WI: Steve Jobs goes into indy media instead of computers?

So, two things potentially play out very differently, or not:

1) Does indy media get more attention and have a bigger effect?

2) And, how does the computer industry develop in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s without the passionate Steve Jobs?
 
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Bill Gates and Paul Allen and their early Micro-soft were in Albuquerque, New Mexico, writing software for MITS in 1975. Steve Jobs got rolling with Apple I, and then the Apple II around 1977. You'd think in the amorphous early days, the industry could have easily gone in any number of directions, say, thin clients and servers. But if Steve had gone into something else, would that have really been enough to derail personal computers?

And with indy media, there's always been plenty of juicy, full-bodied stories not really being covered corporate, mainstream media. It hasn't been content. The problem has always been economics. It is hard even today. But pre-Internet, it was really hard to make any appreciable money doing indy media.
 
Steve Jobs got rolling with Apple I, and then the Apple II around 1977. You'd think in the amorphous early days, the industry could have easily gone in any number of directions, say, thin clients and servers. But if Steve had gone into something else, would that have really been enough to derail personal computers?

It's forgotten now, but Radio Shack's TRS-80 was sales leader until 1979.

Still could be an Apple II, but Apple III would probably be a much better unit.

Woz didn't have Jobs aversion to buttons and cooling fans
 
Woz didn't have Jobs aversion to buttons and cooling fans
Were Woz and Jobs kind of the zen master and the practical man where each needed the other, say, kind of like McCartney and Lennon?

Or, is that after-the-fact history which makes it look more neat and tidy that it is in real life? For example, one of the Beatles producers said what might be viewed almost as the classic textbook answer was that Lennon was the melodies guy and McCartney the lyrics guy, but there were plenty of examples where they did the opposite.
 
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From an article on the TRS-80:

http://techland.time.com/2012/08/03/trs-80/

" . . . The TRS-80, which began shipping in September, was one of 1977’s trinity of early consumer PCs, along with the Apple II and Commodore’s PET 2001. . . "

" . . . Conventional wisdom has long held that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s VisiCalc spreadsheet for the Apple II was the first killer app–a program so useful that people bought a computer to run it. But even before Apple got VisiCalc, the TRS-80 had the Electric Pencil, the first microcomputer word processor. At the very least, it was a proto-killer app. . . "
 
TRS-80 lasting longer could mean Radio Shack survives.

Jobs did have some media influence later. He helped fund Pixar- which got him a seat on Disney's board as a major shareholder.

Perhaps Jobs could try working on something like France's Minitel or UK's Ceefax.
 
And on the indy media front,

I think Ms. Magazine from the early 70s can be counted as financially successful,

and there was a flurry of documentary films from the early 2000s: Fahrenheit 9/11, Super Size Me, What the Bleep Do We Know? (spelled with fun letters!), and Grizzly Man (about Timothy Treadwell).
 
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