Wozniak remembers Steve Jobs
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Edit: I should explain more of my perspective here. Woz doesn't get remotely as much recognition as he deserves for Apple's success. Jobs was the executive, his leadership style, "force of taste" and personality were able to scale to Apple as it exists today. But by itself that would have gotten him zilch in 1976. Apple exists at all because One Guy was able to put together a single box at a production price point that wouldn't be matched for 7 years. The Apple II video hardware and especially the disk controller (both implemented with just a handful of off-the-shelf logic chips, no ASICs involved) were works of true, absolute, genius. Circuit design like that probably won't ever happen again.
It's pointless to try to determine who was more important to Apple's initial success anyway. It's like trying to figure out whether the calves or the thighs contribute more to a vertical jump. Try keeping your legs perfectly straight at the knees and jumping with just the feet: You'll only get a couple inches off the floor. Now try keeping the ankle locked and jump off the heels with your thighs: You'll get a little higher. But if you take a full natural jump with your upper and lower leg, you'll jump far higher than the addition of both before. The point is, sometimes synergies just can't be broken down into obvious component forces.
To be sure, i am a bit of a woz fanboy, having lived through the 80's and poring over his work.
Though i don't begrudge Jobs the fame and fortune, i do think a lot of people overlook woz. To me, he is probably the single most influential pioneer in the history of personal computing.
Apple then and now was able to make these "insanely great" products by attracting the absolutely best engineers. Yes, Jobs without [a] Woz is not successful. But Woz without [a] Jobs is equally so. And while brilliance in either slippery is rare, I don't doubt it's still easier to find someone with Woz's kind of talent than Jobs'.
Finally, even supposing that both skill sets are equally rare--who's going to be better at attracting new talent? One of the nice things about being able to persuade people to buy stuff is that the skill translates nicely to persuading people to share your vision and work for you.
I continue to find it amazing the degree to which the reality distortion field still holds.
Just because Steve wasn't technically proficient doesn't mean that he didn't have any good input into the design and features of the machines that Woz was building. I'm sure Steve said a lot of things, about the software especially, that helped determine the direction of the product they were building.
Eventually, sure, real software shipped for the Apple II. But in the early days it was all out of house (c.f. Applesoft). It wasn't until the days of ProDOS that Apple got serious about writing its own software, and by then Woz had left and Jobs was working on the Mac.
Really, download an emulator and try this thing. Then download the Red Book from bitsavers.org or wherever and read it. It's a hacker's paradise. It's very much not a precursor to the Mac, or the iPhone.
And it's all Woz. He's one of the greatest hackers ever to live, and yet people like you, trapped in the reality distortion field, have managed to needlessly forget him and/or write him out of the history books. And that makes me sad.
Of course there is an user experience element on an Apple II. You just have to put the II in the context of the microcomputers if its time. It came in a plastic box, you could hook up your TV and you could display color and make music and sound effects in the speaker. You turned it on and you got a BASIC language interpreter instantly. You could connect a cassette recorder (an 8-track would do) and save your programs.
Compare that with the average computer of 1977:
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/year.asp?st=1&y=1977
and you'll see the "user experience" of an Apple II was miles ahead what most of the competition could offer (monochrome text on a screen, fan noise, metal cases, serial terminals, no BASIC...) at much higher prices.
People often compare the II to other 8-bit micros like the Atari 400/800 and the VIC family, but forget they were launched 2 and 3 years after the II respectively.
My point earlier was that attributing this to Jobs purely because of an intuition that "Jobs does UX" is incorrect, and speaks more broadly to my point that Woz has been terribly shafted by history.
I mean, when a site called "Hacker News" no less can't speak unanimously to this man's genius, something is terribly wrong.
While I agree the II is not a Jobs-only product, I can't imagine Jobs sitting quietly letting Woz make all the decisions. I can't picture Jobs sitting quietly at all.
Jobs wanted it to be as cheap as possible. Jobs planned to sell two expansion cards, so the Apple II only only needed two expansion slots. Woz refused to hobble the machine when he could easily make it have seven expansion slots.
The Apple II had seven, and within a year there was a flourishing third party market providing all sorts of expansion options.
The Apple II was the last product where Woz had any serious amount of input and (if you had any interest in technology) it was Apple's peak.
A fight for user experience. Woz is the ultimate hacker advocate and he understood the II was a hacker's computer. Jobs was the ultimate common-person advocate. The Mac was the ultimate common-person computer.
And yes, the Jobs/Wozniak equilibrium is my favorite period for Apple. The II is still my favorite computer.
Based on this, there may be some truth in the idea that he lacked some UX finesse.
What you refer to as "user experience" was not at all uncommon. The TRS-80, the Sinclair, and many other computers shipped in plastic boxes. I don't recall the Apple natively supporting a hookup to a TV (the TRS-80 did not), but this was certainly not a positive at the time... TVs were far more difficult to read and work on than monitors.
Both the TRS-80 and the Apple shipped with BASIC and connected to a cassette recorder.
There were dozens of other computers, but there were just a few that were commonly used.
In 77, there were more or less two computers that didn't look too much like office equipment: the II and the TRS-80 model 1. You mention the IIe and the Sinclair. The ZX-80 wasn't launched until 3 years after the original II. The IIe was introduced in 1983 (that is, after the III). The TRS-80 you remember is, most likely, the model III.
I was working on a TRS-80 Model I in the late 70s, I want to say 1977 but maybe it was '78. I remember it vividly, even down to the massive 4kb memory expansion (which weighed around 10lbs and threw off massive amounts of heat).
Later on we got a Model III. It didn't have nearly as much character as the I. I didn't like the monolithic looks of it much but it was admittedly a much cleaner machine with the built-in disk drives (the Model I eventually supported 5 1/4" floppies but they were humongous standalone units.)
What fun!
Indeed. I really miss those days...
I thought the first computer that Woz made had a mouse and GUI though ("borrowed" from Xerox PARC), am I remembering wrong? The Lisa was started in 1978 way before Woz left.
The first computer Woz made was the Apple II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II, which had no mouse or GUI, but could do graphics, which were mostly used by games. I suppose many programs for it used a TUI, a la VisiCalc.
If only to relive a bit of history.
> What would Steve have said about the software?
I have often wished that Woz continued to design products with Apple long after he left. What if he had been there with Steve all this time?
If Woz invented the personal computer for the masses (Apple I, II, and building the Macintosh before Steve Jobs joined the team), what other unknown potential hasn't happened yet?
The other interesting thing is where Steve Jobs was seen as aloof and business minded, Steve Wozniak more than made up for it with heart.
A healthy, hearty and brainy balance if I may say.
He left an indelible impression on all of us that day that is still resonating months later. Made all of us want to go build something!
But yes, it's quite terrible.
We rarely take a minute to make a stranger into a person, and Woz shows how friendship remains above all else. All we have is the memories we make and create together.
Anyone have a link to the unedited video? I'm kind of curious what they cut out.
Is there something more to this story?
[1] search for $700 on Jobs' wikipedia page
Me, I'd be pissed b/c people like Jobs always seems to think engineers are just sitting around waiting to get punked. I hate that someone has to be like Jobs to do so well. But, I also recognize he was successful and had a great vision, I won't begrudge him that.
Why can't goodness and success go together more often, without good people just looking like patsies?
Wozniak would never have become a millionaire without a salesman like Jobs.
The greatest hacker will never overcome economics.