Does Steve Jobs know how to code? | Hacker News Reader

Does Steve Jobs know how to code?

woz.org

280 pointsbane226 comments

It looks like the response was written when Jobs was still around. I doubt Woz would sound so belligerent now. In any case, if you watch some of Job’s old videos and biographical material, it was clear he knew coding. There was some mainframe terminal in his high school that he first learnt how to code.

Now Woz was clearly Genius level when it came to tight hardware/software engineering. So, it is not at all surprising Jobs had limited input when it came to the Apple I and II design. In fact Jobs mentions that Woz was the first guy who knew more about electronics than he (Jobs) did. In Woz’s response, quoted here, he mentions that Jobs was technical enough to alter/change/add to the design. Does that sound like someone who doesn’t know anything?

I find it sad that engineers project their own insecurities in this whole Jobs/Woz saga. Jobs was highly involved in not just the technical aspects but the overall vision of Apple I, II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad. He was one of a kind. There is no need to pull him down and artificially elevate Woz to something he was not. Jobs could work with the best engineers/marketeers/design/retail people during Apple II and the iPad. A whole 35 year period in technology. How would you think Woz would have fared in deep technical discussions involving the iPhone? How many engineers do you know who have worked at the highest level for 35 years? Technology was only one of the aspects that Jobs understood quite well.

Page source indicates that this has been posted on 05 Jun, 2012. (Submission dates are invisible because of a CSS rule.)

I'm guessing the submission dates are hidden because they're incorrect. Here's another one[0] that says it was posted in 2011, but there's an ed mark saying that "at this time" meant "pre-2000."

Edit: It's on the wayback machine since at least August of 2000.[1]

[0]. http://www.woz.org/letters/relationship-steve-jobs

[1]. http://web.archive.org/web/20000817233800/http://www.woz.org...

I agree. I also think that Jobs probably recognized that Woz was well beyond him technically and that he would just get in the way for the most part. Nothing worse than someone "who used to code" deciding to "get their hands dirty" and just end up slowing down the whole process.

>> I also think that Jobs probably recognized that Woz was well beyond him technically and that he would just get in the way for the most part.

Absolutely. IIRC, this is at least strongly implied if not explicitly stated in Job's biography.

What exactly was so belligerent about Woz's response?

It seemed like a straight-forward, facts-only response to me.

Unfortunately, straight forward and concise, when in the web medium, can sound belligerent depending on the perspective of the reader. When I'm reading someone technical like Woz I have to consciously apply a matter of fact tone to the content to avoid thinking it comes off as rude.

can sound belligerent depending on the perspective of the reader.

Ah yes, I can see how anything that wasn't utterly worshipful of Steve Jobs would sound belligerent to an Apple fanboy.

Now you came as rude and tasteless.

Nobody asked for something "utterly worshipful", and nobody sounded like a "fanboy" in this thread, and surely not the original commenter (oh, and using such words as "fanboy"? Are you fifteen years old?).

His concern was if this was an accurate portrayal or if Wozniak was resentful and downplayed some of Jobs skills.

Nobody expected Woz to say that Jobs had Bill Joy level programming skills.

Just about everything you said was incorrect.

Please, take your special brand of crazy somewhere else.

Steve Jobs never claimed to be a programmer. He had bigger sources of pride. He was a technician at Atari. 'npalli' seems to be offended by Woz stating the facts. I wouldn't expect Woz to submit to the hero worship of Jobs that a lot of people seem to expect these days. That'd be like asking my ex-wife to sing my praises.

I like Woz better because he is a better person that Jobs. That's all. The fact that he is a more technical person is just icing on the top.

I agree. I think there is a real resentment among people who work hard to master technical details, only to have guys in positions like Jobs's more or less float over that. It's like, you didn't put in the hard work to learn endianness like I did, so you don't know shit.

The kind of knowledge and savoir-faire that Jobs had is not concrete, ineffable. Engineers tend to hate that, they think it's just a bunch of shit.

Jobs was extremely smart to brilliant. What he didn't do, and what he said he did, was design the Apple I. There was a front page article a few weks ago linking to a bunch of Jobs videos, and again and again he'd stand in a front of a bunch of people and claim to have designed the Apple I.

I guess none of us really know the score in that regard, but certainly everything in the rest of their careers backs up Steve's story.

Engineers hate lying, not soft skills.

Engineers hate lying, not soft skills.

Thank you for pointing out this very important distinction. I think it's important to realize that Jobs was human and not the most humane among us. It's easy to realize if you read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

Development of the Apple Lisa computer began in the year of Brennan's birth, just as Apple Computer, the company her father founded, began to experience significant growth. Jobs initially denied paternity, and he and Apple claimed that the name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture".[5] Steve Jobs swore in court documents that he could not be Lisa's father because he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."[2] Decades later, Jobs admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson, "Obviously, it was named for my daughter."[

The guy swore under oath and penalty of perjury that he was incapable of fathering the daughter he in fact fathered and concocted an elaborate story to explain away why he named one of Apple's computers after this girl that he claimed was not his daughter.

So I agree with you; engineers tend to deal in reality. Many people are successful because they successfully sell non-reality to people when it suits their purpose. Engineers tend to have problems with such people.

I just want to say kudos to the above responses. I think they're right on the money. In fact, I think the main reason I got into engineering in the first place is that I couldn't stand people's bullshit. In engineering, it actually matters whether what you say is true or not, because if it isn't, the thing won't work.

Get over yourself.

There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law? Surgery?

Let's leave aside for a second the enormous number of programmers who aren't actually engineers (with an engineering degree) who still use the Engineer title.

Although I agree that "There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie." But Law? Surgery? are not the examples you should choose, both had plenty of cases where lying did work.

I believe both fields have formalized codes of eithics, tho. you can be disbasrred or struck off the list of licesed practitioners for 'lying'. That being said, their is a continuum on considerations, even professionally. Physicians need to maintain a diplomatic bedside manner; counsel needs to advocate adversarially the strongest position, etc. In these examples, the notion of black and white is best not clung too strenuously. Perjury, negligence, and fruadulen billing, etc of course are at the othe end of the spectrum.

> There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law?

The field of Law is based on interpretation and persuasive authority.

Sorry, I had to chuckle when I saw you include law as one of the fields where lying "won't work." For many parties, lying in court does "work" for them if they can get away with it. Recent case in point: the DEA using NSA intercepts to launch investigations, then lie in court about how these investigations originally started. [1]

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

Litigation/trial law is but a small part of the Law profession.

Perjury is also a felony, despite the fact that your country's justice system doesn't seem to enforce it.

This ( http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html ) is part of what made me like computers:

>I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

>> Engineers hate lying, not soft skills.

I think I ought to admit that as an engineer I probably shouldn't hate soft skills, but I do (I also do hate lying, but that's not a bad thing). I dislike the fact that it's hard for me to gain some of those soft skills, and the fact that they're often necessary for complete success. I'm willing to call that jealousy, but I think we should recognize that it's natural for that to creep in, and maybe that explains some of the comments towards Jobs.

Okay, sure, I was a bit blithe in that statement, aiming for a catchy, not all-inclusive statement. Good point.

Do you have a link to the page? I've never heard that Jobs claimed to have designed the Apple I. It's a strange claim for him to have made.

Sure, here [1]. First video, at 2:30. He keeps using "we" (I don't feel like transcribing the video). Now, if you parse the wording very, very carefully you could argue that Jobs never exactly says that 'he' designed it, but he keeps using 'we' - the computer was designed for them, 'we'worked on it for 6 months, etc. It's weasel words and phrases, and I have no doubt that every person in that room walked out thinking that Jobs co-designed the Apple I, and that Jobs thought up the idea. Whereas in reality Woz went to a homebrew meeting, came up with the idea, designed it, and then showed Jobs. Jobs came up with the idea of it being a kit, marketed it, and absolutely made Apple what it was. The third video, of Woz, explains that history.

