Comment Re:We idolize the dead. (Score 1) 1452
In the same league as Alan Turing, or Ada Lovelace, or Charles Babbage...?
Which one of those has had the biggenst influence on technology as we use it in out daily lives today?
Ada Lovelace and Chares Babbage - built, or tried to buiild a mechanical difference engine in the 19th Century. Interesting. Yes. Important from a purely theoretical point of view. Yes. Impact on current technology and society, probably a lot less than Steve Jobs.
Alan Turing - seminal work on computability. the halting problem, turing machine, not to mention his work at Bletchley park on the Engima Machine. Arguably more important than Jobs when you look at the theoretical underpinnings of modern computer science. Someone else might have come along 5 or 10 years after and provided the same insights, but he was first. If he had not been at Bletchley Park, the Germans could have won the second world war - or it could have dragged on for a lot longer. That would have made a huge difference to modern society.
But really Jobs wasn't in the same class as these people. It's like comparing apples to oranges (pun intended). He was never a theroetical, head in the clouds, computer scientist. he was a businesman first and foremost with a very good intution as to what the market would want if he gave it to them. (as opposed to what the market/a focus group would have said it wanted) He was a leader in that sense.
If you want to compare Jobs to anyone, look at Henry Ford, Thomas Watson (IBM), (even, arguably Bill Gates, Lee Gerstener,Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.) You can't ignore the fact that he took Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable (more or less) corporation in the world in 14 years, and along the way produced some of the most iconic pieces of technology of our time.
Will Jobs be as well remembered in 50 or 100 years time as Babbage/Turing/Lovelace? Only time will tell