4 ms·

Knowing what I know about Steve Jobs, I have to wonder whether the whole thing was a bait to get you (and everyone else he mentioned it to) into proving the con

Knowing what I know about Steve Jobs, I have to wonder whether the whole thing was a bait to get you (and everyone else he mentioned it to) into proving the concept before they signed a contract. What do you think? You reckon he was baiting you or it was an honest mistake?

StavrosK 5y ago
I got "Wozniak" more than "Jobs" from it, given the technical nature of the job.
- npongratz 5y ago
  Assuming we're talking about the first Steve, it definitely sounded like Reality Distortion Field Steve, given this quote (with my emphasis): >• The Steve who told me I would never be able to write a 6502 disassembler ... (He was neither a programmer nor a hardware engineer.)
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    Oh oops, missed that, you're right.
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Indeed you are correct. In fact, when I was writing my comment I just said "(He was not a programmer.)" and then decided to add "nor a hardware engineer" to disambiguate. I didn't want to put in the second Steve's last name (hoping not to burn too many bridges), and I liked the parallelism of just mentioning each one by first name.
Stratoscope 5y ago
That is a really interesting speculation, and of course we will never know the answer. I do think it was ignorance about programming, combined with Steve's infamous arrogance. I'd programmed in machine language on a few different architectures by that time, and not just assembly but binary machine code too. To me the 6502 just looked like another instruction set. But as you might guess, I have sometimes wondered "what if" I'd pushed back more. Would I have ended up a billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire? Or would Steve have driven me to the brink of despair, as he did with a few other people? (One dear friend of mine once said in an interview, "You may find that some people who worked with Steve won't want to talk about their experience.") Or perhaps worse for the world in the long run, could my involvement have led to Apple Computer's downfall? The dirty little secret is that I didn't have a 6502 chip to test my code on, but I was working at Tymshare [1] at that time, I had a Teletype [2] machine at home, and Tymshare had a 6502 emulator that I used to test my code. Oops! What if they had gotten wind of this and sued me and/or this little Apple Computer company? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33
- MillenialMan 5y ago
  This is a great little story. Got a chuckle out of it, thanks for sharing.

StavrosK 5y ago

I got "Wozniak" more than "Jobs" from it, given the technical nature of the job.

npongratz 5y ago
Assuming we're talking about the first Steve, it definitely sounded like Reality Distortion Field Steve, given this quote (with my emphasis): >• The Steve who told me I would never be able to write a 6502 disassembler ... (He was neither a programmer nor a hardware engineer.)
- StavrosK 5y ago
  Oh oops, missed that, you're right.
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Indeed you are correct. In fact, when I was writing my comment I just said "(He was not a programmer.)" and then decided to add "nor a hardware engineer" to disambiguate. I didn't want to put in the second Steve's last name (hoping not to burn too many bridges), and I liked the parallelism of just mentioning each one by first name.

Stratoscope 5y ago

That is a really interesting speculation, and of course we will never know the answer. I do think it was ignorance about programming, combined with Steve's infamous arrogance. I'd programmed in machine language on a few different architectures by that time, and not just assembly but binary machine code too. To me the 6502 just looked like another instruction set. But as you might guess, I have sometimes wondered "what if" I'd pushed back more. Would I have ended up a billionaire or at least a multi-millionaire? Or would Steve have driven me to the brink of despair, as he did with a few other people? (One dear friend of mine once said in an interview, "You may find that some people who worked with Steve won't want to talk about their experience.") Or perhaps worse for the world in the long run, could my involvement have led to Apple Computer's downfall? The dirty little secret is that I didn't have a 6502 chip to test my code on, but I was working at Tymshare [1] at that time, I had a Teletype [2] machine at home, and Tymshare had a 6502 emulator that I used to test my code. Oops! What if they had gotten wind of this and sued me and/or this little Apple Computer company? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33

MillenialMan 5y ago
This is a great little story. Got a chuckle out of it, thanks for sharing.