Celebrate Woz's 70th
wozbday.com
wozbday.com
"And when Jobs (in the movie, but really a board does this) denied stock to the early garage team (some not even shown) I'm surprised that they chose not to show me giving about $10M of my own stock to them because it was the right thing. And $10M was a lot in that time."
Anyway, my point being is: there is a 572p 16:9 version available on DVD.
Some early DVDs had a lot of love put into their production, some others did pretty heinous things to the source material though.
First of all, it's simply a mischaracterization, and second, today we interpret that moment very differently to the way it's portrayed in that movie. Steve Jobs turned Apple around spectacularly and went on to create the company with the highest market capitalization in the world, surpassing even Microsoft for many years.
Other than the ending, that documentary does a better job representing Steve Jobs' life than recent biographical movies.
There should be a documentary that covers Steve's life in his NeXT years.
I would love to see a documentary about NeXT. I feel like there is a missing component in the YouTube technology discussion which is actual documentary films. If you go and look up NeXT computers, there are people talking about something they bought on ebay, there is old footage of steve jobs pitching next computers, but there isn't any sort of scripted narrative documentary told via old footage, current interviews, etc. This is true basically across the space of technology videos on youtube. It's not limited to NeXT. Ironically, I made something like this for scientific models. Maybe if I want this, I should hunt down people willing to tell stories on camera and make it myself. lol.
I suspect this is because of the economics of youtube. I don't think there is enough money in it for niche documentaries to be profitable. Either it's quick cheap solo stuff, or it's big documentaries but with a nice broad appeal (e.g. Vice or food stuff)
I dont think Woz's actions would have lowered your opinion any more on Jobs
Similarly to Dennis Ritchie who worked on the C programming language and Unix, and dies a week after Jobs gets completely ignored and yet arguably has had more impact than someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough
> someone who's just known for arguing about tech not being pretty enough
If you think that's all Jobs did, I don't know what to tell you.
He is in the running for most successful businessman in history.
We can't speculate on what a Apple Prime would have done without Jobs. But we do know that his single mindedness about making arbitrary changes cost them several years in the 80s and led to the slump in to the 90s.
Apple could have launched in iPhone like product years ahead of when they did if they kept that branch of the company afloat. That would have been a real 'visionary' move. Instead, they were forced to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace by emphasizing little design flourishes and style.
Job's only real contribution is managing to gaslight (a.k.a, his "reality distortion field") the entire industry into thinking he had any real insight or ability beyond that of a typical middle manager with a cluster-b personality disorder.
It would have been exposed as being a dead end with no backwards compatibility. The GS was essentially a completely different architecture from its predecessors anyway. Compatibility was maintained with the Mega2 chip. Apple wouldn't have been stuck for a couple of years with barely any software on their "flagship" product.
The GS would have killed the Macintosh if they raised the clock speed, gave it some higher video resolution modes, and developed something like the Macintosh Toolbox in ROM for it.
Heck you see a lot of that attitude today in many open source projects.
And that's just one way he pushed modern computing into what it is today. Did he perform every detail himself? Nope - that would be absurd. But he took things that until that time no one else correlated, and he correlated and pushed for them. Often with amazing presence. And it wasn't willy-nilly, either.
I mean just look at the way he handled this OpenDoc troll:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
How many can compose themselves and deliver that kind of a response that quickly? Not many.
So yeah, those who try to dismiss Jobs as just a marketing or product guy are only displaying their profound ignorance. I don't think Jobs was perfect - far from it. But he certainly did make a dent in the universe, and many others too - perhaps it is a good thing that people like Jobs are pretty rare but there is no doubt we would all be a lot poorer if he hadn't existed.
They were fans, so not pleased when I told them one could know every single thing there is to know about CS and never hear his name once
I'm not demeaning his achievements, but the general cultural view of Steve Jobs is of a technical and scientific genius that he was very likely not. Who knows? He might have been above average, even gifted, but there is not much to show for it
I mean, the vision was for a powerful yet affordable computer for use in Higher Education. This seems like quite a noble goal given the technological limitations at the time.
The hardware? Not so much. The other workstation vendors of the era (Sun, SGI, HP, DEC...) ran rings around NeXT. The 680x0 platform NeXT chose was approaching obsolescence by the early 90's.
Life is NOT a zero sum game.
Freaking cancel culture - no one is willing to expend any effort on nuance or deep thought. It's either yes/no, good/bad - zero room for discussions of the space between. How boring.
https://www.documentarymania.com/player.php?title=Steve%20Jo...
