Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say there are two factors besides ignorance that lead to us calling ourselves Americans (of a country, not a continent). First, we are the "United States of America". My state is WA (*high five BC*), so I am in one of those united states, but what is the name of the country? Well it wouldn't be a stretch for someone to assume that the country is then America. We are the United States of the country America. Wrong, but not an altogether hard thing to come up with grammatically. Second, I don't think we have a clean way of saying our nationality. People from Canada are Canadians. People from Mexicans. People from the United States of America are...? United Statians? US-ians? At to those two things the ignorance and laziness of "Americans" and you get what probably comes across as arrogance self centeredness, when it really isn't. We do have that too though :)

[/end giantasstangent]

Nice response! It might have been a 'giantasstangent', but it's nice to see someone's honest question get answered respectfully and with good humour. Doesn't always happen that way on MR.

Down here on the other end of the world, we take 'Americans' to mean U-S-Asians too. :)
 
Yeh I didnt man to start anything, I have always thought of Americans as just ppl from the states, but I had a brain blank and started to question myself if I was meant to include the Canadians. Its all pretty simple, despite being slightly incorrect.

:)
 
I really don't think people here understand history or the definition of influence. I seem to seem a few reoccurring themes:

To be influential, you have to do good things, or be a good person. Not true.
To be influential, you have to do things alone, in a vacuum of ideas. Not true.
To be influential, if doesn't count if you are spreading someone elses idea. Not true.

Look at all the people on the list, and the influence they are known for is nothing they did alone or in a vacuum. Was George Washington the first to come up with the idea of Democracy? No. Did he fight the way against the British alone? No. Was fighting the British even his idea? No. Was he one of the best Military minds of the last milleniam? No.
But did he take what he knew and what he believed in, stand up, and spread those ideas? Causing change in the way people think for hundreds of years to come? Yes.

Okay, how about Lewis and Clark. Did they do it alone? No, they had a crew of like 40 people. Were they the first ones to the west coast? Of course not, disregarding the natives, the Spanish had been there long before. Could they have done it without the natives? Rather unlikely. But did they take what they knew and what they believed in, stand up, and spread those ideas? Causing change in the way people think for hundreds of years to come? Yes.

I've already spouted off about Abe Lincon and Henry Ford, so let's go to Thomas Edison. Well there is a prick if you've met one. The man could rival Jobs in arrogance and self righteousness with ease. Did he invent the Lightbulb? Nope. Did he may it commercially viable? Yep. From the Times article:
"Edison’s true genius lay in his ability to bring mass brainpower to the process of invention. The laboratory and workshop he established in Menlo Park, N.J., in 1876 — his “invention factory” — put him at the center of a critical mass of assistants with backgrounds in multiple areas of science, engineering and skilled labor. It was essentially America’s first industrial R&D facility, the forerunner of a modern-day geeks-in-a-garage skunkworks."​
Does that sound like a guy that worked in a vacuum? Pulling out of thin air the ideas that influenced generations, and working them alone? Nope. But did he take what he knew and what he believed in, stand up, and spread those ideas? Causing change in the way people think for hundreds of years to come? Yes.

Did Martin Luther King come up with his ideas himself? Was he the first to say "Hey guys, I have this strikingly new idea!" ? Did he cause change all by himself? No. Was he the only one to get up infront of crowds and speak for change? No. But did he take what he knew and what he believed in, stand up, and spread those ideas? And did he succeed? Causing change in the way people think for hundreds of years to come? Yes.

Not American, but let's take another popular historical figure, Hitler. Was he a good man? Did he work alone? Were all his ideas his own? Was he the first man in history to think the way he did? The answer to all is no. But he was influential because he actually stood up and took action, and succeeded. That man sparked a lot of (negative) change, and because of it we would consider him "influential" even if he didn't influence the world the way he wanted to.

For Jobs to be on this list he doesn't need to have worked in a vacuum. He doesn't need to have worked alone, or on new ideas. He only needs to have sparked the change, and devoted his life to his passions and ideas, and succeed at them. No one works in a vacuum.

If you haven't seen it yet, I would suggest you go watch the "Everything is a remix" video series. It'll take you all of 30 minutes to watch. However if you only have 10, check out Part 3 (of 4). I promise you'll be entertained :)
 
You could say that Xerox was the influence behind the influence. With them, we wouldn't have Macs or Windows machines as we know them now. Credit where credit is due.

