6 ms·

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

by bigstrat2003 9mo 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 9mo ago
Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.
- Aloha 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
    I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
      - fuzzfactor 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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?
        9mo ago
  - p00dles 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
    I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.
  - rainbowcash 9mo 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 9mo ago
  I worship both thank you very much.
- bko 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
      People who worship Jobs helped make sure of that
- ericmcer 9mo ago
  You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.
postalcoder 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
        I wasn’t talking about a withdrawal rate, this is a rate of return and just living on the interest.
mghackerlady 9mo 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 9mo ago
  Care to explain?
  - volkercraig 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
- rainbowcash 9mo 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

ares623 9mo ago

Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.

Aloha 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
  I admire both and I find the push to Pick a Steve Team really irritating.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    Both, the sum is greater than the parts. Neither of them would be there without the other.
    - fuzzfactor 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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?
        9mo ago
- p00dles 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
  I have chosen to go by "Take no heroes, only inspiration", and take different inspiration from both.
- rainbowcash 9mo 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 9mo ago
I worship both thank you very much.
bko 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
    People who worship Jobs helped make sure of that
ericmcer 9mo ago
You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.

postalcoder 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago
      I wasn’t talking about a withdrawal rate, this is a rate of return and just living on the interest.

mghackerlady 9mo 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 9mo ago
Care to explain?
- volkercraig 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo 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 9mo ago

Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.

rainbowcash 9mo 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