Notes from Silicon Valley

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – February 3, 2012

admin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:22:29 +0000

MOTM Quad LFO Front View

MOTM Quad LFO - Back View

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – February 2, 2012

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:21:27 +0000

MeeBlip Micro

MeeBlip Midi Synth

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012f

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:11:45 +0000

CGS Burst Generator back view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012e

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:10:08 +0000

CGS Burst Generator front view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012d

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:09:10 +0000

Ian Fritz Teezer Through Zero VCO back view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012c

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:07:52 +0000

Ian Fritz Teezer Through Zero VCO front view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012b

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:06:12 +0000

YuSynth CV Standards back view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012-a

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:03:55 +0000

YuSynth CV Standards front view

New Synth Modules I’ve Built – January 29, 2012

admin — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:54:51 +0000

Vacoloco Gorf2

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

admin — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 01:12:48 +0000

This is a bit of a marathon read. The author does a good job of putting the many accomplishments of Steve Jobs to light. For people like myself who have witnessed the entire life of Apple’s products, this book provided many subtle insights into their creation. Steve Jobs and Apple computer could not have come about anywhere but Silicon Valley.

My only complaint is that the Walter Isaacson in some ways was not technical enough, not really understanding some of the many novel ideas presented. The author gives us the notion that Apple by using the 6502 had made a strategic mistake but not using the dominant Intel processor at the time, funny thing is Intel was not dominant at that time, rather Zilog with the Z80 was the dominant processor. Only when the IBM PC came out did Intel dominate the processor world.

While Steve Jobs was not at Apple at the time, Apple was one of the first customers of ARM, and was a key investor in them (10% owner). Thus the choice to go to ARM processors in the iPhone and iPad was kind of a return to the days of the Newton.

The book pointed out quite well that Xerox had invested in Apple and that Apple had the rights to use Xerox’s technology. Many people claim that Apple had ripped off Xerox, this book cleared up some of that. Apple did release on the Mac the Smalltalk programming environment, with the same user interface that Xerox created. Having used that software (which most people have not) it becomes very obvious that Apple made huge improvements to the user interface, this book like most books on the subject present the Apple ripped off Xerox side of this.