Going deeper, I prefer to concentrate on the people themselves. Many of them would've found a way to get their ideas in use, no matter which company.

For example, Larry Tessler and 15 of his fellow Xerox workers, who jumped ship to go work on the Lisa... all because Apple was willing to make their ideas into a commercial product.

Likewise, later on, many of the top Apple engineers left with Steve Jobs to work at NeXT, because they would be allowed to put their ideas into reality.

Still later on, some Apple employees left to join Palm, to work on WebOS and implement some of the wonderful UI innovations there.

--

In 1981, BYTE magazine did an entire issue on Smalltalk and the work being done at Xerox PARC. It was just a matter of time before that would catch the attention of a personal computer company and get put into practice.

For that matter, Jef Raskin deserves credit for dragging Steve Jobs over to see the Xerox GUI in the first place. If he hadn't done that, the Lisa would've been a boring green screen machine and the Mac would've been more like the C64.

--

It's the same story as the electric light, radio, automobiles, airplanes, TV, microprocessors, home computers, GUIs and other hugely influential technologies. They were not dependent on a single inventor or company or CEO, but rather on the technology landscape itself being ripe. The timing and details would've changed, but they would still have come out.
 
Last edited:
I really don't think people here understand history or the definition of influence. I seem to seem a few reoccurring themes:

To be influential, you have to do good things, or be a good person. Not true.
To be influential, you have to do things alone, in a vacuum of ideas. Not true.
To be influential, if doesn't count if you are spreading someone elses idea. Not true.

…

For Jobs to be on this list he doesn't need to have worked in a vacuum. He doesn't need to have worked alone, or on new ideas. He only needs to have sparked the change, and devoted his life to his passions and ideas, and succeed at them. No one works in a vacuum.

Well said and bravo. Let's hope that becomes the most influential post of the thread and we have no more pictures of Bill Gates holding babies.

----------

For that matter, Jef Raskin deserves credit for dragging Steve Jobs over to see the Xerox GUI in the first place. If he hadn't done that, the Lisa would've been a boring green screen machine and the Mac would've been more like the C64.

And let's not forget to thank the person who introduced Jef Raskin's mum to Jef Raskin's dad! If they hadn't got together and conceived little Jef, then who knows but we could all still be using C64s.

(As it happens, I did use my C64 again just last year—dusted it off to show my kids what kind of computer their old Dad used to have. I thought they'd probably yawn after 5 minutes and go back to their iPods, but as it turned out they enjoyed it, and I still get asked occasionally if they can play the 'old computer'. Not bad for an old girl sporting 64 kB of memory!)
 
It's the same story as the electric light, radio, automobiles, airplanes, TV, microprocessors, home computers, GUIs and other hugely influential technologies. They were not dependent on a single inventor or company or CEO, but rather on the technology landscape itself being ripe. The timing and details would've changed, but they would still have come out.

I think that's more or less true… but sometimes the details are important. I can't remember where I read this or who said it, but the writer was discussing operating systems and made the point that those little annoyances (the devils in the details if you like) might not seem like much at first, but they start to compound as you encounter them again and again. One thing Apple does well (and I think this is largely Jobs' perfectionist influence) is to give very careful thought to the details. These are the things you, the user, may not notice or even think about until you pick up a competitor's device and then you go… ah… I see they didn't quite nail this scrolling action, or touch gesture, or whatever it is. So Apple develops a reputation for making things easier to use, and generally I think that's warranted. As many designers have observed, the solutions which seem the most obvious once designed, were not always so obvious.
 
Well said and bravo. Let's hope that becomes the most influential post of the thread and we have no more pictures of Bill Gates holding babies.

Thanks :)

Of course, none of those ideas or facts were discovered or produced by myself. I just took the time to write it down, because I have a passion. Now we wait and see if I succeed :)

The only thing I didn't add, that I meant to, is that it is normal in our society to polarize historical figures. They either invented everything and were saints, or were the devil incarnate. Everyone has forgotten or doesn't care how Edison got to be the figure he is today, but fewer people have forgotten what recent figures like Jobs went through, and what they built off of. In time, people will forget about Xerox and other important figures in the early years of the personal computer, and all that will be remembered is Apple and Steve not because Steve made that happen, but because people choose to have selective memories.

If I have any problem with Jobs being on that list, it is not because of what or how he did what he did. He matches everyone else on that list with ease, especially for his age! No, my problem would only be that influence is best measured over time, and compared to many of those figures, not much time has passed. But given the time we have observed so far, there is no doubt that Jobs has influenced people, culture, and society.
 
re

If people believe this, our educational system is failing us worse than originally thought.
 