And then how about this quote: "This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head. [In March 1975], I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I." [2]

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jobs-ashton-kutcher-re...

[2] http://www.applegazette.com/steve-jobs/steve-jobs-quotes-the...

Your argument is ridiculous. One half of a two person team is certainly permitted to say "we". Sheesh.

What he clearly meant about the Apple I was envisioning the end-user version of the computer, not how the transistors were laid out. My goodness.

I don't think it is clear at all. Woz's description of their respective role is crystal clear, and Job's description is clear only if you already know Woz's description.

But, convince me, don't belittle me. What words did Jobs say in that video to convey that what he did was envision the end-user version of the computer (which I agree is what he did).

edit: I am not suggesting something unheard of, after all. Google 'jobs takes credit for others work' and relevant links fill the page. Here's the top one: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-would-annoy-jony-i...

It is easy to claim Jobs takes credit for others work but I also think its fair to say that for most people who cofound a company, whether they are technical or not, they will often use the word "we" when describing something they've worked on.

You just say we when you talk about your team or company to outsiders. It's pretty normal. You don't say our engineer bob spent months on it.

The engineering portions of output are much easier to quantify. The non-engineering portions are much more difficult to quantify but much, much more important.

I Googled it, and there were 2 or 3 results...the Ive quote, something from Woz and maybe one more. I'd be curious what the complete context is on the Ive quote.

I think a good deal of the mis-placement of responsibility has to do with some people's attachment to novel-ness vs. other's respect for piecing together something marketable.

I Googled it, and there were 2 or 3 results...the Ive quote, something from Woz and maybe one more. I'd be curious what the complete context is on the Ive quote.

I think a good deal of the mis-placement of responsibility has to do with some people's attachment to novel-ness vs. other's respect for piecing together something marketable. I appreciate invention but understand that it is useless without marketing. Not so the other way around.

There's a lot of Steve Jobs hero worship I hear of this sort. What did the poster do to deserve being called ridiculous? He laid out a very compelling case that there was serious ambiguity in Job's statements to the public.

Do you think it does any good to elevate Steve Jobs above what he actually did? Who does that ultimately benefit?

We have a whole channel full of entrepreneurs here who deserve to know the true story because they may also have co-founders who claim too much credit or they may have resentful co-founders. They all need to know that friction does not mean that their businesses will fail.

Founders are human. Like Steve Jobs.

Um, am I the only one that feels that part of my job is to make my boss look good?

I would get a new job if I were you. Not saying that you should, if that sort of stuff is your thing, but I would.

Not sure how it will help. It will be just as true in the new job.

Not unless you create the new job!

When you are your own boss, making your boss look good is even more closely aligned with your personal interests.

Some people care about doing a good job and getting paid well for it, not the "glory". And if the guy taking the spotlight shows his appreciation, staying in the shadow can be just as rewarding.

Or back on topic: I think someone like Woz would be totally miserable being in the spotlight and under constant pressure the way Jobs was.

Do you mind providing any reasoning why the person should "get a new job"? I tend to agree that a significant part of being employed is "making your leader look good". This is generally accomplished by doing good work and complementing your team, leader included.

You are not.

You absolutely are. Otherwise, what's the point in hiring you?

Um. What question is it that you think you're answering?

Here's the way in which I presume your comment was interpreted:

You are not [supposed to make your boss look good].

Not that I would've interpreted it that way, however.

Yes, sorry. He actually meant: "You are not the only one who thinks that part of your job is making your boss look good."

Kinda seems obvious now.

That's fine, as long as it's part of your bosses job is to tell customers how smart his engineers are. Making people look good is a two way street.

In my view, the good boss deflects as much praise as possible onto his team, and absorbs as much blame as possible.

To be fair, most people who act like Steve Jobs are not Steve Jobs.

There are appears to be a strong trend these days in certain circles to demonize Steve Jobs in some way or other. Simply mentioning his name either here or on reddit (and probably a few other places) is often enough to garner a large number of replies saying he wasn't a genius and was just a salesman / marketer, etc.

The fact is, he did have a proven track record of being able to distill various concepts and functions into products that people loved -- not just liked, but loved. When presented with a prototype or the beginnings of an idea, he knew what to keep, what to throw away, and what to change. He knew how to keep at it until it was truly great. So great that it could turn entire industries on their heads. So great that whole companies would spend years trying to imitate the results. He did this many times during his life, enough times so that it is pretty much impossible to say that it was merely accident; he clearly knew what he was doing.

The results are so striking and so clearly beyond that which other people working at the same time were able to produce that I think it's safe to say Steve Jobs was exhibiting a next-level talent, one of those talents that even people whom we normally think of as extremely talented find difficult to even comprehend, let alone replicate. Because of this I think it is truly fitting to use the word "genius" when describing what he could do, even if it was not the skills of an engineer. I know using that word will probably incur some of the replies I was just talking about, but that's how I see it.

When it comes down to it, Steve Jobs probably could have been a good or even great engineer if he had set his mind to it, but he had a much rarer talent around which he chose to build his career. I can't help but feel that a lot of the vitriol directed at him is because people either do not understand or on some level actively resent what made him different.

I agree with a lot of this, but Jobs made plenty of blunders as well. Computers without disk drives, keyboards without arrow keys, etc - all things that were put on the market with Jobs vehemently arguing that it was the only, and correct choice, .... and then Apple backpedaled.

Which is not intended to counter your "next-level" talent claim - I wholeheartedly agree. I guess statements like "he knew what to keep" give me pause because he did, clearly, make plenty of blunders. As Woz said [1] "Steve never created a great computer. In that period, he had failure after failure after failure. He had an incredible vision, but he didn't have the ability to execute on it. I would be surprised if the movie portrays the truth."

One can be (must be?) flawed and still a genius. Some people (not you) deny the flawed part, and that rankles me. [1]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jobs-ashton-kutcher-re...

edit: sorry, the floppy thing was NeXT, not Apple.

The mouse with one button, they finally gave in and have two now.

I don't see why you read this as belligerent, unless you think altering and changing designs is inferior to coding and original design. There were a lot of articles after Tim Cook took over that described Jobs' genius as that of a design editor, knowing what to cut and what to keep. Wozniak's comment here seems consistent with that.

I think it's worse than belligerent. It makes both of them look bad (both Steve and Woz), to show that perceived split between them. There's what you say, and then there's what you say.

It also makes engineers look bad because it only enhances the perception that we can only handle the raw technical aspects, and that we get bitter when someone passes us because of non-technical reasons. I don't know why engineers are singled out here because I've seen it happen in all other specializations. Perhaps it's in the way we generally react?

I didn't read it as belligerent. He stuck to facts only and avoided emotional vocabulary.

Totally agree. I don't understand why people are reading Woz's words are belligerent...maybe based on their own preconceived notions or experiences, but certainly not because of anything Woz said.

He simply stated the truth: "Steve didn't ever code."

It's not a judgement. He didn't say it made him inferior in any way. In fact, he praised him in the very next sentence saying "he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs".

I'm not sure any of this is a big revelation anyway...didn't we all pretty much know that Woz was the tech/programming guy and Jobs was the marketing/sales/business deal guy? They were amazingly successful together and it is doubtful that either one of them would have attained the same success if they had gone about it independently.

I disagree. I think it sounds belligerent. If he had stopped at "Steven didn't ever code" (which I'm not sure is accurate), maybe. But then he goes on to include zingers like "no original design" which is sort of a fighting phrase (and not part of the question) and "I did...all the feature choices" which we know is false, it becomes belligerent. Then Woz has to pile on even more about doing everything solely except for some tiny, trivial component. Belligerent in my book.

Agreed, this is classic Woz. He didn't take any of the offense that others seem to think he should have, nor was he heaping scorn on Jobs here. Just telling it like it is, as is his want.

