6 ms·

In the heady days of my youth in the early 90's I was foolishly of the opinion that Apple would one day rule the world, and that Steve Jobs would be seen as som

In the heady days of my youth in the early 90's I was foolishly of the opinion that Apple would one day rule the world, and that Steve Jobs would be seen as some sort of Christ figure. I kinda looked up to him in that fashion, at the time, even before he'd come back to Apple after Next. Of course, when I actually became an adult, I realized the error of my ways, switched to Linux,and over time my admiration only grew for Woz. I once appeared in a reenactment of a Jobs/Woz story on TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEuJMPBZJ7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEuJMPBZJ7c . It was a cheesey TV reenactment, and it really doesn't matter which one of the two Steve's I was playing, versus which one was portrayed by my child-hood friend, Travis. But during the filming, I did get to handle a Woz Blue Box, and an Apple I board. It was like touching a Rembrandt, or a Van Gogh. At the time, I pretended to be Jobs. These days, I say I played Woz. Woz, to put it bluntly, is the awesomest hacker/engineer, ever. He's just a freakin' god! Everything he's ever done has been 10% pure hacker ethos. The early Apple I's came with a complete explanation of how they were laid out, hardware-wise. The manual was a work of pure joy. You don't get technical writing like that, ever. Nothing was hidden. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Apple/Apple.AppleI.1976.102646518.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Apple/Appl... If you like that, ever head of the CL 9? Woz, after leaving Apple due to surviving a freakin' plane crash, decided he wanted to fix the then common remote control. The CL9 Core remote control was a hacker's dream device. You could program it to emit whatever IR signals you wanted, and it came with a manual explaining as much. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL_9 Jobs, on the other hand, was a seriously driven guy. An entrepreneur's entrepreneur. Take that for what you will, the good and the bad. I've always taken it to mean he was good at spotting an opportunity and exploiting it. I, for one, will always worship the engineer, first.

derefr 13y ago
Rather than picking one over the other, I would say that it would have been best if Jobs had had a little more Woz in him (to appreciate the tech more), Woz had had a little more Jobs (to sell himself more), and they had continued to work together. Apple would be an even bigger player than it is today, I think.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  I disagree. What made them an amazing pair is that they complimented each other perfectly. Character and skill are zero-sum: if Jobs had a little more Woz in him, he would have to be a little less Jobs. And vice versa. The result would be a more inferior Apple. It's better to have one person who is Level 100 at skill A and another who is Level 100 at skill B, than 75/25 and 25/75. "Well-rounded" is another term for "mediocre."
  - oblique63 13y ago
    While this stance sounds nice, it doesn't actually make much sense in reality. It appeals to our cultural want for 'justice'/'fairness'/'equality', but it doesn't quite pan out once you look at the general picture of skill acquisition. If a person learned to become exceptionally 'talented' in one area, then he/she's more likely to replicate that same level success in a completely new area, than someone who hasn't gained that level of skill anywhere. This is because skill acquisition itself is a skill. So once you've learned what it takes to master a certain skill (i.e. you learned how to learn effectively), you can then apply it with much more ease than someone who hasn't really learned how to learn as much. This causes a sort of 'snowball-effect' outcome, where ease of skill acquisition follows a logarithmic curve of sorts rather than a linear/exponential one like most people seem to view it. The only limiting factor on skill acquisition is choice/taste. If a particular area doesn't interest you, then why bother expending energy learning to master it, right? Doesn't mean you're not capable of it, all it means is that you didn't have to strive for greatness in that area to make it work for you. And since Jobs met Woz pretty early on, there was really no reason for him to become a master engineer thereafter. Meanwhile, Woz probably just didn't care about business/marketing, so he chose to not master it. There are other factors that influence skill acquisition (e.g. IQ), but they don't necessarily limit it. And in order for the 'fair' view of skill acquisition to hold, there would need to be some sort of non-trainable limiting mechanism for building skills. But as of now, I'm not familiar of anything that would cause that. The only way the "Jack of all trades; master of none" mantra holds, is if the 'Jack' never deeply learnt/'mastered' any of the subjects he's familiar with. But of course, the label "Jack of all trades" doesn't actually specify whether-or-not that's actually the case. Same for "well-rounded"; implying it indicates anything other than breadth of knowledge is inaccurate.
JosephHatfield 13y ago
Cheesy, yes, but I thought that video was actually very interesting. "Ma Bell is listening in" indeed.
fudged71 13y ago
Is "10%" a typo? :)
- phreakingout 13y ago
  10% is a lot of hacker ethos. Few take shits on toilets they made themselves all the time. Few make their own mattress or intentionally hack their brainwaves with external and/or internal devices when they sleep. And very few are consuming soylent regularly. You could have written your own email client, browser, and you could be writing code on a CPU you designed yourself, just to avoid the day-to-day grunge of unhackerness. I could have spent the time that I wrote this to instead take apart an old cordless phone to make it a garage door opener, just to have a spare. The car I drive could be one of a kind. It shouldn't even be called "car", because it would be different and better suited for the task of getting me from point A to B, freeing my hands to hack something together while I'm traveling. Yes, 10% is what was meant, even if it was unintentional.
  - supercoder 13y ago
    So yes, 10% was a typo then.
    - phreakingout 13y ago
      You don't know Woz.
bsdetector 13y ago
Please. Woz's answer to the top thing wrong with the movie was that it overglorified Jobs as too much of a personality. But later he says Jobs was the best technology leader of our time. This may not be a good movie and I believe that Woz believes what he says, but like any eyewitness I also believe his memory is colored heavily by his own POV. Keep your mind clear and don't worship Jobs or Woz.
ateev 13y ago
I have read a lot about who's better. Jobs or Woz. Who's right ?. Well according to me both are equally important. They are like inseparable. No one would have succeeded without the other. We need both, awesome passionate technology-focused engineers and user-experienced-focused people in our team. As tom pretson said in one of his talks, open source lacks designers. There are so many great engineers in the open source communities but not enough designers. This has to change. And this combination only can guarantee a success for startups.
vidarh 13y ago
> The early Apple I's came with a complete explanation of how they were laid out, hardware-wise. Publishing details at pretty much that level was the norm at the time, nothing particularly special for Apple. E.g. up until at least '87 or '88 (and quite possibly later), pretty much all Commodore hardware had proper schematics in their manuals, and they provided separate documentation with much more detail.

