8 ms·

There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him

326 points by coloneltcb 9mo ago

bigstrat2003 8mo ago
Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.
- ares623 8mo ago
  Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.
  - Aloha 8mo ago
    If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs. Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer. The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
    - nekooooo 8mo ago
      true. woz made a $900 universal remote in 1987. it could control 256 devices via IR and was programmable via PC at a time when you probably had 1 device in your house (with 7 channels.) Maybe 2 if you had a tape player. He clearly made it for himself and his sick component system.
    - keiferski 8mo ago
      I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
      - fragmede 8mo ago
        Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
        fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way. Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there. The longer that structure can be maintained, the better. Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well. So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that. Through the roof can be hard to avoid then. Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
        al_borland 8mo ago
        Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby. Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story. Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
        fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        I fully agree, Jobs was like the ideal founder. And so was Woz. What actually hapened couldn't have happened any other way. >It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby. If so it could only continue for so long before a lesser entrepreneur took the position that Jobs undertook. And Apple might only be about half the size it is now. Is that so bad?
    - p00dles 8mo ago
      They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference. The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc. To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
      - microtherion 8mo ago
        The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.
        fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
        microtherion 8mo ago
        You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor. Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
        snek_case 8mo ago
        Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit). The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
    - BirAdam 8mo ago
      This. When Woz created the Apple I and Apple II, the entire microcomputer market consisted of hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Had Woz been acting alone, the Apple I and Apple II would have made a splash at Homebrew, but they wouldn't have been products. Jobs made them products. After VisiCalc, this market expanded to finance professionals, but it was still a tiny market. It was really Raskin and Jobs who proved the viability of the Xerox PARC (and SRI before them) advancements around the GUI that propelled computing to a more general audience. Then, MS caught up, dominated the market in the 1990s, and Apple came back only when Jobs returned and began pushing industrial design and OS X. From the point until quite recently, most companies R&D could have just been attending Apple product launches and imitating as best they could (that's hyperbolic, but not entirely incorrect).
    - Findecanor 8mo ago
      I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.
    - rainbowcash 8mo ago
      > The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people. Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.
  - tehnub 8mo ago
    I worship both thank you very much.
  - bko 8mo ago
    Worshiping Woz is cool, but like the article says, there's only one Woz. And chances are you're nothing like Woz or Jobs. But Ballmer? That's someone I can look to emulate. https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf4c9803d74c#.xfttmyket https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf...
    - varjag 8mo ago
      There were/are countless engineers which are very like Woz. Just that engineers are worse positioned to reap the rewards of commercial success so you rarely hear of them.
      - ares623 8mo ago
        People who worship Jobs helped make sure of that
  - ericmcer 8mo ago
    You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.
- postalcoder 8mo ago
  I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.
  - omnimus 8mo ago
    Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
    - SkyMarshal 8mo ago
      To be fair, Woz wasn't just a “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”, he was also the co-founder of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And YC is, in their own words: "The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.". They're not entirely unrelated.
      - al_borland 8mo ago
        He was a cofounder because of his skill and Jobs talking him into it. Woz would have been perfectly happy as an engineer at HP, that was his plan.
        leoc 8mo ago
        He wasn't entirely unworldly though. He didn't like BASIC as a language, but he gave the Apple I and II a BASIC capable of running the programs from Ahl's BASIC Computer Games because that's what the market was demanding.
    - postalcoder 8mo ago
      Woz is a primary figure in one of YC’s essential texts. He has always been revered here as a founder and as a human. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788 https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
- appplication 8mo ago
  I was behind Woz in Heathrow security a few years back. I was taken aback he’d just be in the regular airport security line given he’s probably worth 1B+. I asked him if he was who I thought he was (he was wearing a face mask, but it was printed with a picture of his own face on it so I wasn’t sure). He said yes and asked if I wanted to take a selfie. Very humble dude.
  - rsanek 8mo ago
    I think his net worth is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-his-10m-net-worth https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-h...
    - dhosek 8mo ago
      Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.
      - snek_case 8mo ago
        3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.
        dhosek 8mo ago
        I wasn’t talking about a withdrawal rate, this is a rate of return and just living on the interest.
- mghackerlady 8mo ago
  To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way
  - checker659 8mo ago
    Care to explain?
    - volkercraig 8mo ago
      Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
      - NetMageSCW 8mo ago
        > outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership. Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.
        f1shy 8mo ago
        That said the previous post. >> remained in the domain of universities and industry > I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost. Was the source available, and possible to modify it?
        mghackerlady 8mo ago
        Sure it was free (as in beer) but was it free (as in speech?) Could you modify and improve the compiler? If you did, could you redistribute it? Knowing bell labs, the answer is a definite no to the last one
- pavlov 8mo ago
  Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
  - rainbowcash 8mo ago
    Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new
doanbactam 8mo ago
It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.
- nekooooo 8mo ago
  modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.
  - aix1 8mo ago
    What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
    - pixl97 8mo ago
      >without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect. People were copying code from SO since it became popular. People are including node modules blindly before AI. Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers. Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.
      - aix1 8mo ago
        First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method. Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(
rajayonin 8mo ago
Only one Woz? What about Scott?
- knorker 8mo ago
  The fact that you have to be more specific than "Scott" says a lot.
  - testfrequency 8mo ago
    That’s more likely just you. Anyone who knows Apple knows who “Scott” is referring to. Scott Forstall.
    - LukeShu 8mo ago
      Heh, I assumed he was referring to "Scott the Woz" Scott Wozniak, a vintage-gaming youtuber. I assumed that the GP took a more literal attack on "only one 'Woz'", hile you took a more symbolic "only one engineer of such quality". In the context of Apple, sure "Scott" is Scott Forstall, but that's not necessarily the context.
      - testfrequency 8mo ago
        I could be wrong then if that was their reference. I was in the mindset of foundational Apple leaders, not other Woz’s outside the Apple hemisphere. EDIT: reading this again, now thinking you are right and they are just being snarky about the “one Woz in the world” existing.
      - iwisjwudjqjdw 8mo ago
        [dead]
    - vasco 8mo ago
      That's crazy because I assumed they were obviously talking about Apple's first CEO. For "Scott Apple" search string, Google agrees with me and the forstall guy is just a secondary mention.
maximgeorge 8mo ago
[dead]
qingcharles 8mo ago
Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420
q2dg 8mo ago
For me, anyone who is involved in FOSDEM in any way deserves more respect (regarding revolutionary things we can learn)
- direwolf20 8mo ago
  You can just go to FOSDEM, it's open entry. If you're in Brussels this weekend.
OhMeadhbh 8mo ago
I learned some very bad jokes from him.
OhMeadhbh 8mo ago
It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract. So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.
- Tor3 8mo ago
  Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do". It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other. With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
ndr42 8mo ago
Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk (found on the blog of Cabel Sasser: https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/ https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/)
ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
> his post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power. Sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter. His best and most influential work came after he left The Oval Office.
- bazoom42 8mo ago
  Maybe best, but suerly not most influential.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
    I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards. I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.
Joel_Mckay 8mo ago
I find it amusing people still port in WozMon for modern 6502 trainer hobby machines. =3
andrewstuart 8mo ago
People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough. Woz invented the consumer personal computer. That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.
- BirAdam 8mo ago
  Well, that's a highly contested claim. There was quite a bit of prior art.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- iwisjwudjqjdw 8mo ago
  [dead]
- alnwlsn 8mo ago
  Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.” seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.
  - NetMageSCW 8mo ago
    As far as I know, Don never had a computer and the Mark-8 used LEDs.
- mrexcess 8mo ago
  >Woz invented the consumer personal computer. Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
Peroni 8mo ago
I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics. Devastatingly he fell ill just before his trip and had to withdraw. Fortunately we hadn't announced anything however I still mourn over the missed opportunity to be able to introduce this living legend to our audience!
- simonh 8mo ago
  I didn't know there is a HN meetup in LDN. How do I join up?
  - Peroni 8mo ago
    Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.
    - davnicwil 8mo ago
      how did you go about organising this in terms of getting the word out? Did you just mention it a lot here, or via some other platforms too/instead?
      - Peroni 8mo ago
        We'd announce it on here and on twitter but we managed it on meetup.com so if you were a part of the HN London meetup group, you got emailed every time the next event got announced.
- randycupertino 8mo ago
  I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him. My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
mocmoc 8mo ago
Woz is the man
yodsanklai 8mo ago
he's also not afraid to speak out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
m-s-y 8mo ago
That “but” needs to be an “and”.
tofuahdude 8mo ago
My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story: One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents. The phones all stop working. So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!". He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms. My dad let him do his thing.
ece 8mo ago
I saw him at a meetup in the south bay years ago. Definitely kind spoken and generous in answering questions. It was a highlight for me after moving to the bay area.
gtoubassi 8mo ago
Hackers by Steven Levy is an incredible story of the industry’s early years (60-80’s) and the characters that were in it for the “love of the game” vs what is more common now (“status and money”). A lot of heroes like woz, but who are less well known in this day and age (Gosper and Greenblatt!). If you are familiar with and a fan of Dealers of Lightning or Dream Machine, check out Hackers! (this is not a paid endorsement).
DataSpace 8mo ago
I’ll share one of the few encounters I had with the Woz: At age eight, I attended Steve’s 40th birthday party. My father was his insurance agent. Steve had transformed his house in Almaden Valley into a playhouse. The attic spanning the entire footprint of the house was carpeted and filled with arcade games, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, snacks, and any fun a kid could imagine. You entered and exited via ladders built throughout the house, in various rooms. In one room, “The Ball-oon Room,” the floor was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons. Steve had a dinosaur cave constructed in his backyard that integrated into his pool and a pond. Glass viewing ports peered into the depths of the pond. A television embedded into the wall playing archaeology shows on loop, fossils in the walls. Why? To learn. To play. To inspire. That’s who he is. There were many extravagances at Steve’s 40th, like a stadium-quality stage erected on the hillside that could seat a few hundred. The most memorable thing for me was the party gift: burgundy sunglasses with built-in flashing LEDs. As a little boy, that blew my mind and inspired me for a lifetime. Videos exist.

