Stephen Wolfram on Steve Jobs: A Few Memories | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Wolfram on Steve Jobs: A Few Memories

blog.stephenwolfram.com

379 pointsrobertbud147 comments

NeXT sold maybe 50,000 systems in 5 years, less than the number of PCs that a typical large company has stuffed in cubicles.

And from that small install base, emerged the first Web browser, Doom, and Mathematica.

They were amazing, if flawed products. Every system came with Mathematica, a full dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare.

I remember having to go use Windows NT after NeXT failed in the market. And I remember, ten years later, holding the first iPhone in my hand and knowing where it came from.

Is that you Steve Ballmer?

How is this a constructive comment? For that matter, how does that even remotely follow? This comment baffles me on so many levels.

For that matter, how does that even remotely follow?

I can only assume it was based on the fact that the OP is called "steveb". A brief look at his profile, however, is sufficient to satisfy me that this is not, in fact, Steve Ballmer.

I think he really nails the reason that so many people love Jobs:

"In my life, I have had the good fortune to interact with all sorts of talented people. To me, Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.

I myself have spent much of my life—in science and in technology—trying to work in somewhat similar ways. And trying to build the very best possible things I can.

Yet looking at the practical world of technology and business there are certainly times when it has not been obvious that any of this is a good strategy. Indeed, sometimes it looks as if all that clarity, understanding, quality and new ideas aren’t really the point—and that the winners are those with quite different interests.

So for me—and our company—it has been immensely inspiring to watch Steve Jobs’s—and Apple’s—amazing success in recent years. It validates so many of the principles that I have long believed in. And encourages me to pursue them with even greater vigor."

I grew up in Champaign, IL, where Wolfram is based and Steven Wolfram had a reputation for being difficult and an introvert - but the more I read or see about him, the more I find him inspiring and quite brilliant.

His story was also touching because it shows how Steve Jobs was able to touch people's lives in significant ways even through the briefest of interactions.

I'm not surprised there is such "cult" behavior behind Apple - if there was ever a cult leader I would want to believe in, it would be Steve.

> Steven Wolfram had a reputation for being difficult and an introvert - but the more I read or see about him, the more I find him inspiring and quite brilliant.

Well, it's an archetype. The socially difficult hermit who can do things no one else can.

It's more about him comparing himself with Newton and "forgetting" to cite previous work on his field. Not that he's not brilliant though.

I like the way he managed to blame Steve Jobs for the fact that he always compares himself with Newton.

mostly irrelevant, but were your parents grad students/professors? I'm a freshmen at uiuc right now (and I intern at wolfram actually), I like finding out about the area (and people who live[d] here)

My mother was a professor of MIS there.

Congrats on attending UIUC, I really loved the school and got a lot out of going there. Is Wolfram still on Neil St? I loved that amongst the car dealerships and Meijers was this mecca of mathematics and technology.

In terms of things to do:

- I highly recommend you join the Engineering Freshman Committee and the EOH group, I was the chair of that group and we were given $2000 to do whatever we want (we built a lightbulb unscrewing robot to compete at EOH). It was definitely one of the best experiences of my life ($2k in college seemed like an infinite pool of money).

- Start poking around Beckman Center, I did lots of interesting research there and it still puts out some really cool stuff that freshman can get involved with.

- If you can get a car and need to impress a date, Curtis Orchard is really pretty right now.

- I loved the 318/319 courses and wish I had taken it earlier, when I was there Garland and Hart were there and I wish I had a chance to take more classes in that track.

Best of luck!

The building? Yeah, it's on Neil. I found it kind of funny too - it's just of tucked away in between a McDonald's and a Walmart (I also find it amusing how you can see a six story building from so far away - I'm from around New York)

Honestly I have mixed feelings about the school. There's stuff to like but I feel out of place a lot of the time. I've been a combination of blue and busy lately, but I should probably check out Beckman and NCSA and some other stuff.

