You could argue that Steve Jobs was a product of very Californian circumstances: Born to parents of very different cultural backgrounds, raised in a hotbed of electronics development (and new age spirituality), started a company in an area full of enthusiasts and venture capitalists…
Jobs did a lot of useful things, but he was not an inventor and so has nothing to show. He was really good at forcing people to perfect the inventions of others which is a useful thing. Cray-1 is an invention, and better known than the inventor. So it is the right decision for both.
You can of course debate which is better and there are hundreds of other choices that could be put on either coin - both humans and inventions. I would probably pick different things (not people) for both - but this is a reflection of my biases and not some universal truth.
Jobs was arguably the first product manager in personal computing - meaning he had a clear vision for the consumer and product and worked to carry that out.
The intent here is to get people's attention, and an arguement over "which is best" is exactly the outcome desired. I won't step into it except to say regardless of the subject and reasoning, the design of the Jobs one is pretty dumb. It looks like the gave a prompt focused on hippy-spirtual-big-thinker to AI and said "design a coin".
bc theyre going for the aspect of the innovation that the most people in the relevant political constituencies will recognize. in some cases the inventor, in others the invention.
Saying "no" to off-topic / dumb ideas in a consistent way is an amazing product development skill.
It's like carving away all of the marble that doesn't look like David.
Neal Stephenson wrote a really great Substack about art and how it's the end product of many small decisions. That's exactly what Jobs did on the hardware he worked on.
Far enough, because I will even concede that after Jobs died, Apple has never been the same. Cook has been serviceable, but I haven't really been comparatively thrilled with anything to come out during his tenure.
Technically inept is acceptable as long as he could communicate well. The man consistently had clear vision and the ability to communicate that vision to those who were around him.
Products? I mean at the end of the day (as long as you consistently pick the right people/tools for the job) technical part is just an implementation detail.
I'd love to see Wozniak up there. From Al Alcorn, a pivotal computer scientist and electrical engineer employed in the early days of Atari:
"So, meanwhile, Steve’s friend Wozniak comes in the evenings. He would be out there during burn-in tests while these Tank games were on the production line, and he’d play Tank forever. I didn’t think much of it; I didn’t care. He was a cool guy.
I found that what really had happened was that Jobs never designed a lick of anything in his life. He had Woz do it [redesign Breakout].
Woz did it in like 72 hours nonstop and all in his head. He got it down to 20 or 30 ICs [integrated circuits]. It was remarkable… a tour de force.
It was so minimized, though, that nobody else could build it. Nobody could understand what Woz did but Woz. It was this brilliant piece of engineering, but it was just unproduceable. So the game sat around and languished in the lab."
Not so much an exception but a work around according to the guardian newspaper [1]:
[...] the law specifically says “no head and shoulders portrait or bust of any person, living or dead, and no portrait of a living person may be included in the design on the reverse of any coin “created to mark the US anniversary”.
The proposed design features a wider illustration of Trump on the reverse side, a move that legal experts said would fall outside the ban on a “head and shoulders portrait or bust”.
On the US Mint Site I was just looking at the 'Medals', where you CAN have a living person minted onto what they call a medal. Unsure of if it's the same size as a coin, but if it is, you could conceivably try and circulate the medals of living ex-presidents (to great cost to yourself).
There is a law but there have been plenty of exceptions including President Calvin Coolidge on a 1926 half-dollar and Alabama Governor Thomas Kilby on a 1921 commemorative coin and Carter Glass on the 1936 Lynchburg Half Dollar.
Oh no way? TVA is great. I went to college down the road from their HQ, and they were the main source of internships for my comp sci program. My university had a strong cybersecurity program that was partly DoD funded, in which many graduates went on to perform cybersecurity roles for TVA. After all, power plants are often juicy targets.
One neighbors growing up used to tell people to not believe any of the conspiracy theories about Elvis still being alive. He knew Elvis was dead because he was one of the paramedics to carry his body out of Graceland.
The KKK was founded in Pulaski, TN, which is about an hour from where I was raised. It wasn't until July, 2021 that the bust of the founder of the KKK (Nathan Bedford Forrest) was removed from the state capitol building. It's now been relocated to the 'TN State Museum' which was magically opened mere days after the bust was removed.
I could provide countless more examples of things I have heard, read, and witnessed, but I am certain you do not need any more examples, and honestly, even thinking about it all really depresses me.
If you had some of knowledge and experiences I have had, I would hope you would agree with me. Things have gotten better over the years, but there is a lot of dark and grim history.
I don’t want to psychologize too much but when people have tough upbringing and then find a community in adulthood they tend to invert the morals and values of their upbringing.
Alternatively why not Seymour Cray instead of the Cray-1?
Or why not use one side for the inventor and the other side for the invention?
Jobs sitting there in an empty field just throws the whole set for me.