326 points by coloneltcb 9mo ago

bigstrat2003 8mo ago

Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.

ares623 8mo ago
Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.
- Aloha 8mo ago
  If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs. Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer. The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
  - nekooooo 8mo ago
    true. woz made a $900 universal remote in 1987. it could control 256 devices via IR and was programmable via PC at a time when you probably had 1 device in your house (with 7 channels.) Maybe 2 if you had a tape player. He clearly made it for himself and his sick component system.
  - keiferski 8mo ago
    I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
    - fragmede 8mo ago
      Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
      - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way. Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there. The longer that structure can be maintained, the better. Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well. So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that. Through the roof can be hard to avoid then. Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
        al_borland 8mo ago
        Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby. Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story. Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
        fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        I fully agree, Jobs was like the ideal founder. And so was Woz. What actually hapened couldn't have happened any other way. >It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby. If so it could only continue for so long before a lesser entrepreneur took the position that Jobs undertook. And Apple might only be about half the size it is now. Is that so bad?
  - p00dles 8mo ago
    They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference. The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc. To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.
    - microtherion 8mo ago
      The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.
      - fuzzfactor 8mo ago
        You could say that about the iPod or the iPhone which Woz wasn't involved in, but when you do the math, there's only one Woz and he was essential to define the company in the 20th century, and look how many people it took to "replace" him when it came to Jobs "alone" defining the company in the 21st century.
        microtherion 8mo ago
        You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor. Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.
        snek_case 8mo ago
        Another thing that people fail to remember is that Woz designed the Apple II, which is what made Apple a highly profitable company for many years, but instead of embracing that success, Jobs repeatedly tried to kill and replace the Apple II with the Lisa, then the Macintosh, and drove Apple into financial trouble. Apple would have done better, at that time, by simply building more advanced and backwards compatible followups to the Apple II, which is what consumers actually wanted (the original Macintosh was an expensive piece of shit). The Apple II had 7 expansion slots and was easy to open and service yourself. It was a machine designed for hackers, and it was highly flexible. Jobs kept trying to push his all-in-one closed design when it made no sense. He did unfortunately succeed eventually. What Jobs did after his return was to turn Apple into a "luxury brand", where iPhones are perceived a bit like Prada handbags. One thing I will give Apple is that there is still no PC equivalent to Apple laptops. That can probably only really happen if mainstream PC manufacturers fully embrace Linux.
  - BirAdam 8mo ago
    This. When Woz created the Apple I and Apple II, the entire microcomputer market consisted of hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Had Woz been acting alone, the Apple I and Apple II would have made a splash at Homebrew, but they wouldn't have been products. Jobs made them products. After VisiCalc, this market expanded to finance professionals, but it was still a tiny market. It was really Raskin and Jobs who proved the viability of the Xerox PARC (and SRI before them) advancements around the GUI that propelled computing to a more general audience. Then, MS caught up, dominated the market in the 1990s, and Apple came back only when Jobs returned and began pushing industrial design and OS X. From the point until quite recently, most companies R&D could have just been attending Apple product launches and imitating as best they could (that's hyperbolic, but not entirely incorrect).
  - Findecanor 8mo ago
    I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.
  - rainbowcash 8mo ago