Split between them? You should read how Jobs got some work with Atari, got Woz to do the work and said they'd split it 50-50. Atari paid Jobs $5000, told Woz they paid him $700. Kept the rest.

Woz himself said that the money was no big deal. If this was a big deal, he should have confronted Jobs about it in person.

Unfortunately, society at large does not really care about "fairness." People have a tendency to blame the victim, and that victim would be us.

People do not intrinsically value what we do. They value what we can do for them. To that end, it's easy to understand why they would prefer the story of Jobs to the story of Wozniak. Saying that Jobs was not a coder did not significantly hurt Jobs. Jobs may have been an asshole, but he had enough charisma to go keep going. Saying that Jobs was not a coder hurt engineers because it pigeonholes us into the technical-only side of things. Woz did the engineering and hardware design. Jobs did everything else.

Ultimately, in any such situation, it is important to keep this kind of drama under the sheets. Most people are not like Jobs. Most management would not be able to deal with the fallout of these kinds of statements.

I know a lot of engineers IRL who resent Jobs because of these things. My response to them has always been: start your own business, because the more technical entrepreneurs there are out there, the less likely that a future Jobs figure would act the way that Jobs did.

>society at large does not really care about "fairness."

[Citation needed]

Perpetuating these sorts of things spreads them.

For some reason it won't let me reply to you. Anyway, He said the _money_ was no big deal, that he would have done it for free. The outright lie/ money grab was a big deal. If he'd learned about it earlier instead of 10 years after the fact he probably wouldn't have gone into business with him.

Yeah, it's fun to make shit up that but let's not ignore the fact that while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987, he did not play any role of significance at Apple after his plane crash in 1981, and was never involved in the Mac project at all. Any importance Woz may have had to Apple effectively ended in 1981.

> while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987

I think that Woz is actually still employed at Apple even today. According to both his personal website and autobiography he still takes a paycheck (Wikipedia says around $120k a year). Like you say though, he has no involvement at Apple anymore despite the salary.

That probably makes him technically the only Apple employee who's allowed to openly critique new product releases in public!

That effectively makes Woz responsible for 50% of Apple's success so far.

Well you can count any way you like if you absolutely want to make it so. But I count Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and the App Store as pretty good successes.

>>if you absolutely want to make it so.

I'm just stating history as is.

Apple I and II were something like what search business is for Google. They were basically their bread and butter for nearly the entire early years.

And Woz had almost entirely designed and built them. The products you mention are all large team products.

Look at it anyway. If you count for the individual efforts. Woz is way ahead of any one at Apple.

I think Jobs and Bricklin were at least as important for the success of the Apple II as Wozniak. Yes, Woz worked magic on the hardware and the software, allowing for an aggressive price for the feature set, but Jobs and Bricklin made that hardware enter the office; Jobs by insisting that that the case looked friendly (http://www.landsnail.com/apple/local/design/apple2.html gives a nice overview), and Dan Bricklin by writing VisiCalc.

If Jobs and Bricklin hadn't been around, Woz' design might be a footnote in history, smaller than the Commodore Amiga.

Oh, so in your version of history, Apple had about as much success prior to 1981 as they did after? Interesting.

I saw the Woz speak just a couple of months ago and he spent probably half an hour (total, not consecutively) of the talk bashing Jobs in various ways, talking about how Jobs would take credit for his work, etc. He portrayed Jobs as a slick marketer who wasn't ashamed of making use of others' successes for his own gain.

I was on the scene in those times (I wrote Apple Writer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) and I have to agree -- I think Steve's role at Apple resulted from a combination of his narcissism, his bullying tactics and his evangelism for the person computer, in equal measure. He ended up with an insanely great career. :)

Thank you for your work. I greatly enjoyed using Apple Writer.

You're most welcome. At the time there was a rather stupid magazine article titled, "Will Success Spoil Paul Lutus?" When I saw it I laughed and said, "I hope so."

Did it? :)

I was on the scene at the time too, hired by the author of AppleWorks. The only reason AppleWorks became Microsoft Works for the Mac, a computer which desperately needed software at the time, was because the author of AppleWorks (Lissner) couldn't deal with Jobs despite being very willing. I'm not knocking Jobs, but Wozniak has every right to complain if that's what he chooses to do.

I have a personal revelation about that. Until Apple Works got under way, Apple was paying me a lot of royalty income for Apple Writer because I had negotiated a rather high percentage in the early days, before either Apple or I understood what a normal royalty rate might be. After seeing me refuse to accept a reduction in the rate, Apple got fed up and started the Apple Works project with a much more favorable arrangement with Lissner (I think he might even have been employed as a programmer). In principle that should have produced a good outcome, because Apple Works was a much more ambitious program that did a lot more than mine.

But after the Apple Works initial release, Lissner left and refused to work on the code base any more. So Apple asked me to take Apple Works over with the same arrangement Lissner had had, but by then, spoiled by the royalty arrangement and having heard too many stories about Steve's behavior, I refused.

In retrospect, I had no difficulties upgrading Apple Writer and accommodating user suggestions, because I was hundreds of miles away and I wasn't an employee. By the time Apple asked me to take over Apple Works, I understood that fully -- Lissner's circumstances were unbearable -- as a result of which there was no imaginable incentive that could have gotten me into a closer working relationship with Steve.

I remember some shouting on the phone between Lissner and Jobs but I was just a young pup at the time and didn't understand what was going on. I think all Lissner wanted was a little respect since AppleWorks was a major seller for the Apple II line, but Jobs being Jobs he probably came across like, so what, the Apple II is dead and the Mac killed it (he was right of course.) Lissner got rich anyway and lost he drive to work on the Mac version. Our small team in Santa Cruz continued to build it, then Gates came down to meet us and bought it. Works ended up being the first really useful program on the Mac, followed a little later by Excel. I remember hearing a lot of good things about Apple Writer, but of course I used AppleWorks. Those were heady times.

>>who wasn't ashamed of making use of others' successes for his own gain.

Trust me, that is nearly a mandatory skill you will need to have to succeed in a place of any significant size.

If you think you can just be successful by working hard you are living in a perennial state of delusion.

> If you think you can just be successful by working hard you are living in a perennial state of delusion.

That sentiment divides the stories of the well-known and the truly great. Einstein prevailed by working hard, not by stealing the work of others. The careers of many scientists follow the same pattern -- a conscientious attribution of credit where due, followed by an important personal breakthrough. Darwin is another notable example.

If you work independently and the outcomes of your results are judged by an impartial authority you will succeed by working hard. The best example I can come up with is are exams. In an exam if you study well and appear for the examination you will win.

Same applies to scientists. They work individually, and pretty much do work and are judged in isolation.

If you work with a group of people. Politics is a inevitable consequence due to human nature and you will see how that will effect hard working people.

> Same applies to scientists. They work individually, and pretty much do work and are judged in isolation.

I don't think this is true any more.

Historically, you had individual scientists working hard on very specific problem areas.

Even this didn't get rid of the divide between (perceived) genius and (perceived) success. Witness the classic example of Edison vs. Tesla.

However, modern scientists seem to work predominantly in groups, and are subject to the same petty intrigues and political nonsense as the rest of us.

> > Same applies to scientists. They work individually, and pretty much do work and are judged in isolation.

> I don't think this is true any more.

True, and to me unfortunate. Some recent LHC papers have more than 1000 authors, each of which actually contributed something to the outcome.

"Did Higgs yield the most authors in a science study?" : http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57509551-1/did-higgs-yie...

Quote: "Two articles by the teams are each about 30 pages long. The combined author list takes up 19 pages of single-spaced text and appears to have roughly 6,000 names. Wouldn't that be fun to cite as a footnote in full?"

> However, modern scientists seem to work predominantly in groups, and are subject to the same petty intrigues and political nonsense as the rest of us.

All true. The movie portrayal of a 19th century scientist working alone toward a basic discovery is now a popular myth.

