Yeah definitely agree, Taleb has warned us about such teleological explanations. As far as I remember, Woz's biography is good evidence that you don't need the

Yeah definitely agree, Taleb has warned us about such teleological explanations. As far as I remember, Woz's biography is good evidence that you don't need the idea of "boolean logic" to design circuits. That did come after the fact -- the way it's taught, not the way it was invented I think he just said he figured it all out himself essentially, and often did a lot better than the pros. Some of his claims were suspect to me, but I do think his claimed ignorance of prior work is genuine :) Shannon did come decades earlier though, so the designs of somebody who was influenced by Shannon probably influenced Woz. It's hard to tease apart, but I agree with "evolution" and "tinkering" as the main explanations. The entertaining explanations are the ones that tend to stick in our minds, but they're not necessarily true --- The other example I think of is when I look at Debian -- a lot of it is not at all what the Unix inventors had in mind. Debian/Linux basically looked at an artifact and then came up with their own divergent ideas around them Likewise Woz probably looked at a lot of computers, but he didn't have much of an idea what the creators were thinking -- just the artifacts themselves