the value of life

[mike wightman]

There is a really annoying tendency to say "X is Traveller's primary source"...

When it is MWM himself saying it it is not annoying, it is fact - well sort of

I will point out how much I liked Dumarest of Terra (by E. C. Tubb) and you can see his influence in the Traveller rules.

This is a quote from his recent facebook Q&A. Before you comment that this is still debatable there is an even more direct statement that Dumarest should be a go to source of inspiration for Traveller referees in his youtube interviews at TravellerCon.
There is also this:

Marc Miller: There have been some excellent analyses of the literary antecedents of Traveller, and they go into far more detail than I can provide here, but let me tell you just a few inspirations that I can recall off the top of my head. And I recommend, if you have not read these authors, to make a point of doing so: Larry Niven and his Known Space stories. Poul Anderson and his Flandry of Terra series. All of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. And the quintessential Traveller: E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest of Terra.

Yes, Marc was influenced by plenty of golden age scifi, but no other single source is paid as much homage as Dumarest in the original Traveller rules.

I would argue that later rules supplements drew from other sources more heavily - original High Guard owes a lot to Mote in God's Eye - fusion drives and the black globe stand out for me (note the original black globe is even more like the Langston field than it would become in the later version of HG), Mercenary from Falkenberg's Legion etc.

You can see echoes of the Foundation in the rise and fall of empires and the long night, Dune influences the nobility.

 

[aramis]

Who invented the iPhone?

Apple is highly derivative, borrowing concepts and technologies from all over the map.

Jobs' genius appeared to be timing and marketing.

So likely pulp magazine authors borrowed concepts from each other that they liked, and we remember those concepts from the stories we liked, or at least were memorable.

There is more truth to that than many realize.

Not just the pulp mags, either - the sunday comics and the pulp comics also cross-fertilized with each other and with the pulp mags and novels.

In much the same way that TV, Movies, Games and Novels do now.

 

[whartung]

Who invented the iPhone?

Apple invented the iPhone.

Apple is highly derivative, borrowing concepts and technologies from all over the map.

But Apple was the only company that pulled it off. Whatever derivative concepts were borrowed, clearly there's more to it that just being aware of the concept to pull of an actual, functioning, tangible product.

It's easy to argue that "well, someone would have done it someday" and that would be true. But not only did Apple do it first, it did it in a vacuum. The best example of this is to contrast what Apple did with the iPhone and what Google/Android were scheming up at the same time.

Both companies had, effectively, infinite resources. Both had availability of the same concepts to derive from. Both lived in the same world, with the same customers, and same technologies.

Yet Apple came out with the iPhone. Apple was not in any kind of "race" to get to market first before Company X came out with their version a month or two later, that Apple just managed to sneak in to the market a month or so before the others.

Googles phone was Yet Another button festooned phone not dramatically unlike everything else. As soon as the iPhone hit, Google did a complete reset on product design. "Well, that's that!"

No, the iPhone was "impossible", yet they pulled it off. And, yes, the original iPhone was half magic trick as much as anything else. But no matter.

Touchscreens were not new. Boxes with rounded edges were not new. No singular component of the iPhone was new.

But the iPhone, as a whole, the execution, WAS new. It caught the market and its competitors flat footed.

Similarly with the Lisa and Macintosh. There were no secrets here. The mouse wasn't new. Smalltalk was described in Byte Magazine in 1980 (Apple was already on board with ST and Xerox at that point). I'd seen the Xerox Alto in 1981, myself, (and I was just a lowly college student -- a friend worked at Xerox and showed me the machine).

But did Microsoft go off pursuing the concept to market? Nope. Not until they encountered the Lisa and the Macintosh at Apple (as they were already working on software for those machines when they started Windows).

And history can tell you how well the Xerox Alto penetrated the marketplace. There's concept, and there's execution.

 

[Condottiere]

Serendipity and focus.

Microsoft dropped the ball on cell phones and tablets, but really focussed on getting their gaming console to market. Microsoft is no longer hungry enough.

For Jobs, he recognized the consumer need at the right time when technology became affordable.

Apple has lost it's focus with the passing of Jobs.

 

[Tiikeri]

Air rafts show up in Piper's books from the early 1960s, while Startowns show up in Andre Norton Solar Queen and other books. Small ship tramp freighters pretty much describe the Solar Queen series, while the passengers onboard could come from Piper's Lone Star Planet. Trying to put precise references as to where Traveller material comes from gets harder and harder the more widely you have read 1960s and earlier science fiction. Look at some of the early science fiction on Project Gutenberg and you will see how early some ideas appear that later authors have made use of.

I didn't say that Dumarest was Travller's primary source. I said 'on which a lot of Traveller is based', which is true.

Air rafts were by name taken from Dumarest, whereas Piper's contragravity vehicles were somewhat different (using 'hot jets', etc.) than Traveller's self contained grav drives.

I was emphasizing to the OP how many things in Dumarest also appeared in Traveller, often by name like the low berths he was discussing. I wasn't stating that the general themes I mentioned didn't appear anywhere else or that Traveller wasn't influenced by other sources with these themes, but I can see how it could seem that way since I didn't separate out the general themes from the specific by name examples.

 

[aramis]

The iPhone wasn't even the first flat-glass phone to hit the market, Whartung. It was the first to get the OS right to support the flat glass well.

Actually, PalmOS was pretty decent for phone use, too... and well supported at the time... but suffered from being hard on developers. Not that it was hard to program, per se; no, the problem was connecting devs with their potential audience. (I wrote some PalmOS apps. Not at all hard... but there wasn't a clear marketplace to put them, so I never was able to commoditize them, even tho' I used them a lot myself, and my friends did, too.)

Apple had one thing neither Palm, Nokia, Samsung, nor Blackberry had - the maniacal Steve Jobs, who could sell ice to eskimos and sand to the !kung.

Palm OS was solid. Newton OS was easier to write for. Neither had a good marketplace. If Apple had launched Newton with an online marketplace, a slightly lower entry point, and not hyping the handwriting recognition, we'd never have seen the iPhone, as the NPhones would have hit in about 2004. (by the time the MP130 was out, the handwriting recognition was VERY good. Better even than my Samsung Note. And my handwriting is horrible.)

Newton was great tech, and what it really needed to take off was treating it like the initial Macintoshes: break even only on the CPU, and charge up the Woz for peripheral licenses, while encouraging Usergroups at the stores, and putting lots of hype about the reliable features. (I first laid hands upon a MP 120 in 1996 or 97... it was rocking good. I later bought an MP130. Last I checked, it still worked)

Oh, and the best way to do handwriting recognition on a Samsung Note? Load up Einstein, the Newton Emulator... with the MP200 OS.

Apple killed the Newton because Jobs hated its design team.