simply because he dreamt up a device enabling them to watch YouTube at the bus stop or post vapid tweets from their camper in the mountains.

 

I realize this is all personal opinion, but before I accept the designation of "philanthropist via technological contribution" as appropriate for Steve Jobs, I'd need to be convinced that his products are actually making our lives better and making the world a better place to live in. In doing so, it's critical to carefully distinguish between "improving" our lives and simply "changing" them. That he achieved the latter is self-evident, but it's not so cut-and-dried for the former. For every person that points out "hey, I can have a video chat with my grandma from my iPhone, that is so handy!", somebody else could say "every time I go out into a social setting, people's faces are buried in their iPhones, and that's sad".

 

Changing gears a bit, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a business plan that involves strong-arming consumers into buying Apple products to play music from his much vaunted digital distribution network is an odd move for a philanthropist. Back in the CD era when Sony was a much bigger player in music distribution, I'm pretty sure most of us would have thrown a fit if we brought a CD home from the record store only to find out that it wouldn't play in our Samsung CD player.

 

I don't really know how to respond to the article you posted--the author was obviously a died-in-the-wool capitalist, so it makes sense that he would deify Steve Jobs. Again, if capitalism is the be-all-end-all, then how come the biggest capitalist economy in the world is unable to pay back billions in loans to China, a communist country? No, I'm not advocating communism, and I do not wish to talk politics, I'm simply making the point that it's all too easy to see a certain reality when you want to badly enough.

 

There is one thing in the article that I have to address, though:

 

Whatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices.

 

This guy really likes to speak as if his perception is synonymous with reality, doesn't he? The first half of his statement is completely subjective, the second half is patently and demonstrably false. Maybe he's never read a Best Buy flyer?

Edited October 7, 2011 by Cynicaster

[jaybird3rd]

I realize this is all personal opinion, but before I accept the designation of "philanthropist via technological contribution" as appropriate for Steve Jobs, I'd need to be convinced that his products are actually making our lives better and making the world a better place to live in. In doing so, it's critical to carefully distinguish between "improving" our lives and simply "changing" them. That he achieved the latter is self-evident, but it's not so cut-and-dried for the former. For every person that points out "hey, I can have a video chat with my grandma from my iPhone, that is so handy!", somebody else could say "every time I go out into a social setting, people's faces are buried in their iPhones, and that's sad".

I think you're conflating two different things: the potentialities that a given technology creates, and the purposes for which it is actually used. Apple and Steve Jobs deserve credit for the former, but it's not entirely fair to blame them for the latter.

 

Looking only at the areas where Apple has innovated most productively, I think it's pretty clear that the positives (the popularity of graphical interfaces, new forms of human/computer interaction, new ideas in hardware design, etc.) far outweigh the negatives (the frivolous and stupid things people sometimes choose to do with Apple products). We don't always appreciate the positives because we've assimilated them into our daily lives, in the form of products and technologies many of us use every day for productive and creative work, whereas the negatives are more visible because they bother us all the time--and believe me, as a teacher who often can't get students to look up from their iPhones long enough to study or listen to a lecture, they bother me, too. One can hardly blame Steve Jobs or Apple for stupid Twitter posts written on iPhones, however, any more than we should blame Alexander Graham Bell for phone sex and telemarketers, or Henry Ford for traffic fatalities.

 

Even those of us who don't own Apple products have demonstrably benefited from Apple's influence on the industry as a whole; it's not for nothing that Cupertino has been referred to as Silicon Valley's "R&D lab". And if you don't like Apple's policies or price structures, you always have the option of not buying their products. Nobody is "forcing" anybody to buy anything from Apple.

 

 

I don't really know how to respond to the article you posted--the author was obviously a died-in-the-wool capitalist, so it makes sense that he would deify Steve Jobs. Again, if capitalism is the be-all-end-all, then how come the biggest capitalist economy in the world is unable to pay back billions in loans to China, a communist country? No, I'm not advocating communism, and I do not wish to talk politics, I'm simply making the point that it's all too easy to see a certain reality when you want to badly enough.

Well, I don't want to get into politics either, so I'll simply respond by saying that you'd be mistaken to think of the United States as a purely capitalist economy, especially in its present state. The reasons why, and the reasons we are so deeply in debt, are closely related, and they have nothing to do with capitalism.

 

But, that aside, I'd be curious to know what specific assertions you found to be incorrect or mistaken, without making it into an abstract social or political issue. Nothing in the sentence you quoted is "subjective", for example: Apple products clearly are superior in several important ways, which is why so many people enthusiastically choose them over other cheaper alternatives. Yes, the products are expensive, but millions of customers find them to be worth the cost and are getting what they want, so who are we to complain? I personally think that the author's emphasis on the contributions of creators and innovators is enormously important, especially when you consider how little credit they get compared to the value they create.