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Comment by antimagic | Hacker News Reader

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).

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>" 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.

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