No car and no dates as of late. :P

318 (I think it's 418 now, with Hart this semester) seems cool.

Yeah if you're from Manhattan it's going to be an adjustment - I'm in Manhattan now and haven't been back since I graduated (my mom moved to NC). Here's a few things I wish I had done differently:

1. Don't skimp on where you live (live in a good place in a great location like right above Murphy's). The rent seems like a lot when you're a student, but in hindsight it's the best deal you'll ever get. Don't live far away from north campus to save money.

2. The ACM at UIUC is pretty amazing, they have a secret lab underneath DCL where they have every thing you could ever want to build a robot, hack on Arduino (I think I salvaged a HP oscilloscope).

3. If you're looking for some more money - there are a lot of companies out by Assembly Hall (motorola etc). Good jobs/pay, really painful to get to.

College is definitely an adjustment but I found my groups I enjoyed hacking with, going to Brothers' with, going to Murphy's with and got a lot out of the experience.

I'm from right outside New York in New Jersey, so I'm used to suburban areas, I'm just also used to being near a big city.

1. Being OOS, money is slightly more of an issue to me, so saving money to live somewhat further way seems like exactly something I may need to end up doing, but I'll see if the difference really matters.

2. I should really start hanging out in the acm office more...might fix (mitigate) some of the problems I have with the school.

3. Well, like I mentioned, I'm at wolfram right now, with pretty decent pay, so I think I'm sticking with that for a while.

Be sure to explore the steam tunnels...

Also great this time of year and in the same vein as Curtis Orchard is Robert Allerton park. It's about 45 minutes out of town just outside of Monticello.

My grandparents took me as a kid, and it made an incredibly lasting impression.

I'm in Champaign too. It's not a bad little city. Downtown Champaign has some nice spots. I grew up here, attended UIUC, and had the good fortune to intern at Apple while Jobs was at the top of his game.

I have a stupid Steve Jobs anecdote of my own, which I wrote when he retired from the CEO position: https://plus.google.com/102623420630486053048/posts/fTYoDEFV...

One of the best parts of interning at Apple was their tradition of each top exec giving a small lecture to the current crop of interns. Not just Jobs, but guys like Phil Schiller and Jonathan Ive. It was fantastic.

They'd each do an informal Q&A after their speech, and I remember one of the kids jokingly asking Steve if he could be a dancer in a silhouette iPod ad. Steve turned on some music and had the guy come down in front and demo his dance skills, sagely advising him afterwards to stick to his day job. It was great.

At the time, all sorts of people were telling me that I needed to put quotes on the back cover of the book. So I asked Steve Jobs if he’d give me one. Various questions came back. But eventually Steve said, “Isaac Newton didn’t have back-cover quotes; why do you want them?”

This tells so much about Jobs. Everybody is doing X but we do Y. Think different.

I can't help but think that maybe Jobs just didn't have a positive review of the book. I've never read it but the most helpful reviews on Amazon are not favorable.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Kind-Science-Stephen-Wolfram/dp/15...

... making this perhaps the most genius refusal, suggestion, and compliment all wrapped into one.

Same for Woz's book: "I was a little disappointed — Steve Jobs had indicated he'd write a foreword. But he'd never written a foreword before and I said, "Just write what we were like back then."

"We sent him the book and he said, "Oh, I saw some excerpts, and I'm going to decline writing the foreword." I don't know why because I'm nice to him, so there must have been something he didn't like."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...

> his theory for a name was to start from the generic term for something, then romanticize it. His favorite example at the time was Sony’s Trinitron.

This theory appeals to me, but the example doesn't seem to be an instance of it. Neither trinity nor electron are generic names for TV (or for a tube). Maybe the story got mixed up somewhere.

> The name Trinitron was derived from trinity, meaning the union of three, and tron from electron tube, after the way that the Trinitron combined the three separate electron guns of other CRT designs into one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinitron

OTOH iPhone is a romanticisation of a generic term.

