Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer (Video) | Hacker News Reader

Steve Wozniak: How I Invented the Personal Computer (Video)

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40 pointsctingom15 comments

If you have enough time, you might want to read Steve Wozniak's interview from Founders At Work. It's very long and detailed!

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

even if you dont have enough time, his book 'Iwoz' is a must read ! :-)

I didn't enjoy his book. Woz is someone who did something great, made a lot of money, and then stopped.

To each his own I suppose, it's just really disappointed to read about someone who was, in all regards, brilliant and probably a genius. And then... For him to simply stop after a few years. Very sad.

One thing that particularly bothered me was why he went back to try and make a calculator after the personal computer?

"why he went back to try and make a calculator after the personal computer?"

Maybe his goal is not to create an industry, but to have (and give people) a lot of fun. Apparently, he has a different concept of success than most people.

Nice video, the Founders at Work story goes into much more detail, IMO, it's one of the best "chapters" in that book!

The passion that flows through this man's veins every time he speaks is amazing. Just listening to him makes me want to turn toothpicks into treasure.

Anyone have a link to this video that doesn't require Flash to be installed to download it?

It's hard to understand why the personal computer wasn't invented by a large company.

That is explained nicely in The Innovator's Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology. The personal computer wasn't powerful enough to compete against the computers made by large companies and didn't have a big enough (profitable enough) market to interest large companies. Big companies asked their existing customers what they wanted and they all said "bigger, faster computers." None of them wanted smaller, less capable computers.

Woz built the personal computer to scratch his own itch, but it created a new market, a market the big companies didn't have a clue existed (even Woz was surprised).

Big companies are entirely rational in this... they are maximizing their profits and listening to their customers. What they miss is new customers, niche markets that grow into major markets, resegmented markets...

It was more or less invented by Xerox, but they never brought it to market. Why not? Xerox was a multi-billion-dollar company and didn't want to "waste time" on a product that at the time had a very small potential market.

That's how Alan Kay sums up the history, anyways. There's a much more complete account in Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer: http://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Comp...

It's actually very unusual for a big company to do anything technically innovative. Most innovation happens in startups; if we are successful big companies may offer to buy us.

Apple and Google are the elephant-sized exceptions here (but still they make a lot of acquisitions).

PS: Steve Wozniak was one of my favourite chapters in Founders at Work.

The late Apple is more about masterful execution than innovation proper. OSX is Unix (and a rehash of NeXT's OS), the Macs are x86 PCs (and even run Windows), neither iPods nor iPhones were the first in their categories. They merely were the first to be done right.

IIRC, the last time I saw Apple really breaking new ground was with the Newton. Before that, with the Lisa. The Mac was merely a cheaper, less functional, Lisa.

It was a Lisa, masterfully executed though...

I'd be suprised if it came from a large company (not counting the founder). It'd be like a large company writing a novel.

Even innovation at a 'large company', typically it is from the hands of a few innovators. The best tools, products and inventions are always by small numbers of people and many times a single person with a drive.

It basically was. HP had what we'd recognize as 80s-era 16-bit micro as early as 1972-1973. It just never occurred to them to knock an order of magnitude off the price tag and add a speaker.

It took someone of Woz's stature to put a lot of very obvious things together and make it accessible at a price the masses could handle.

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