Mentioned in the CNN doc is the trick Jobs played on Woz in their first business deal. Jobs told Woz that Atari had paid them $700 to build the game Breakout and paid him half, or $350. But in fact Atari had paid them $7000, not $700.
Yet even after learning this, Woz continued working with Jobs and later co-found Apple. That says a lot about both men.
Jobs had far more financial success, and was involved in the release of far more products, was far more famous than Woz, but died young and had...complicated relationships with everyone in his life.
Woz cashed out when he had enough to enjoy doing whatever he wanted for the rest of his life, organized music festivals, taught kids about computers and technology, played with cool gadgets, seems to be beloved by everyone who ever knew him, and is still going strong at 70.
How many of those could I do starting at 60? There are lots of life choices it’s easy to make at 25 that are not easy to make 65.
Even something as simple as 3 month cross country road trip. My parents retired at 55 and did that twice. My parents are still independent, but with their eyesight and hearing going they couldn’t decide at 75 to hop in their car and spend three months on the road.
I donate to Lifespan.io in the hope of this.
I lost a large part of my net worth between those two things - but I had the income to both enjoy life and to recover.
Everything I mentioned above happened between the time I was 25-35. Some good, some bad but I don’t regret any of it.
I wouldn’t take nearly the risks in my 60s that I did in my 30s. If I broke a bone in my 20s while doing some of the crazy stuff I did, I could heel. Not so much in my 60s.
I got a chance to start over with a new family making better choices in my 30s. I was still young enough at 35 to run with my sons, take them to the gym with me. At 85 not so much.
Are we really arguing that there are opportunities you have between 30-50 that you can’t make up for between 70-90?
Would you rather have been Steve Jobs or Ronald Wayne?
- Byron, The Corsair
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life”
Steve said that. You don’t have to agree. But you can’t deny that these people who might not have lived very long have changed things: Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Steve Jobs. To definitively declare that you must live long to live a fulfilling life is insulting to those who haven’t the opportunity.
One of his diets was a poorly designed "fruitarian" diet consisting of eating one kind of fruit for weeks, or drinking excessive amounts of fruit juice like Odwalla carrot juice... or sometimes, just fasting for long periods of time.
Very few people live like this, so there is not much medical literature about the implications of this lifestyle. I think this could have contributed to his health decline.
https://osher.ucsf.edu/patient-care/integrative-medicine-res...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2011/10/24/steve-j...
His absence is such a loss to the tech industry that this is hard to digest, even after a decade.
I was in hospital recently for acute necrotizing pancreatitis (not fun, it will be a long time healing, if ever—fingers crossed).
I have to stick to a low- to non- fat diet (~ 30g or less a day) and occasionally have to skip eating altogether for half a day to several days if I'm feeling discomfort or pain. In hospital I wasn't allowed to eat anything for days. Just some water or fruit juice and, thankfully, hydromorphone.
Trying diets isn't very surprising. Even pancreatitis seems to vary in what diet will work for people. It sounds like some have to avoid fibre, others need more fibre. Some can go back to eating fats without straining the pancreas and some can't go near any. It's awful, especially because of how unpredictable and difficult the pancreas can be. It's not totally out-there to just try things related to diet as a last ditch attempt, if you ask me—but it's also not based on clinically-proven science either. (Except for fats and alcohol in the case of pancreatitis). Further, there is a dearth of layman information and community for pancreatic illnesses which can be disheartening and probably inspire just trying anything.
But during my experience everything I've heard about pancreatic cancer is that it's essentially a death sentence—and a horrible one. (Cursory look at the US National Cancer Institute—relative survival rate after 5 years is about 10%)
Pancreatic cancer is curable if it’s caught soon enough. (And I seem to recall that Jobs’ disease was thought to be atypical in some positive way, although details were obviously limited.) The problem is that due to the anatomy of the region, the disease is often advanced before symptoms are noticed, or noticed and thoroughly investigated.
Much of the information out there is either garbage or medical research papers. Most information on any pancreatic illness involves diet/digestion and potential surgery.
This stuff has been on my radar because unfortunately severe cases of pancreatitis can precede chronic conditions[0], cysts, tumours, and potentially even pancreatic cancer.
Jobs seems to have had a liver transplant. That says a couple of things. If the cancer had spread to his liver his chances were not good. His cancer was of the islet cells. Islet cells are the part of the pancreas that regulate blood sugar levels. So immediately he was staring down diabetes with surgery and removal of a large portion of them. There are surgeries (we've looked at them as possible futures) to transplant islet cells to the liver in order to try and avoid becoming diabetic if part or all of the pancreas has to be removed.
