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The issue with the "Great Man" idea of history is that it doesn't take into account that people are created by history more than they create history. the microc

The issue with the "Great Man" idea of history is that it doesn't take into account that people are created by history more than they create history. the microcomputer revolution was already going before Jobs and Wozniak showed up at the Homebrew Computer Club. Somebody was going to turn this hobby into a big business. If not them, somebody else.

decentomyous 3y ago
Well, maybe. We just don't know how things would have played out. The safest assumption seems to be that people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak very significantly accelerated progress. But because of the way acceleration seems to kick of revolutionary changes, it does seem fair to say they were pretty 'Great' in terms of their impact. For example, without them, maybe we would be in the 1990s era of personal computing now, thirty years later. Or maybe someone else would have done even better than them, and we would be further along, but the latter is harder to believe. We'll simply never know the answer to these questions because we can't run the counter-factual.
adventured 3y ago
The "if not them, then somebody else" premise is a fallacy of guaranteed progress, when history overwhelmingly demonstrates that progress is anything but guaranteed. The computer revolution happened because a string of great men and women made it happen. Unix and Linux very clearly didn't have to happen (as they have) for example, and certainly didn't have to happen in a way that was so dramatically beneficial to the open source community.
philwelch 3y ago
The problem with this theory is that all of the “somebody elses” were also there at the time, so if “somebody else” was going to do it, why didn’t they?
- jhbadger 3y ago
  Well, they kind of did. We don't think much about Commodore these days because it died in the early 1990s (mostly from competition with IBM PC and compatibles, not so much Apple), but the Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer of the 1980s. And in Britain (and in many parts of Continental Europe) Sinclair and Amstrad were huge but people from the US hardly recognize the names.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    Commodore is probably the closest analog to Apple because they tried to follow up the 64 with the Amiga. It didn’t work out for them (hell, it barely worked out for Apple) but some people absolutely loved the Amiga. Do you think in a world without Apple, the founders of these companies would have ended up doing what Steve Jobs ended up doing? If so, what stopped them?

decentomyous 3y ago

Well, maybe. We just don't know how things would have played out. The safest assumption seems to be that people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak very significantly accelerated progress. But because of the way acceleration seems to kick of revolutionary changes, it does seem fair to say they were pretty 'Great' in terms of their impact. For example, without them, maybe we would be in the 1990s era of personal computing now, thirty years later. Or maybe someone else would have done even better than them, and we would be further along, but the latter is harder to believe. We'll simply never know the answer to these questions because we can't run the counter-factual.

adventured 3y ago

The "if not them, then somebody else" premise is a fallacy of guaranteed progress, when history overwhelmingly demonstrates that progress is anything but guaranteed. The computer revolution happened because a string of great men and women made it happen. Unix and Linux very clearly didn't have to happen (as they have) for example, and certainly didn't have to happen in a way that was so dramatically beneficial to the open source community.

philwelch 3y ago

The problem with this theory is that all of the “somebody elses” were also there at the time, so if “somebody else” was going to do it, why didn’t they?

jhbadger 3y ago
Well, they kind of did. We don't think much about Commodore these days because it died in the early 1990s (mostly from competition with IBM PC and compatibles, not so much Apple), but the Commodore 64 was the best-selling computer of the 1980s. And in Britain (and in many parts of Continental Europe) Sinclair and Amstrad were huge but people from the US hardly recognize the names.
- philwelch 3y ago
  Commodore is probably the closest analog to Apple because they tried to follow up the 64 with the Amiga. It didn’t work out for them (hell, it barely worked out for Apple) but some people absolutely loved the Amiga. Do you think in a world without Apple, the founders of these companies would have ended up doing what Steve Jobs ended up doing? If so, what stopped them?