Darwin and Einstein were a once in a generation geniuses, I'm not sure much can be extrapolated from how they worked.

>That sentiment divides the stories of the well-known and the truly great. Einstein prevailed by working hard, not by stealing the work of others.

Well, Poincaré might want to disagree. Well, it's not like he "stole the work of others", it's about gaining from their successes. And Einstein did that too, as any scientist did: he "stood on the shoulders of giants" (Maxwell, for one).

+1 for the citation.

> And Einstein did that too, as any scientist did: he "stood on the shoulders of giants" (Maxwell, for one).

Yes, certainly true, but not by stealing or failing to attribute prior work. And I agree with your suggestion that Maxwell might be a more important figure in the shaping of modern physics than most people realize.

There is actually quite a bit of historical controversy regarding Einstein's work on relativity and whether he deliberately avoided crediting the work of Poincare, Lorentz, Minkowski, and others. His initial paper on special relativity had no citations, despite the existence of a lot of relevant work by others.

After a few months Einstein wrote an 'addon' paper in which he included all citations.

> His initial paper on special relativity had no citations, despite the existence of a lot of relevant work by others.

It's important to remember that what we now understand to be special relativity, with its spacetime interpretation, was crafted by others (primarily Minkowski) after the original paper. This is important to remember when reading the original paper -- we might be suffering from perfect hindsight.

But I might have chosen a bad example, because it's true that Einstein tended not to attribute the work of others as much as he should have. Compare to Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark.

Engineers, of which I am one, tend to see the world in pure dialectics, so they often have very difficult time understanding why accomplishment is not purely evaluated by some rational universal force and recognition made manifest commensurately.

Self promotion is a skill that we all need, and do not think for a moment that people like Einstein were not well skilled in it.

As for claiming credit in higher proportion to one's contribution, that is evil in proportion to the exaggeration. However, perception being limited as it is, no one, not even the other contributors are in a good position to judge.

As for outright lies, they are, well, outright lies.

I surely hope I never have to work with you.

Such as when Jobs got Wozniak to create Breakout for him and took the entire bonus without telling Wozniak.

There's a difference between "knowing how to code" and actually doing it. I know a lot of people who know the basics HTML/CSS, but most of them don't do it for a living for whatever reason. Just because "Steve didn't code", doesn't mean "Steve couldn't code"...

Perhaps Steve's greatest contribution to Apple was being its ultimate guinea pig. He wasn't an engineer, so he wasn't bogged down by the insecurities and fears and analytical thinking that plague the engineer's mind. He could "let go", as it were, and really evaluate the products coming out of his company for what they ARE, and their usefulness, unlike an engineer who always has the potential of making really geek-oriented products that fill a specific niche and aren't very useful outside that niche.

Off-topic, but do you consider knowing just HTML/CSS being knowing how to code? If so, do you consider knowing something like LaTeX, Markdown, or reStructuredText to include knowing how to code?

Not that I'm any authority, but I generally considering "knowing how to code" to require at least being able to use some sort of branching operation as well as some some sort of looping/recursion (which yes, is really just branching).

There is a difference between "coding" and "programming". Programming is an act of producing a formal computational solution for a problem. Coding, on the other hand, means literally encoding that formal specification of computation in a way that computer will be able to execute. In that sense, yes, HTML/CSS is a coding as the end result can be executed on a computer to produce a visual representation of the page.

What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another.

I've always considering "programming" and "coding" to be synonyms, but you've pointed out an interesting distinction I've never considered. Thank you.

> What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another.

I meant this at a really low level. Recursion is just a conditional jump and a stack push. When I said branching, I was thinking of the jump instructions in assembly (which allow you to jump to any point in a program, including instructions that have already been executed).

A lot of engineers are incapable of seeing the value that someone like Steve Jobs brings in the technology industry. These might be the same people that wonder why Linux has not succeeded on the desktop.

I appreciate having bosses and sales guys around to play up the BS so I don't have to.

Which values are you talking about in this case? I'm just curious to see what is so great, in your opinion, about Jobs contribution to IT world? Since personally, being a tech enthusiast myself, there has never been so far anything produced by Apple that I couldn't live without.

Personal computing, WIMP interface, WYSIWYG fonts, object oriented operating systems, multitouch interface, digital music distribution.

Jobs invented none of them, but they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse) today without his contributions.

> they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse)

Do you really think we would be swimming in a sea of technological shit if Apple didn't come up with its own technological innovations ?

I don't think so... Of course look and feel would be slightly different... but that would also have happened in case one "Orange" company had existed too.

Probably the main differences would be 1) less instagram pics 2) podcasts not called podcast but audio files 3) you got me...

Everyone thinks everything we have now is obvious. It's not.

Take fonts. The Macintosh came out in 1984. It took over a decade for WYSIWG and fonts to catch on. By 1995, Wordperfect for DOS was still massively popular.

We think the desktop metaphor with on-screen typesetting just "makes sense" today. Why shouldn't we just be typing on a virtual piece of paper, working directly with fonts of the desired type and size?

But that is an entirely new metaphor. Writing and publishing never worked that way. You'd write a draft on paper or a typewriter, then give it to some layout guy who would work with the typesetter to get the press set up.

The early text-mode-only word processors extended this metaphor is a natural way - you became the layout guy and the typesetter using markup inside your draft, and the software and printer would work to get you the output you wanted. This was a big deal, and to many, was the way it was going to work forever.

The iPhone is "obvious", and that's how all phones work now, but there was nothing like it in 2007 and there were plenty of skeptics that predicted failure because of its lack of a stylus and physical keyboard.

If we could be shown the world without Steve Jobs, it wouldn't surprise me at all today if we all had to drive over to our local IBM "Computing Center" where we could pay to send people "Electronic Mails", and we'd all think we were living in a futuristic wonder world.

Whenever anyone says this, I wish I could draw.

I have this cartoon in my head in which one caveman is stood at a stall selling round wheels, surrounded by eager punters desperate to buy them for their stone age carts, whilst a bunch of other cavemen stand around with square wheels that no-one wants to buy complaining that they invented the wheel first and that they can't see why the round wheel is so much of an improvement.

Except for the fact that round wheel vs squared is totally out of the world comparison being it something related to core functionality of an object and not something which concerns look and feel or interfaces (mouse, multitouch) or aesthetics which is what Apple mostly innovated in. So your draw, could at maximum be same two cavemans both with round wheels except second wheel is chromated, has more comfortable lock/screws system and... costs double price. Also if first caveman wheel's customers are power-cavemans (haha) they'd could invest same money on two wheels... So your draw had to be a nice refined solid wheel vs. white space where a bike stood before going riding. Which in real world terms is a 'project realized' -> multitrack song/indie game/3D animation/cpu intensive ERP made, sold and cashed.

Ok, now is time for those flashy details.... I'd like one of those trendy expensive flashy wheels ... I'm sure it will fit in perfectly in my new large white-walled sexy cave...

That's a pretty shallow analysis of Apple's products.

Well, go on, add something more then.

It looks like the response was written when Jobs was still around. I doubt Woz would sound so belligerent now.

It sounded pretty matter of fact, and not belligerent at all.

Are you implying that you know better than Woz would on the topic?

>I find it sad that engineers project their own insecurities in this whole Jobs/Woz saga.

You seem to be the one projecting here, if you're seeing this terse recitation of facts as belligerent. I am happy you posted, though, because you inadvertently caused this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296217

> How would you think Woz would have fared in deep technical discussions involving the iPhone?

I think he would fare quite well, even if he hasn't done any coding or engineering since leaving Apple in 1987.

He has done coding and engineering since leaving Apple. You might want to do a little research like read his biography or scan his web site....

You misinterpreted my statement. I meant to emphasize "even if," my point being that even the level of technical knowledge and experience he had in 1987 should easily qualify him to have intelligent technical conversations about the iPhone.