    > The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people. Woz was perfect for those in the home brew club and Steve (basically vagabond) had a different perspective on users. It was the perfect combo in hindsight.
- tehnub 8mo ago
  I worship both thank you very much.
- bko 8mo ago
  Worshiping Woz is cool, but like the article says, there's only one Woz. And chances are you're nothing like Woz or Jobs. But Ballmer? That's someone I can look to emulate. https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf4c9803d74c#.xfttmyket https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf...
  - varjag 8mo ago
    There were/are countless engineers which are very like Woz. Just that engineers are worse positioned to reap the rewards of commercial success so you rarely hear of them.
    - ares623 8mo ago
      People who worship Jobs helped make sure of that
- ericmcer 8mo ago
  You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.
postalcoder 8mo ago
I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.
- omnimus 8mo ago
  Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
  - SkyMarshal 8mo ago
    To be fair, Woz wasn't just a “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”, he was also the co-founder of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And YC is, in their own words: "The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.". They're not entirely unrelated.
    - al_borland 8mo ago
      He was a cofounder because of his skill and Jobs talking him into it. Woz would have been perfectly happy as an engineer at HP, that was his plan.
      - leoc 8mo ago
        He wasn't entirely unworldly though. He didn't like BASIC as a language, but he gave the Apple I and II a BASIC capable of running the programs from Ahl's BASIC Computer Games because that's what the market was demanding.
  - postalcoder 8mo ago
    Woz is a primary figure in one of YC’s essential texts. He has always been revered here as a founder and as a human. https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/1430210788 https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...
appplication 8mo ago
I was behind Woz in Heathrow security a few years back. I was taken aback he’d just be in the regular airport security line given he’s probably worth 1B+. I asked him if he was who I thought he was (he was wearing a face mask, but it was printed with a picture of his own face on it so I wasn’t sure). He said yes and asked if I wanted to take a selfie. Very humble dude.
- rsanek 8mo ago
  I think his net worth is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-his-10m-net-worth https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-h...
  - dhosek 8mo ago
    Even 7 zeros is pretty much you can do what you want anytime you want. Ten million dollars sitting in a bank account earning 3% is 25k a month and nobody with those kinds of assets is leaving them in a bank account earning 3%.
    - snek_case 8mo ago
      3% is considered a "safe withdrawal rate" for stock investments, not so much if you have the money just sitting in a bank account, but you're right nevertheless. You can do whatever you want with that kind of money.
      - dhosek 8mo ago
        I wasn’t talking about a withdrawal rate, this is a rate of return and just living on the interest.
mghackerlady 8mo ago
To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way
- checker659 8mo ago
  Care to explain?
  - volkercraig 8mo ago
    Without the gnu projects, software would have remained in the domain of universities and industry. Distributing it for free and encapsulating it with an actual legal license was radical in and of itself, but the notion of being required to distribute source was even more radical. Without that, people don't learn to code outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership.
    - NetMageSCW 8mo ago
      > outside of industry, people don't share ideas and software remains in corporate silos with no/low interoptability unless a business decides to form a strategic partnership. Computer science and computing was taught and done at universities long before Stallman and GNU came along. I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost.
      - f1shy 8mo ago
        That said the previous post. >> remained in the domain of universities and industry > I was using C++ Release E at college before GNU started, provided by Bell Labs at no cost. Was the source available, and possible to modify it?
      - mghackerlady 8mo ago
        Sure it was free (as in beer) but was it free (as in speech?) Could you modify and improve the compiler? If you did, could you redistribute it? Knowing bell labs, the answer is a definite no to the last one
pavlov 8mo ago
Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
- rainbowcash 8mo ago
  Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new

