Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Vision from the Past

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Back when I worked at Apple in the late 1980s, Sculley had a “visionary” video put together for internal viewing only called Knowledge Navigator. It was his attempt to be forward-looking, with a concept of what Apple might provide by the year 2011. It occurred to me today to re-watch this old chestnut (which I hadn’t done in ages). A few of the things have come true (Facetime, for example) whereas some things were pretty far off (like the fact that the guy is pretty much unreachable if he leaves his ridiculously sumptuous college professor’s office). Of course, back in the day, we focused our laughter at the utterly dorky bow-tied digital assistant.

The Normal Steve

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Yesterday on the plane ride from Seattle back to San Francisco, I finished up the Becoming Steve Jobs book which I wrote about about a week ago. The book is even more outstanding than I suspected it would be halfway through it. Late in the book, it mentioned Jobs’ last truly public appearance: this one in front of the Cupertino City Council, getting their approval for their gigantic new headquarters building. According to the book, Jobs was in searing pain by this time of his life, but his presentation shows him at his most personable and human self.