Kind of OT, but a little sad thing I noticed in the "Jobs" movie trailer (at least the version they are showing in Brazil) is that while the images are clearly showing Woz showing what he did (Apple I) and then he and Jobs working together all the time, the text was saying "It only takes one person... ...to start a revolution".

WTF?! One person? I am not even making any moral judgement here, I am just shocked of how schizophrenic it is. People don't even bother about coherence any more? And them the movie goes on to show another people joining, two more engineers, a investor. It was just weird...

It's part of the mythos--nevermind the engineers that actually built anything.

This is probably just a side effect of the legacy that led to this film being made in the first place... the mythology surrounding Jobs.

That's just sad, and something that inspires an all too common megalomania among wanna-be CEOs who think that, if they have the same ego as Steve Jobs, that their vision and passion shall too drive a revolution.

Woz was the critical factor to Apple's early success, and the momentum the Apple ][ bequeathed gave Jobs the significant runway to make real his vision.

And vice versa, being a stellar engineer alone won't necessarily lead you to success...Woz readily admits at he'd still be at HP, making calculators, if it weren't for Jobs (though Woz would be content either way because, well, he's the Woz)

This is the most balanced comment on this thread I've read so far. Woz and Jobs were the Yin and Yang of Apple's success. Comparing the two misses the bigger picture. I don't really get the reason for the argument: I never hear people arguing about Ben and Jerry, Gates and Allen, or Hewlett and Packard. The only reason I can think of is that for some people Jobs has ascended to heaven where he reigns as a god with no equal.

Well, the quote is about just starting the revolution, not finishing it. If it helps, consider this - Jobs could probably have found another brilliant engineer to fill the role of Wozniak in the startup of Apple. I don't think Wozniak could have found another Jobs (or would even have tried - after all it was Jobs that found Wozniak, and not the other way round).

>" If it helps, consider this - Jobs could probably have found another brilliant engineer to fill the role of Wozniak in the startup of Apple"

I disagree, if he would never met Wozniak, Jobs wouldn't have any product at all (hence he wouldn't have an engineering role to fill at all). As for Wosniak, he would eventually find an executive guy inside HP with the guts to produce it (Woz mildly tried that when he was forced to go full time to Apple)

To put you in context, Apple I was the first personal computer that resembles the ones that we have today, before that there was just the Altair which was a kit to build a computer unit with switches as input and leds as output)

Even if Woz had found support to build a microcomputer within HP, it almost inevitably would have been watered down or corrupted as some sort of 'design by committee' took over. Sacrifices made to meet budgetary or time constraints, etc. The purity of his vision would have been lost, and the Apple I wouldn't have been an Apple I.

The purity of his vision would have been lost, and the Apple I wouldn't have been an Apple I.

Maybe it would have been better?

Better for whom? HP was an organization designed to make money in a certain way at the time, from certain kinds of customers, and most likely the Apple I's design would have been influenced by that business model (to its detriment, revolution-wise).

Apple I was hardly designed by Steve Jobs.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I : "They were designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak"

And From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II : "designed primarily by Steve Wozniak"

Steve Jobs isn't even in the picture here. Yes he might have sold them.

But that makes him a good salesman, not the one who started "The revolution".

Utterly false, and a dangerous belief held by many business-oriented types who think that engineers are a dime a dozen, and their ideas are what really matter.

In this case, no Woz = no Apple.

Uh huh. OK, firstly, I'm an engineer, not a "business-oriented type". Secondly, how many times do we read accounts of successful Y-Combinator founders saying that their biggest error was trying to code solutions at the start of their companies instead of getting an MVP out there? Even PG has said so about Viaweb. The harsh reality for engineers is that engineering isn't as important as we like to think it is when it comes to building the Next Big Thing. Bringing it back to Jobs and Wozniak, Jobs didn't need a brilliant engineer for the Apple I, merely a highly competent one, which makes Woz much easier to replace in the story than Jobs, who really was a one-of-a-kind business leader.

Actually it was one person who "started" the revolution, but at least one more person (with money and business skills) was needed to make that product accessible to the masses.

By the way, Jobs was not any of those two people. The real revolutionary guy was Wozniak and the business man who turned the Apple I into the Apple II (with money and business skills was Mike Markkula)

I would highly recommend you to read Accidental Empires and iWoz if you are curious about those stories.

I have to say, Isaacson's book definitely did a good job of highlighting the importance of Mike Markkula in Apple's story.

It's amazing how 'right' Markkula was, at least in the bits cited by Isaacson.

After reading Isaacson's book, I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs.

It felt he continually found some one whom he could exploit to keep his career going.

I am sorry you sort of missed the forest for the trees. I think the book is quite a bit nuanced with respect to Steve Jobs and I came away from it with an entirely different feeling.

I did get the forest though.

I understand Jobs had a exceptional understanding of one thing- 'Aesthetics'. This one thing is what separates him from rest of the pack. I don't know if it was because of his Buddhist faith- but he did understand beauty and simplicity in a unique winning combination. This explains why nearly everything he touched turned to gold. Because you are now delivering very beautiful products which are also at the same very simple to use.

But that is besides the point. They are repeated instances on how he was anti-loyalty. The whole book had stories how he screwed his friends regularly.

But the point you see here is totally ridiculous. Steve Jobs did by no means start 'The revolution'. Revolution is what I call TCP/IP, Internet, Unix and things like that.

I look at Job's awesome products as Toys. I've seen brilliant toys out there. They are awesome in their own right.

But this hero worship, and things like 'one man revolution' is going a bit too far.

I agree with some of your latter comments but disagree on some of the former. I genuinely hope you give Jobs credit far more than merely his aesthetic sense. He was a skilled negotiator, marketer, and many other day to day details that we are unfamiliar with and to take away only just that one thing and credit that as the reason things turned to gold is a bit much.

Pretty interesting to note that even the "business guy" did some coding for Apple II.

Wikipedia: "In addition to providing "adult supervision" to the younger Jobs and Wozniak, as a trained engineer Markkula also possessed technical skills. He wrote several early Apple II programs, served as a beta tester for Apple hardware and software, and Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy disk drive system after Markkula found that a checkbook-balancing program he had written loaded too slowly from a data cassette."

I know it sounds bad, but some "penalty" (adding a rating system for lies?) should exist for plain lies and fake revisionism in films. The extreme of this in another context are the laws against Holocaust denial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial we can't obviously compare the Steve Jobs film with it, but the cinema has a long tradition of modifying historical facts without the typical disclaimer.

a recent example of this taken to extremes would be the film "Mermaid: the body found" - pretending to be a documentary claiming evidence of the existence of mermaids, until the credits roll and reveal that the whole film and most of the evidence was a fiction. Granted the subject matter is unlikely, but the deception comes off as very unethical.

Well... it is fiction "inspired" by real facts. The point is that people should be aware but that is not the case for the most part.

Offtopic. That link is incredibly scary. On what basis does Europe justify making an incorrect opinion illegal? And why that opinion, specifically? Why not criminalize a belief in God, or alien visitation?

Because that incorrect belief tries to erase and cover up the murder of millions of people. I'm not sure if that's right, but that is the motivation.

At a specific time and place in 1945 this law makes a ton of sense, and it's actually done a lot of good. Compare german - european relations with japanese - chinese/korean/filipino relations.

Maybe it should have a sunset provision for the sake of free speech, although I don't think you'll find many MPs signing up to sponsor that bill.

It's not as simple as that: think about libel laws: if I say that you've stolen something, or that you've killed something and I actively try to ruin your reputation, then my 'opinion' of you is actually very damaging.

The same goes for holocaust denial, those who deny the death of millions of people risk repeating history, thus making their 'opinion' dangerous for society at large.

But you're not harming a living human being. At worst, you're minimizing a memory, which is a fundamantally emotional position.

As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.

It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax. Very very few people are going to become customers. Except it's much worse, because you are criminalizing ideas.

