Steve Jobs and Apple
From: Jake Kipp <jacobkipp@cs.com>
Subject: Steve Jobs and Apple
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2011
Just a short note on Steve Jobs and Apple. When I was working on the origins and development of perestroika I read N. N. Moiseev's Sotsializm i informatika (Socialism and Information Science). Moiseev wrote that the Cold War was over when Apple put laptops in every American school and made the personal computer the instrument of the information revolution. Moiseev (1917-2000) was a leading Soviet expert in Applied Mathematics and Systems Analysis and went on to be one of the leading voice for environmental protect in Russia. When I interviewed him in the mid-1990s I asked him if he still agreed with that assessment. He said he did because down to that point the USSR could adapt to industrial models from the factory and combine them with the barracks to keep up. But personal computers as opposed to mainframes was about the decentralization of information and its flow. It was not a model compatible with a society based on authoritarian control.
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