doanbactam 8mo ago

It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.

nekooooo 8mo ago
modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.
- aix1 8mo ago
  What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
  - pixl97 8mo ago
    >without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break. You are living in a past, but one much farther back than you expect. People were copying code from SO since it became popular. People are including node modules blindly before AI. Most developers suck, terribly. Maybe being on HN is a type of filter that shows you're just a little bit better than the average, but the number of developers on HN is small versus the total number of developers. Edit: I was copying code out of magazines to get games running without understanding anything about it when I was young.
    - aix1 8mo ago
      First of all, that's a very different sort of thing compared to blindly taking reams of code from an LLM. The amounts of code in a given SO answer or a magazine article are tiny and the code has undergone review of one sort or another. Similarly, if I take QR decomposition code from Numerical Recipes, that's quite likely to be better quality than what I -- or most folks -- can code up in a comparable amount of time. It's also an opportunity to learn by studying the code and the method. Secondly, I am not talking about some abstract SWEs in a vacuum. This is happening to real people I work with, whom I know to be very capable. The lure of switching off the brain and just clicking "Accept" to some LLM suggestion seems too strong to resist. :(

rajayonin 8mo ago

Only one Woz? What about Scott?

knorker 8mo ago
The fact that you have to be more specific than "Scott" says a lot.
- testfrequency 8mo ago
  That’s more likely just you. Anyone who knows Apple knows who “Scott” is referring to. Scott Forstall.
  - LukeShu 8mo ago
    Heh, I assumed he was referring to "Scott the Woz" Scott Wozniak, a vintage-gaming youtuber. I assumed that the GP took a more literal attack on "only one 'Woz'", hile you took a more symbolic "only one engineer of such quality". In the context of Apple, sure "Scott" is Scott Forstall, but that's not necessarily the context.
    - testfrequency 8mo ago
      I could be wrong then if that was their reference. I was in the mindset of foundational Apple leaders, not other Woz’s outside the Apple hemisphere. EDIT: reading this again, now thinking you are right and they are just being snarky about the “one Woz in the world” existing.
    - iwisjwudjqjdw 8mo ago
      [dead]
  - vasco 8mo ago
    That's crazy because I assumed they were obviously talking about Apple's first CEO. For "Scott Apple" search string, Google agrees with me and the forstall guy is just a secondary mention.

maximgeorge 8mo ago

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qingcharles 8mo ago

Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420

q2dg 8mo ago

For me, anyone who is involved in FOSDEM in any way deserves more respect (regarding revolutionary things we can learn)

direwolf20 8mo ago
You can just go to FOSDEM, it's open entry. If you're in Brussels this weekend.