I doubt you’d be allowed to sell stuff made from toe jam and ear wax for human consumption in most of Europe. Or, even if you were allowed to sell that stuff, you’d need a proper certificate, health and sanitary checks and ensure that your product is indeed safe.

Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.

You can't believe a country like Germany with one of the strongest cultural and scientific traditions could have accept genocide of such magnitude.

Coming from the UK and having looked into the history of some of my country's behaviour during the height of empire, I have no problem believing that in the slightest. Peccavi.

> But you're not harming a living human being.

Are you not? It would seem to pretty clearly defame everyone who have made claims to have witnessed holocaust and been in concentration camps. And in fact, holocaust denial is often explicitly framed in a way where defamation is a substantial part of the intent. So yes, you are harming living human beings even if we ignore the

> As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.

The rise of the nazis happened in a situation where it was competing in a marketplace of ideas where a substantial majority of the population o the countries involved had first hand experience with the effects of World War I, and despite that the nazi's still succeeded in getting enough support in elections to be able to form an elected government.

The nazi rise to power was a horrific demonstration of just how easy it is to ignore history even when the knowledge is widespread. I'm not even decided on whether or not these bans are necessary, but not out of any kind of fantasy belief that these kind of ideas can't gain support again.

There's more than enough surveys demonstrating scary numbers of people doubt facts that are disputed by far less dedicated crackpots than holocaust denials to the extent that it is hardly a defensible position to claim that current education systems are sufficient to prevent obviously wrong ideas from gaining substantial support.

> It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax.

And that is, indeed, likely illegal pretty much everywhere and certainly in Europe. If your product does not prominently state that it is toe jam and ear wax, and in any way present it as hot dogs, you'd go down for misleading advertising and likely for fraud. And regardless of that, chances are high you'd be on the hook for health and safety violations. So that's not a very good example.

It takes a very twisted mentality to put the Nazis forward as an example of the dangers of a free and democratic society that respects freedom of expression.

Not a single country allows unlimited freedom of expression. Every single one, including the US, has substantial limitations based at least on situations where that speech harms others (e.g. slander/libel/defamation/incitement laws).

In that respect laws specifically targetting a very specific set of lies, that also happen to be defamation of a large group of people (and so potentially actionable based on other laws in many cases anyway, including in many cases in countries without laws against Holocaust denial) is one of the most targeted, limited such restrictions around.

Holocaust denial is in the same vein of "defamation" as claiming that the Bush family are secret reptilians from outer space or that the moon landing didn't happen--there's no risk of confusing a reasonable person with these claims, nor do they especially fall under the banner of normal defamation.

The entire lesson of the Nazis is that awful things can happen when the State appoints itself as the unquestionable arbiter of truth and refuses to allow open discussion about its own dogma. Freedom of expression simply does not exist when governments have the power to rule facts into law by fiat and render them illegal to question or dispute.

I think it's because social perception of history is volatile and some experiences came at so much cost that they ought to be remembered correctly.

It's not about an "incorrect opinion" though, it's about active proliferation of the lie.

A substantial part of the justification is that allowing the resurgence of support for nazism is seen as posing a direct risk of genocide and war, and a such a substantial threat to the rights of others.

This was further shaped by the experience that the nazi rise to power was propelled by widespread popular support both in Germany and elsewhere, despite the millions that died in World War I just a couple of decades earlier.

In comparison, the limited harm done to people who have their speech restricted is seen as a relatively minor tradeoff.

It's not an opinion. For example, the world is flat, not an opinion.

The funny part is that its a specific opinion, also.

Questioning the existence of the Holodomor, for example, even though it conservatively resulted in the deaths of 7 million people in one single year, more than the whole "6 million jews in 6 years" thing, is not illegal.

In fact most people in Europe are blissfully unaware of the Holodomor at all. Or of Stalin's and Mao's murdered millions.

Strange, yes?

What is your point? Do you think that the Armenian genocide, together with other genocides should be added to the undeniable things or do you think that the Holocaust denial laws must be "deprecated"?

I wish for no thought crimes at all.

The laws vary, but in many of these countries, such as the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland and Switzerland, denying those acts would also be illegal and they are far from blissfully unaware of the impact of Stalin and Mao.

edit - if you are going to post on the subject of the legal positions on political denial of events, then it helps to do some research to check that you are not actually talking bollocks yourself.

I've looked it up real quick but I can't see the Holodomor being illegal to deny in any other country other than the Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Holodo...

Or are you talking about something else?

Ironically you need to look under laws against Holocaust Denial to find anything useful about it on Wikipedia as far as I can tell, as that page includes references to laws that more generally disallows denial of genocides and crimes against humanity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

France and Germany, for example, has laws that while containing bits and pieces that are specific to nazism, also targets genocide and crimes against humanity in general.

Switzerland and Portugal are examples of countries with laws that don't explicitly mention Holocaust denial but where many forms of Holocaust denial is covered by laws placing restrictions on denial of genocide in general.

I was wrong about France actually. It appears that the wording in the French law is narrower than it first appears.

It is a bit confusing as it looks wider until you consider the condition "such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945". That tribunal explicitly was only able to rule on acts carried out by Axis countries, so this law only applies to those acts specifically.

Look up the laws of the countries that I referenced. They have laws that either outlaw denying any genocide, or laws outlawing the denial of the nazi and communist genocides and mass atrocities.

Also, "I've looked it up real quick but I can't see" is hardly the way to approach this if you think you have even the slightest point.

Not strange at all, the problem is that you had an entire generation ripping through Paris' streets throwing bricks at the police while holding mao's book in their hands when in china people were dying by the millions due to the pogroms better known as the "cultural revolution", one of the biggest success stories in marketing considering mao was able to repackage state-sanctioned genocide with a cool name less than 10 years after the abysmal failure of the "great leap forward" which also claimed the lives of million of chinese.

For those people acknowledging the holodomor and giving it the same status of the holocaust or even that of the armenian genocide means admitting they spent most of their youth defending mass murderers.

Umm, the holomodor was under Stalin in the early thirties, everyone alive then is dead now. edit - well, everyone who was old enough to be involved in the politics, anyway.

Also, it is illegal in France to deny the communist mass atrocities, just as it is illegal to deny the nazi ones.

What are you talking about?

Ask trotsky how easy it was to be a communist in the thirties and not defend stalin.

And got a link to that? because all I could find was a petition from eastern european countries to the UE asking for penalties on deniers of the crimes of communism.

Actually, I am wrong about France.

It has a law from 1990 which criminalises denying those crimes against humanity covered by the Nuremberg Charter, however that only dealt with trying the Axis powers, so doesn't cover the USSR.

There is then the law that got brought in in 2012 that makes it a crime to deny any genocide recognised as such as by the state. However that law got struck down by a court, and also they might count what happened in the USSR as a mass atrocity rather than a genocide, so it might not have covered it.

Lies and revisionism in entertainment media is what creates folk stories and folk heroes. It's where a big source of our culture comes from. Folk stories aren't hurting anyone. Take Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer for example. I'm fairly certain Abe didn't kill a single vampire. Or John Henry, the steel driving man. Maybe he did beat a steam drill and die with a hammer in his hands, but he probably didn't. Talk to all the blues singers who tell tales about Stagger Lee killing Billy Lyons. I'm sure they really care about the facts and would love to know that Lee wasn't actually 10ft tall and and that he didn't actually meet the devil himself.

Even dating back to Odysseus, did he actually meet the sirens and the cyclops and see his men turned into pigs? Probably not, but it's a damn good story. You'd have to prove malicious intent before anyone could entertain the idea of folk stories causing damage to anyone.

If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod.

They were one of a range of companies starting to mass produce "proper" home computers with keyboards and support for proper displays around the same time, and consistently in the third place in sales numbers of the three (Apple, Tandy, Commodore) that launched their computers on the West Coast Computer Faire in '77If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod.