Why not? He said that start from generic term for 'something', not necessarily the product you are trying to name. So I think his theory holds. [And if you think about it, the name 'Google' follows the same theory.]

Metallica.

I have no respect for Stephen Wolfram. He is completely shameless. This article made me more cynical about him than I ever have been.

I mean I went into this article assuming he'd talk a little about his products because that's just how he is, but somehow he managed to work every last one of his god damned products in great detail into this "memorial" for Steve Jobs. He manages to turn everything into a promotional piece for himself or for his company's shit - even someone else's death. It is nauseating.

Just compare this to any other post about Steve from any other executive. It's completely tasteless and inappropriate.

I couldn't read the whole thing. Once I saw the he mentioned NKS in the first paragraph, I had to x-out.

He mentioned them because of the deep influence Jobs had on each one of them. This is so, so much better than empty statements like "Jobs was a visionary", because it actually shows why Jobs was what everyone is saying he was.

What I found kind of icky was the fact that he keeps saying "Steve Jobs" all the way through the article in a way that doesn't feel natural; more like keyword spam.

Exactly my thoughts.

TL;DR: "me, me, me, me, Steve Jobs, Mathematica, me, me, me, me, I can't believe how awesome I am, Wolfram|Alpha".

I wouldn't be surprised if he has a cellular automata that can write blog posts given an input of a subject "Steve Jobs" and happens to churn out shameless self promotion as a result.

The original (one-page) version of this is here: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2011/10/steve-jobs-a-few-memo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3079799

I think this is more of a memory of Mathematica than Steve Jobs.

Not only did he mention Mathematica again (doesnt he in every blog post he writes?), he even managed to somehow correlate Steve Jobs and NKOS (which he also does with every blog topic he writes about, like a broken record).

In what way? Steve Jobs is mentioned in literally every paragraph of the article.

Frequency analysis from textalyser.net:

i: 36

steve: 35

jobs: 20

mathematica: 20

So the good news is that Steve manages to just pull ahead of Mathematica in his own obituary.

That was not an obituary. It was Wolfram's recollection of his personal interaction with Jobs. Since much of that interaction was over the development and bundling of Mathematica, it is expected that Mathematica would be mentioned a lot.

This was surprisingly good -- I had no idea about these connections.

I've recently learned about a two other connections with Steve Job that friend have had, albiet much smaller than you see written here. One was a friend who's father was asked to make paintings for the Apple product rooms and another who's uncle ran a bicycle shop in PA that Steve would frequent to. Both said, just working with Steve made them want to improve in all aspects.

This just goes to show you why startup hubs matter so much.

I use Mathematica every day at work, I was not aware of the rich history Wolfram had with Jobs.

This is simply an amazing anecdote. I can't believe how far reaching Steve Jobs has been in terms of his influence over technology, even down to the name of Mathematica. Incredible.

Is there someone keeping track of all the famous (or not famous) people sharing their experiences with Jobs? I feel like every website I've visited since the news hit features someone writing something valuable, fascinating, and interesting about him, and it would be nice if there was a central clearinghouse for it—a recent Folklore.org, if you will.

In my life, I have had the good fortune to interact with all sorts of talented people. To me, Steve Jobs stands out most for his clarity of thought. Over and over again he took complex situations, understood their essence, and used that understanding to make a bold definitive move, often in a completely unexpected direction.

So true.

he was going out on a date that evening—and he hadn’t been on a date for a long time. He explained that he’d just met the woman he was seeing a few days earlier, and was very nervous about his date. The Steve Jobs—so confident as a businessman and technologist—had melted away, and he was asking me—hardly a noted known authority on such things—about his date.

rofl @ Steve Jobs asking Stephen Wolfram about dating.

"Well, first you have your assistant assign her a serial number..."

And then, if your assistant gets anywhere with the date, file a lawsuit to prevent them from ever mentioning it in public.

"...and that was when I realised women were basically cellular automata - I had discovered A New Kind Of Dating."

Thanks for a much needed laugh amongst all these tributes.

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