OhMeadhbh 8mo ago

I learned some very bad jokes from him.

OhMeadhbh 8mo ago

It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract. So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.

Tor3 8mo ago
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do". It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
- pixl97 8mo ago
  At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other. With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.

ndr42 8mo ago

Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk (found on the blog of Cabel Sasser: https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/ https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/)

ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago

> his post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power. Sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter. His best and most influential work came after he left The Oval Office.

bazoom42 8mo ago
Maybe best, but suerly not most influential.
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo ago
  I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards. I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.

Joel_Mckay 8mo ago

I find it amusing people still port in WozMon for modern 6502 trainer hobby machines. =3

andrewstuart 8mo ago

People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough. Woz invented the consumer personal computer. That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.

BirAdam 8mo ago
Well, that's a highly contested claim. There was quite a bit of prior art.
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iwisjwudjqjdw 8mo ago
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alnwlsn 8mo ago
Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote “It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.” seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.
- NetMageSCW 8mo ago
  As far as I know, Don never had a computer and the Mark-8 used LEDs.
mrexcess 8mo ago
>Woz invented the consumer personal computer. Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.

Peroni 8mo ago

I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics. Devastatingly he fell ill just before his trip and had to withdraw. Fortunately we hadn't announced anything however I still mourn over the missed opportunity to be able to introduce this living legend to our audience!

simonh 8mo ago
I didn't know there is a HN meetup in LDN. How do I join up?
- Peroni 8mo ago
  Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.
  - davnicwil 8mo ago
    how did you go about organising this in terms of getting the word out? Did you just mention it a lot here, or via some other platforms too/instead?
    - Peroni 8mo ago
      We'd announce it on here and on twitter but we managed it on meetup.com so if you were a part of the HN London meetup group, you got emailed every time the next event got announced.
randycupertino 8mo ago
I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him. My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!

mocmoc 8mo ago

Woz is the man

yodsanklai 8mo ago

he's also not afraid to speak out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM

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m-s-y 8mo ago

That “but” needs to be an “and”.

tofuahdude 8mo ago

My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story: One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents. The phones all stop working. So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!". He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms. My dad let him do his thing.

ece 8mo ago

I saw him at a meetup in the south bay years ago. Definitely kind spoken and generous in answering questions. It was a highlight for me after moving to the bay area.

gtoubassi 8mo ago

Hackers by Steven Levy is an incredible story of the industry’s early years (60-80’s) and the characters that were in it for the “love of the game” vs what is more common now (“status and money”). A lot of heroes like woz, but who are less well known in this day and age (Gosper and Greenblatt!). If you are familiar with and a fan of Dealers of Lightning or Dream Machine, check out Hackers! (this is not a paid endorsement).

DataSpace 8mo ago

I’ll share one of the few encounters I had with the Woz: At age eight, I attended Steve’s 40th birthday party. My father was his insurance agent. Steve had transformed his house in Almaden Valley into a playhouse. The attic spanning the entire footprint of the house was carpeted and filled with arcade games, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, snacks, and any fun a kid could imagine. You entered and exited via ladders built throughout the house, in various rooms. In one room, “The Ball-oon Room,” the floor was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons. Steve had a dinosaur cave constructed in his backyard that integrated into his pool and a pond. Glass viewing ports peered into the depths of the pond. A television embedded into the wall playing archaeology shows on loop, fossils in the walls. Why? To learn. To play. To inspire. That’s who he is. There were many extravagances at Steve’s 40th, like a stadium-quality stage erected on the hillside that could seat a few hundred. The most memorable thing for me was the party gift: burgundy sunglasses with built-in flashing LEDs. As a little boy, that blew my mind and inspired me for a lifetime. Videos exist.