Blame the founding fathers for giving the country such a generic name. :mad:

United States of America doesn't seem generic to me, especially for the time. Actually, sounds pretty specific. Union of states that are located in the region of land named America. North and South America were not officially identified as separate continents until after the United States was named. There was just America. The nation of Canada wasn't established until much later as well.
 
Blame the founding fathers for giving the country such a generic name. :mad:

Actually when you consider our history it is not that generic ... at the time of our founding many States considered themselves independent entities in a kind of federated alliance ... we had to fight a war to resolve ourselves into a unified country ... as Shelby Foote so eloquently put it, "Prior to the Civil War we referred to ourselves as the United States 'are' ... after the Civil War we became the United States 'is' ... the Civil War transformed us from an 'are' to an 'is'" ;)
 
Ben Franklin doesn't make the list but Jobs does?

Edit: Neither do James Madison, writers like Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and Hemingway, etc.

No one would buy the magazine if it was full of predictable people. Time Magazine is throwing Jobs among others on this list to stir the pot and cause commotion about their magazine.
 
Actually when you consider our history it is not that generic ... at the time of our founding many States considered themselves independent entities in a kind of federated alliance ... we had to fight a war to resolve ourselves into a unified country ... as Shelby Foote so eloquently put it, "Prior to the Civil War we referred to ourselves as the United States 'are' ... after the Civil War we became the United States 'is' ... the Civil War transformed us from an 'are' to an 'is'" ;)

Way off topic, but...

Civil War didn't transform us from 'are' to an 'is'. We are still a union of states with individual governments and laws (at least my pay stub and driver's license tells me that). Civil War just showed that people whom opposed slavery were better at fighting wars than people that supported slavery.
 
Way off topic, but...

Civil War didn't transform us from 'are' to an 'is'. We are still a union of states with individual governments and laws (at least my pay stub and driver's license tells me that). Civil War just showed that people whom opposed slavery were better at fighting wars than people that supported slavery.

The Civil War wasn't over slavery per se. Lincoln didn't even free the slaves until near the end, and in fact, most Northerners refused to fight for such a reason.

More importantly, slavery was already a doomed institution because of the coming Industrial Revolution. Farming machines would soon be replacing field workers, just as machines were going to replace horses.

The war was over State's Rights vs a strong Federal government. For better or worse, the USA ended up with the latter. That's where the quote came from about 'are' vs 'is'.

The North won because it was already industrialized.
 
The Civil War wasn't over slavery per se. Lincoln didn't even free the slaves until near the end, and in fact, most Northerners refused to fight for such a reason.

More importantly, slavery was already a doomed institution because of the coming Industrial Revolution. Farming machines would soon be replacing field workers, just as machines were going to replace horses.

The war was over State's Rights vs a strong Federal government. For better or worse, the USA ended up with the latter. That's where the quote came from about 'are' vs 'is'.

The North won because it was already industrialized.

The Emancipation did not occur until the war was nearly over not because the war was not really about slavery. All of the issues that led up to the war being fought were based on the question of slavery, most particularly about whether the territories had the choice of being admitted as states as slave or free. Emancipation was done at that point because Lincoln knew that it would be divisive and controversial in the north had it occurred earlier. He understood that if the war became about freeing black people that the war would lose a great deal of the support it needed in the north to be successfully fought.

The North won partially because of industrialization, yes, but also because it was far more populous, and more unified.
 
The Civil War wasn't over slavery per se. Lincoln didn't even free the slaves until near the end, and in fact, most Northerners refused to fight for such a reason.

More importantly, slavery was already a doomed institution because of the coming Industrial Revolution. Farming machines would soon be replacing field workers, just as machines were going to replace horses.

The war was over State's Rights vs a strong Federal government. For better or worse, the USA ended up with the latter. That's where the quote came from about 'are' vs 'is'.

The North won because it was already industrialized.

My comment about the Civil War wasn't to be taken so literally. Yes, the south wanted to be independent from northern law/government. Slavery was one issue. Southern farms, like cotton, had much business because of slavery. To take that away meant that businesses would have to pay "real" wages for manual labor. Farmers would have to pay and learn to operate industrial machines. Something I'm sure many were reluctant to do. Anyways, the north was better at fighting wars because the south lost, whatever may contributed to that.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.