So this is a completely uneducated guess and only speculation, but if he was looking into islet cell transplants[1] prior to pancreatic head removal then he may have wanted a healthy liver first. Information relating to those details hasn't been made public to my knowledge. Most of the information surrounding his health seems as if it was measured in its releases. Also that he had a Whipple procedure it sounds like he was also having more traditional treatments.[2] Diet is also a part of treatment and symptom management and, from personal experience, the diet is pretty well the same as that for pancreatitis.[3]
Being that he lived 7 years after what is publicly known to be his diagnosis, he beat the average by a couple of years. That puts him in the 90th percentile of all pancreatic cancer deaths (at least according to the present figures I mentioned before which don't differentiate between types of pancreatic cancer).
[0] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...
[1] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overvi...
[2] https://pancreasfoundation.org/patient-information/pancreati...
You’re right he beat the odds, time-wise... but this is what being a billionaire with a team of world-class oncologists at your beck and call will do for you. He had full genome sequencing of his tumour before it was widely accessible, and it’s reasonable to assume that based on the results of this, his team will have tried a variety of atypical and possibly experimental treatments.
from the article
>"But something felt wrong. After a day of talking, I was often exhausted and unfulfilled. Two hours spent with one person who wants to “pick my brain” is two hours I could have spent making something that could be useful to the whole world, including that one person. Then people in America started emailing to ask why I’d been so silent. No new articles? No new projects? Nothing?So there’s the trade-off. When I’m local-focused, I may be useful to my community, but I’m not being as useful to the rest of the world."
the real problem here is mistaking the gratification one gets from github stars with the real impact one can have over a lifetime, and it doesn't always feel gratifying. Help one person instead of writing a thousand blog posts, don't confuse being well known with being genuinely useful.
In the case of Woz, I'm not sure someone would have filled the gap for the local good he did. It may have just not happened.
I wish more of them had wanted to be like Woz. I think the "impact" of the world would have been much better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
>Legacy
>Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny". Use of leaded gasoline, which he invented, released large quantities of lead into the atmosphere all over the world. High atmospheric lead levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems from childhood, including neurological impairment, and with increased levels of violence and criminality in cities. Time magazine included both leaded gasoline and CFCs on its list of "The 50 Worst Inventions".
>Midgley died three decades before the ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol phased out the use of CFCs like Freon.
He created the App Store fiefdom which taxes developers more than their government. It also compelled them to price their work at less than the cost of a cup of coffee.
He turned the general purpose computers in most Americans' lives into locked down, tightly controlled "experiences". (The iPhone, which lacks the ability to install whatever you want.)
He created an expensive laptop that isn't user upgradable.
His company is now suing a mom and pop healthcare app for having a logo shaped like a pear, which seems par for the course.
He sold status and glamour, and he wasn't a very good person. You can praise him if you want, but I think he's the epitome of selfish and don't consider him a role model. If you have to behave like that to win, it isn't worth it.
Gates, for all of his flaws, is doing really good work to make this world a better place. I look up to him instead.
Jobs could have done it before he died. He didn't. No need to theorize.
Plus Gates always struck me as more balanced than the narcissistic Jobs. Plus Melinda has been a great influence.
Dare I say, it seems, pear for the course...
Perhaps Job's muse seems more cruel. But what else could he do?
Steve Jobs acted the way he did because that's the kind of person he was. Some of us have worked for people who have styled themselves (and maybe even literally described themselves) as being like Steve Jobs. Invariably they're not, and this is just a key for them to unlock their inner asshole and bestow it on others around them. They create a toxic work environment that does not end up producing the next ipad.
Likewise there is a lot to admire in Woz's life, but for someone not naturally wired that way to try and emulate it, it just wouldn't work.
“You smell like a toilet.” This is what Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs while on his deathbed, she wrote in her new shocking tell-all memoir about her bumpy relationship with her father.
“I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love,” she wrote.
In her memoir, titled “Small Fry”, Brennan-Jobs says that a lot of her memories with her father were not a typical father-daughter relationship. She talks of him denying paternity despite a DNA match, not sending financial help to her and her mother, and saying mean things to her in the little times that he spent time with her.
Edit: my favorite is him donating money by saying f*ck while wearing a shirt with three commas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJjjAeob_Ms
He didn't work at Apple, but had a lot to do with them for a while in the early days.