derefr 13y ago

Rather than picking one over the other, I would say that it would have been best if Jobs had had a little more Woz in him (to appreciate the tech more), Woz had had a little more Jobs (to sell himself more), and they had continued to work together. Apple would be an even bigger player than it is today, I think.

enraged_camel 13y ago
I disagree. What made them an amazing pair is that they complimented each other perfectly. Character and skill are zero-sum: if Jobs had a little more Woz in him, he would have to be a little less Jobs. And vice versa. The result would be a more inferior Apple. It's better to have one person who is Level 100 at skill A and another who is Level 100 at skill B, than 75/25 and 25/75. "Well-rounded" is another term for "mediocre."
- oblique63 13y ago
  While this stance sounds nice, it doesn't actually make much sense in reality. It appeals to our cultural want for 'justice'/'fairness'/'equality', but it doesn't quite pan out once you look at the general picture of skill acquisition. If a person learned to become exceptionally 'talented' in one area, then he/she's more likely to replicate that same level success in a completely new area, than someone who hasn't gained that level of skill anywhere. This is because skill acquisition itself is a skill. So once you've learned what it takes to master a certain skill (i.e. you learned how to learn effectively), you can then apply it with much more ease than someone who hasn't really learned how to learn as much. This causes a sort of 'snowball-effect' outcome, where ease of skill acquisition follows a logarithmic curve of sorts rather than a linear/exponential one like most people seem to view it. The only limiting factor on skill acquisition is choice/taste. If a particular area doesn't interest you, then why bother expending energy learning to master it, right? Doesn't mean you're not capable of it, all it means is that you didn't have to strive for greatness in that area to make it work for you. And since Jobs met Woz pretty early on, there was really no reason for him to become a master engineer thereafter. Meanwhile, Woz probably just didn't care about business/marketing, so he chose to not master it. There are other factors that influence skill acquisition (e.g. IQ), but they don't necessarily limit it. And in order for the 'fair' view of skill acquisition to hold, there would need to be some sort of non-trainable limiting mechanism for building skills. But as of now, I'm not familiar of anything that would cause that. The only way the "Jack of all trades; master of none" mantra holds, is if the 'Jack' never deeply learnt/'mastered' any of the subjects he's familiar with. But of course, the label "Jack of all trades" doesn't actually specify whether-or-not that's actually the case. Same for "well-rounded"; implying it indicates anything other than breadth of knowledge is inaccurate.

JosephHatfield 13y ago

Cheesy, yes, but I thought that video was actually very interesting. "Ma Bell is listening in" indeed.

fudged71 13y ago

Is "10%" a typo? :)

phreakingout 13y ago
10% is a lot of hacker ethos. Few take shits on toilets they made themselves all the time. Few make their own mattress or intentionally hack their brainwaves with external and/or internal devices when they sleep. And very few are consuming soylent regularly. You could have written your own email client, browser, and you could be writing code on a CPU you designed yourself, just to avoid the day-to-day grunge of unhackerness. I could have spent the time that I wrote this to instead take apart an old cordless phone to make it a garage door opener, just to have a spare. The car I drive could be one of a kind. It shouldn't even be called "car", because it would be different and better suited for the task of getting me from point A to B, freeing my hands to hack something together while I'm traveling. Yes, 10% is what was meant, even if it was unintentional.
- supercoder 13y ago
  So yes, 10% was a typo then.
  - phreakingout 13y ago
    You don't know Woz.

bsdetector 13y ago

Please. Woz's answer to the top thing wrong with the movie was that it overglorified Jobs as too much of a personality. But later he says Jobs was the best technology leader of our time. This may not be a good movie and I believe that Woz believes what he says, but like any eyewitness I also believe his memory is colored heavily by his own POV. Keep your mind clear and don't worship Jobs or Woz.

ateev 13y ago

I have read a lot about who's better. Jobs or Woz. Who's right ?. Well according to me both are equally important. They are like inseparable. No one would have succeeded without the other. We need both, awesome passionate technology-focused engineers and user-experienced-focused people in our team. As tom pretson said in one of his talks, open source lacks designers. There are so many great engineers in the open source communities but not enough designers. This has to change. And this combination only can guarantee a success for startups.

vidarh 13y ago

> The early Apple I's came with a complete explanation of how they were laid out, hardware-wise. Publishing details at pretty much that level was the norm at the time, nothing particularly special for Apple. E.g. up until at least '87 or '88 (and quite possibly later), pretty much all Commodore hardware had proper schematics in their manuals, and they provided separate documentation with much more detail.