Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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> you likely would not be on this forum right now if not for him, the IBM pc only happened after early Apple validated the market.

Years before the IBM PC came out, I had a Heathkit H11 (a version of the PDP-11) and was writing and selling software for it. I'm fairly confident that the PC revolution would have happened with or without Woz. I had been working with 11's, 6502's and 6800's for years before that, and it was pretty clear that there was a revolution in the works.

The students at Caltech (75-79) I was with were all excited about microcomputers and quite a few designed and built their own systems from scratch (it wasn't very hard, the chips pretty much just plugged together). Hell even I made one around a 6800. None had an Apple II, mainly because a PDP-11 was the preferred system used to dev the software for the microcomputer boards.

Woz certainly made enormous contributions, and nobody can say what the shape of it would have been without him, but it would have happened anyway.

The H11 was released a year after the Apple I.

I had a KIM-1 at the time and the Apple was lightyears ahead of it, even though they shared the same processor.

Most other 'personal computers' were still stuck in hexadecimal keyboard territory.

I've rolled my own (6800, '09 and 6502 based boards) and learned a lot doing that but the Apple I and later the Apple II (neither of which I ever owned but an uncle of mine had an Apple II that I played a lot with) was a real computer rather than something more akin to a large embedded system, programmed with paper tape and terminal interface using current loop. The Apple stuff rocked the world of personal computing.

The difference was huge, and I'm pretty sure that the design elements present in the Apple II raised the bar considerably for the competition and had a direct effect on the PC lineage.

It would be nice to interview the designers of the original IBM PC to ask them where they got their input.

The H11 was just a repackaging of the PDP-11 which had been around for years, at steadily dropping prices. It was far, far more powerful than the Apple II.

Apple had many firsts, but it's an awful stretch to say the PC revolution wouldn't have happened without them. It's like saying we wouldn't have airliners today if the Wrights never existed.

You'd have airliners today. But likely they'd be the airliners of a decade or two ago.

The Wrights are an excellent example because they did what they did when they did it, and there were still people talking about whether powered flight was even possible. Kitty Hawk was a milestone for exactly the same reasons the Apple I was a milestone: huge improvement over the status quo, accelerating development and validating a market.

That's worth a lot in my opinion, it moves the needle with a large jump rather than a tiny increment.

There's is quite a list of inventors from around the world who independently invented powered flight at about the same time as the Wright brothers. Flight being invented in 1903 actually has more to do with the evolution of petrol motor power to weight ratios than it did discovering the principles of flight. It would have happened within 1 year of 1903 with or without the Wright bros.

And even if it had taken a decade, that almost certainly wouldn't have set us back a decade today.

It's amazing how smug we can be and how we can lose all sight of perspective.

When apple released their kit, there were already competitors in the marketplace.

What the wright brothers did was much more akin to inventing the first computer, period.

There is still controversy about whether the Wright's were first with powered flight or not. Around the same time the Wright's Flyer took off you had Langley and Santo-Dumont. Both were in weeks of getting their first.

Also, the Wright's set aviation back a little with their patents on powered flight and wing warping. Even though control surfaces were better they basically had their competitors under their thumb with other 20+ year patents.

If you take a good hard look at the engineering, the Wrights were about 5 years ahead of the others. Unique to the Wrights were:

1. The first propeller theory, yielding propellers that were twice as efficient as others. This translates into needing half the power that other rivals needed.

2. The first aviation engine. The Wrights designed and built their own engine, because nothing else available had near the power/weight they needed.

3. The first wing shape based on wind tunnel tests. The Wrights discovered that the lift/drag tables existing were wrong by a factor of two. Much more power and lifting area was needed than anyone else realized.

4. The first 3 axis control system. Other experimenters had not even realized they needed one. Years later, when the Wrights demo'd their flyer in europe, they could literally fly rings around the others. The other planes could do little more than fly straight and level, making wide, clumsy, skidding turns.

5. The Wrights had the first, so far as I know, directed research and development program. They built a series of prototypes, each designed to validate a particular principle. The other experimenters just "winged" it with whatever they thought looked good.

And, of course, the Wrights documented their flight with photographs that are undeniable, and their airplane still exists. Exact replicas of their flyer have been built, they fly, and they fly in a way matching the Wrights' descriptions. The Wrights also built followup aircraft with improvements.

All modern aircraft can trace their design elements in an unbroken line back to the Wright Flyer, and no other.

I've read many books on the early development of aircraft. The Wrights certainly invented powered, controlled flight. They were about 5 years ahead of the others. So I'd say the max effect of the Wrights never existing would be about a 5 year delay.

Was Apple ahead of the others? Sure. By a decade or two? No way. The most generous you could say would be a year.

> I'm fairly confident that the PC revolution would have happened with or without Woz.

I don't like this argument at all.

I'm fairly confident that any single invention or discovery in the history of the world would have happened with or without the person we credit it to, someone else would have done it anyway. But that doesn't change the fact that it is an achievement and doesn't give you the right to dismiss the work the person did.

> doesn't give you the right to dismiss the work the person did

What part of WalterBright's post made you think he dismisses Woz's work?

He isn't saying that he thinks he is doing that. WalterBright was heading off such criticism and micampe was disagreeing with his method of doing so but pointing out that doesn't mean he disagrees that Woz deserves credit for what he did.

I vote for the "it wasn't very hard, the chips pretty much just plugged together" part.

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