EDIT: Of course the Apple I was out before that show, but it was produced in miniscule quantities - about 200 -, and just a board, and competed with a number of other small production runs of other home computers including ones that were out well before the Apple I, like the Altair; the Apple I had some firsts that made it significant, such as being the first pre-assembled board to come with support for proper displays (but display hardware had become available for other machines like the Altair as well). But pretty much every new computer from well before the Apple I and to well after it had some significant first.

IIRC out of the big 3, the Apple ][ was first on the market available to consumers; the other two were thrown together after the Apple got shopped to Tandy and Commodore. (I'm not completely sure of this memory.) It was clearly a much better computer than the other two; I doubt the PET and TRS-80 would have succeeded for long if Apple weren't already fond of high margins.

The Apple II started shipping in volume a couple of months earlier, but they were all introduced to the US market at the same time (in fact the PET had been demonstrated publicly earlier - in January 1977 at the Hannover Fair).

A timeline claiming Commodore talked to Apple first, doesn't work. Chuck Peddle, who ended up doing the PET, was at MOS Technologies when he started planning it, and had presented it to the board at MOS. When their board rejected the idea, he was considering leaving for another job when Commodore acquired MOS and got him to stay by entering into an agreement with him to build the Pet after Peddle presented his Pet idea to Commodore.

Then, after assembling a team at Commodore to build a computer, he approached Apple (whom he knew because they were of course one of the early customers of MOS, and Peddle designed the 6502) with the intent of considering an acquisition of the company as a quick way of getting a prototype done.

There are disputes about who did what to whom in terms of rejecting the deal. What is clear is that Commodore did see it as one option of serveral to get a prototype out the door quickly, but at the same time they had already assembled their own design team before talking to Apple, as well as talked Microsoft into doing a BASIC for them (despite Gates apparently demonstrating deep disdain for the 6502 CPU). The reason for talking to Apple in the first place was explicitly that Commodore would be using the 6502 which it now owned, and so it was natural to talk to them to short circuit the development cycle.

So both Commodore (and Tandy, who started even later) are quite good demonstrations at the pace the industry was taking with or without Apple: Commodore went from nothing to a working machine in 5 months, and to mass production in about 10 months. Tandy went from nothing to presenting a machine at the West Coast Computer Faire in three months.

In terms of margins, I don't think Apple had high margins at the time. Their production volumes were tiny, and contrary to e.g. Commodore, they lacked vertical integration - Commodore stayed on the verge of collapse for years despite owning the company (MOS) that manufactured both the CPU, graphics chip, keyboards and many other critical parts of the Pet and shipping far higher volumes than Apple could dream of.

Thanks for offering what you know. I'm mainly recalling from Wozniak's book iWoz when it came out around 2007; I don't have a copy handy. On the quality of the computers, I have firsthand knowledge from 1981.

Added to clarify: the claims I'm taking are that the ][ was the first PC someone could buy and use out of the box, dating from when that happened rather than the conference it was announced at, according to Woz; it was considerably better than the competitors for the first few years, if you could afford it; and they did not much cut prices as they ramped up production (that they might've had low margins in 1977 would be consistent with what I read). Woz's book had some stories about shopping it around before deciding to sell it themselves, and its influence on competitors, that I admit to being fuzzy about. And of course personal computers would have happened without them -- I never implied otherwise.

Would it have been easier for Woz to find a different Jobs or Jobs to find a different Woz?

Issacson's biography doesn't indicate that Jobs ever wrote code, but at the very least we can say that he was one of the few non-coders who didn't treat it as a fungible commodity given that he literally threw a crying tantrum to get Woz to co-found Apple.

Also this: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...

> "In my perspective ... science and computer science is a liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation and these computation devices."

I wonder if Woz's response is only in context of Apple. IIRC Steve Jobs did actually code when he worked at Atari.

Edit: Steve Jobs believed that everyone should learn how to program, I don't think that statement would make any sense if he didn't know how to program himself (even if it's just the basics): http://vimeo.com/64572687

...if by code, you mean stole and rebranded Woz's designs, you're correct:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29

This is covered in iWoz--Woz didn't take it super personally, but it was kind of tacky, and Jobs never mentioned the bonus in his payment discussion for a 50/50 split.

He was hired by Atari int 1973 way before he was assigned to do the Breakout game which was in 1975. I wonder what was his actual job at first. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Career

Apparently minor design work and modding other peoples' circuits:

http://web.archive.org/web/20110612071502/http://www.woz.org...

Google image search for atari breakout.

"Coding" in that context is not as relevant

The low-level programming needed for the Apple I is very different from "general programming". It made sense for Woz to do the hardware and the software.

In fact I doubt most "coders" of today could do something simple for an Apple I, even given modern resources (like a ASM compiler).

Woz was one of a kind.

A Mad genius, to paraphrase Ang ( from Avatar the last Airbender )

There is no parallel to him and i don't believe there is anyone who can do both original hardware design and low and high level coding like woz.

I think there are many people who could, but the skills are no longer as remarkable or required in today's world.

Your point is so correct though -- he was a genius, and such diversity of skill should be respected and significantly more valued in the field today.

Wasn't it a slightly less specialized world back then too? The software and hardware were tightly enough linked that you needed someone who could do both. I think Woz is a case of a mad genius being born in the time that suited him.

Nowadays a generalist is someone who can do both the front and back end of a website, let alone assembler or hardware. (That's why I find Jeff Atwood's keyboard work interesting, independent of the caliber http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/08/the-code-keyboard.h...)

"Wasn't it a slightly less specialized world back then too?"

Yes. Byte had Steve Ciarcia's articles, which were one of the main features of the magazine. We used to modify and build hardware, not just to overclock it, but piggyback memory chips or talk to bench equipment in the lab.

By the time I got out of high school, military and university I had: Built a pirated Apple II+, etched circuit boards, worked with 20 different operating systems, built radios, modems, remotes, door openers, set up a BBS, repaired TVs and stereos for beer money, modified a radar system and so on...

>" It made sense for Woz to do the hardware and the software."

Well yeah, for the Apple I. But that Basic had limitations, it didn't actually supported float point types and that's why they had to license Microsoft Basic later on.

For a one man effort, that Basic interpreter was very good

But yeah, at that point I believe Microsoft had more experience with Basic interpreters as well as a code base.

MS Basic on MSX for example was very good.

According to Wikipedia, Breakout was created in discrete logic. Not exactly high-level.

I'm talking about Apple, not Breakout

Since when is programing with logic gates easy. Doing it on paper without any kind of visual design tool and simulator is very hard.

"In fact I doubt most "coders" of today could do something simple for an Apple I, even given modern resources (like a ASM compiler)."

It's not a fair comparison.

Coders today don't have to drop to assembly or solder or wire-wrap or burn EPROMS. But it is something that many engineers and hobbyist did back in the day. (Myself included...)(And most commuters today don't have to harness horses up to go to work...)

But given time, I bet Woz or a few of us could teach someone interesting enough assembly to do something useful.

Well, this story doesn't make much sense if he knew how to code at Apple. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Calculator_Constr...

Sorry but your comment doesn't make much sense.

I have been programming for 15+ years. It doesn't mean that I instantly know every application framework in existence. Especially the (looking back at it now) the pretty complex way the original Mac OS apps were written.

I think sp332's point is that if you have 15+ years programming and you can't get a guy to produce you what you exactly want, then you would eventually do a prototype by yourself to show them how to do it.

I was thinking, since the drawing functionality was mostly right, Jobs could have tweaked the background color or shadow size manually instead of telling Espinosa to move things around a pixel at a time and waiting for another iteration.

I am honestly bewildered by your thought process here.

If I am getting someone to build me an Android app and I don't know how to do it. Then I am not going to learn Java, SDK, tool chain, build process and buy a device just to show them how to do it. I am going to send them an email and tell them to change it and go back and forth until I am happy.