He thought that Woz was a true intuitive genius. One of the best he had ever met. He did in a short amount of time what would take a team of others a long time.
He had such a creative mind about how things could be done differently, more efficiently more elegant.
He was far away from being a businessman. My dad thought that was a sign of sanity.
He got increasingly disillusioned with the financial aspect and seeing how it impacted other people at Apple (or did not)
He decided to get out it. He had lots of money already. (He did).
Dad thought that Woz would have preferred to give exciting solutions away and see what became of them.
He followed his heart and has (I think) enjoyed his life a lot more than most who just keep chasing more and more of it.
I am sure he was happy his Apple stock kept incrasing in value :)
I think anyone who wins the lottery (or similar) would "enjoyed his life a lot more than most who just keep chasing more and more of it."
So don't feel bad about chasing!
Was that truly Woz own pure and simple choice or was it influenced by his accident?
Did it change his ability to perform like he did before and thought it wasn't worth it to continue? Did it change his personality? Brain damage aside, did coming close to death by his own hand changed his outlook on life?
He never left Apple behind completely. Sure it ended up great but if not for the crash maybe what happened wasn't what he really wanted at the time.
Think about this. At the beginning of 1976, Woz got hold of a 6502 chip for the first time. By March, he had the Apple I running. By April, he and Jobs (and briefly, Wayne) started Apple. In July, they started selling Apple I kits, and by August, Woz had completed a prototype of the Apple II. By April of 1977 (only one year later!!) they were at the West Coast Computer Faire with the full-fledged Apple II computer as we know it today. It continued in production in one form or another until 1993.
This was a tour-de-force of focus, efficiency, innovation, hard work, and plain brilliance that is almost unbelievable today. Think about what you've accomplished in the past year, and compare. Woz deserves all the credit he gets.
Just a good human all around, wanting to build things for fun and help people because that's what people with power do.
A true icon who encompasses many of the things that make America great, and serves as a compass for us all to be a little better. Let's get wozzy.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/woz-u-steve-wozniak-former-stud...
It's a bad mark, for sure, but basically the only bad mark on an otherwise impeccable record. I feel like you certainly get one. So no, I don't think he was trying to scam people. He certainly didn't seem happy about the situation or try to smooth it over.
That being said, what online education institution hasn't had a huge amount of blowback, either due to poor instruction or lying about results?
Not saying two wrongs make a right. Just saying it's all quite predatory and built on promises of tomorrow, most of which will go unfulfilled.
It's probably hard to attribute this to one thing growing up in Silicon Valley in the 90s, but I consider Woz a big part of why I'm a software engineer today. And as an adult, he's one of the engineers who I most admire both professionally and personally as a kind, curious, and generous person.
He's a wonderful fellow to talk to...
I talked to him for about an hour and honestly had no idea it was him. He just came across as a jolly tech guy. Totally friendly and down to earth. There was crafts service there so when he got up to get something to drink, he brought back something for me, you know, just like some nice guy.
It was only later when people were giving him such reverence and acted flustered around him asking for photographs that I was like "wait, is that ... Steve Wozniak?!"
I have always wondered if he posts in hope that people will meet him there, and talk to him. Has anyone done so, have some stories to share?
I don't think that's the case. If he wants to meet and talk to people, he can just organize an event and thousands would apply.
One of my classmates tracked him and successfully asked for a photo with him. nice guy
It would be nice to see that who laughs last laughs best.
I don't like to hear phrases like: Engineers are important, but in the end it's all about marketing, see Jobs...
People should realize that there is nothing to market if there is not someone who solves complex technical problems.
I realized then that it must be exhausting to have so many people want to talk to you. It ain't easy being Woz.
Looks like the party will be streamed Tuesday 5pm pacific.
I am always suprised how much effort rich people put into birthdays. I remember growing up that birthdays weren't really a thing when we were poor, but as we became more middle class, we celebrated with cakes and eventually decorations came in. I once got invited to a birthday party at a special venue and thought, wow! this is grander than a wedding.
The inverse was also true, if someone did not celebrate their birthday they felt so sad, like no one cared about them and made a big deal about it. On the other side we were brought up with "well, no one cares about you other than your family, so be nice to each other and don't expect much from life, you get what you sow".
Anybody able to identify all of the different covers of "Go your own way" in that video? I feel like I can hear Dolores (of Cranberries fame) even singing a version I'd not heard before.
EDIT: Found at least that one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LL7CLRt-es