I don't think you got my point about the story. The pregrammer made an UI utility in few hours so Jobs could design the calculator the way he wanted. A prototype can be done in whatever you already know, so there is no need to learn anything outside your current skill set.

If you aren't able to produce that then probably your programming skills are not higher enough and hence you could say that you can't code (not that is a bad thing anyway)

This is absolutely ridiculous logic. He was doing far more important things at the time than prototyping a calculator, even if he could. These were likely 10 minute flash meetings where he gave direction. This was about time, and time alone.

> "He was doing far more important things"

Apparently for Jobs this was very important to him (he was very picky about details anyway), and if you sum all of his time wasted on each interaction I can see how they are equivalent, he just changed a few UI things anyway.

I get a very different message from that story. The Calculator Construction Kit struck me, the first time I read this, as the ur-program for HyperCard and (especially) Quartz Composer.

I think Steve took one look at it and said "yep, this is how you design a user interface". NeXT and Apple kept coming back to this idea.

How much technical experience did Jobs actually have? Did he actually have a part in designing all the successful products or was he just a manager and marketer?

I don't mean to diss Jobs or imply that he wasn't important, but I don't clearly understand what his role was in Apple's success.

> but I don't clearly understand what his role was in Apple's success.

His role was basically convincing woz to:

a) start AAPL as a company

b) quit his job an HP

c) sell the Apple 1 instead of giving it away.

Needless to say he was pretty important:)

Honestly it's just ignorance on your part.

If you watch some of the presentations Jobs gave e.g. during his NeXt days it's pretty clear that he absolutely understands every bit of the technology as good as any engineering manager. The ability to combine technical knowledge with exceptional design, marketing and product development skills is what made him vital to Apple's success.

Important distinction: understanding the technology != coding. I think alot of folks who worship Jobs here believe saying he couldn't code is some sort of ultimate insult. It's not; he understood his products. I've met many programmers who have no clue about the product they're building, and some who barely grok the tech outside of their area of responsibility.

"just a manager and marketer?"

You realize that late 70s and early 80s were full of 100s companies trying to do the same exact thing as Apple right? Just like there were 100s of competitors to Facebook, Dropbox, Reddit and anything you can think of.

Building a successful business is much much harder than building a product - I'm sorry, but speaking as someone who codes, there is no shortage of good technical people really, there is a shortage of people that can build multi-billion dollar businesses from nothing.

Or a excess of randomness and survivorship bias.

In the 'Lost Interview' of 1995, Steve Jobs says that he was programming at the HP Palo Alto lab, on the 9100 in BASIC and ATL.

He would "hang around that machine and write programs for it"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m8m...

Woz's response exactly conforms to Jobs' account on the topic in his biography, "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson. Woz's response is not all belligerent, as somebody here implied.

I don't have time to read all the comments. But from the first several ones I read it seems that folks, for a change, missed Woz's response. Woz didn't say that Steve couldn't or didn't know how to code, but that "Steve didn't ever code." Very different answers!

I mean, even a monkey can be tough how to code at least at some level. Now, the level at which Woz was coding was not your standard Ruby scripting mombo jumbo, and hence it's a world apart from what some folks consider coding, which is implicit in what he's saying.

Also by Woz saying that "(Steve) wasn't an engineer," he was clearly stating the fact that Steve at that point in time was more about the business, the direction of things and the big picture rather than the nitty gritty stuff for which he had Woz to do it for him/them.

All in all, lets be honest, Steve forte was never ever his technical prowess. I'm sure some business majors here, who get away with getting other folks do to stuff for them, truly believe they are very technical as well, even though they don't know shit!

Steve definitely had a good eye at what could and couldn't sell, particularly at the end of his career. Now, what Steve was really good about was in getting very good technical folks in house and getting away in pushing them to the limit of exploitation, because after all it was Steve Jobs. Hence, he was great at causing confusion and manipulation, which is why he was so good at marketing.

If Woz wouldn't have been around, Apple simply wouldn't have existed with Steve alone. Now, Steve was definitely a hustler and probably would have started another type of business, but we simply wouldn't know about it.

It is quite an irony. If an engineer were to come across a "Jobs" like character, he/she would ignore him/her for the most part. This makes it harder for a "Jobs" like character to make a breakthrough to big stages. To me, he was a brilliant Product Manager. I have seen really good Product Managers who could not write a "select *" query. They have a sense of technology like no others in the sense that they can apply technological solutions to real life problems and envision product futures. They don't care as much about the intrinsic details.

Every time I see a post on HN stating "Here are the things I look for in a Product Manager", I begin envisioning Jobs trying to take on such tests and it is quite funny.

Q: Does Steve Jobs know how to code? A: Steve Jobs never wrote code

Woz doesn't say Jobs didn't know to code. He merely says that he didn't code at Apple.

I listen to a lot of entrepreneurial podcasts, mostly focused on bootstrapping, with an emphasis on SaaS products. On these shows, the entrepreneur is king. They often emphasize outsourcing to VAs, which makes sense. However, I see some of them with an attitude that technical skills are of this same value: something you just buy when you need it, as cheap as possible. Yesterday I think it was the Smart Passive Income podcast I was listening to where they (Pat had a guest) encouraged going to vWorker (yes, I know it's been acquired) if you need a developer to implement something.

Part of me was angry; the other part of me realized the truth of what they were saying. On one hand, some companies require their technology to be a competitive advantage. At a company like Apple, this isn't the case. The tech in their products is actually pretty good, but that's not what sells the products. Yes, they'll mention processor speeds etc at WWDC to thunderous applause, but then you'll never hear those things mentioned in the marketing. Apple has always been about vision, beauty, and simplicity. During Jobs's hiatus, they went down the multiple configurations and flexibility route; Jobs revamped their line and simplified it when he returned. The tech facilitates, doesn't lead.

Did he write code in NeXTSTEP? I guess that wouldn't be a question for Woz.

Not trying to minimize anything he did with NeXT, but I would be shocked if he did the coding for it..... he was already wealthy, and was an executive trying to launch a premium product.

I'm sure he had a vision for it, but it wouldn't make sense for him to have been bogged down at that level.

There was a demo he did of NeXTSTEP where he coded some stuff (can't provide a link - work blocks streaming video). It's certainly possible that he memorized it, but he didn't have any hesitations so I think he had more than a casual familiarity with it.

There are degrees of knowing how to code. Did Jobs know enough to write a simple program? Probably. Was it ever his job to write programs? Did he ever contribute code at Apple? Probably not.

Oh look another engineer whining because he didn't have the vision or business chops to create something great on his own. Woz was an idiot who would have given Apple's original technology away and NOTHING would have come from it as a result. If you enjoy Apple's products at all you should thank Steve. Woz was replaceable as Apple's history has shown; they have grown immensely without his involvement.

There is also matter of perspective here. Woz is that hardware/software genius and hence what he means by "knowing to code" is really different than the person who asked the question. Woz seems to have interpreted it as "knowing some programming language to the extent of making some significant contribution".

Can someone explain to me why I should care whether Steve Jobs could code or not? Is there some lesson to learn here?

Could you explain us why you read the article if you already knew you wouldn't care ?

Does it really matter whether he knew to code or not ? Job's area of brilliance was complimenting to Woz's technical competence and they both managed to stay "generally" out of each others way yet focused on the same goal.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

Woz is a badass.

Thought experiment: which was more likely, Jobs being successful without Woz or Woz being successful without Jobs?

I put my net worth on Jobs.

What's Steve Wozniak's email?

It's all logic and imagination.

Silly title. It should be "Did".

No, it's the title of the original post.

"Does", as opposed to "Did"?

Cue jokes about dead code, bit-rot, etc.

Apple founder guy who specialized in bullshit is dead. Apple founder guy who specialized in real work is alive. Insert witty Kurt Vonnegut quote here.

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