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It looks like the response was written when Jobs was still around. I doubt Woz would sound so belligerent now. In any case, if you watch some of Job’s old video

• goblin89 13y ago
  Page source indicates that this has been posted on 05 Jun, 2012. (Submission dates are invisible because of a CSS rule.)
  • 3JPLW 13y ago
    I'm guessing the submission dates are hidden because they're incorrect. Here's another one[0] that says it was posted in 2011, but there's an ed mark saying that "at this time" meant "pre-2000." Edit: It's on the wayback machine since at least August of 2000.[1] [0]. http://www.woz.org/letters/relationship-steve-jobs http://www.woz.org/letters/relationship-steve-jobs [1]. http://web.archive.org/web/20000817233800/http://www.woz.org/letters/general/08.html http://web.archive.org/web/20000817233800/http://www.woz.org...
• hvs 13y ago
  I agree. I also think that Jobs probably recognized that Woz was well beyond him technically and that he would just get in the way for the most part. Nothing worse than someone "who used to code" deciding to "get their hands dirty" and just end up slowing down the whole process.
  • enraged_camel 13y ago
    >> I also think that Jobs probably recognized that Woz was well beyond him technically and that he would just get in the way for the most part. Absolutely. IIRC, this is at least strongly implied if not explicitly stated in Job's biography.
• WayneDB 13y ago
  What exactly was so belligerent about Woz's response? It seemed like a straight-forward, facts-only response to me.
  • jaredmcateer 13y ago
    Unfortunately, straight forward and concise, when in the web medium, can sound belligerent depending on the perspective of the reader. When I'm reading someone technical like Woz I have to consciously apply a matter of fact tone to the content to avoid thinking it comes off as rude.
    • npsimons 13y ago
      can sound belligerent depending on the perspective of the reader. Ah yes, I can see how anything that wasn't utterly worshipful of Steve Jobs would sound belligerent to an Apple fanboy.
      • coldtea 13y ago
        Now you came as rude and tasteless. Nobody asked for something "utterly worshipful", and nobody sounded like a "fanboy" in this thread, and surely not the original commenter (oh, and using such words as "fanboy"? Are you fifteen years old?). His concern was if this was an accurate portrayal or if Wozniak was resentful and downplayed some of Jobs skills. Nobody expected Woz to say that Jobs had Bill Joy level programming skills.
        • WayneDB 13y ago
          Just about everything you said was incorrect. Please, take your special brand of crazy somewhere else.
  • michaelwww 13y ago
    Steve Jobs never claimed to be a programmer. He had bigger sources of pride. He was a technician at Atari. 'npalli' seems to be offended by Woz stating the facts. I wouldn't expect Woz to submit to the hero worship of Jobs that a lot of people seem to expect these days. That'd be like asking my ex-wife to sing my praises.
• firichapo 13y ago
  I like Woz better because he is a better person that Jobs. That's all. The fact that he is a more technical person is just icing on the top.
• badman_ting 13y ago
  I agree. I think there is a real resentment among people who work hard to master technical details, only to have guys in positions like Jobs's more or less float over that. It's like, you didn't put in the hard work to learn endianness like I did, so you don't know shit. The kind of knowledge and savoir-faire that Jobs had is not concrete, ineffable. Engineers tend to hate that, they think it's just a bunch of shit.
  • RogerL 13y ago
    Jobs was extremely smart to brilliant. What he didn't do, and what he said he did, was design the Apple I. There was a front page article a few weks ago linking to a bunch of Jobs videos, and again and again he'd stand in a front of a bunch of people and claim to have designed the Apple I. I guess none of us really know the score in that regard, but certainly everything in the rest of their careers backs up Steve's story. Engineers hate lying, not soft skills.
    • 300bps 13y ago
      Engineers hate lying, not soft skills. Thank you for pointing out this very important distinction. I think it's important to realize that Jobs was human and not the most humane among us. It's easy to realize if you read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs Development of the Apple Lisa computer began in the year of Brennan's birth, just as Apple Computer, the company her father founded, began to experience significant growth. Jobs initially denied paternity, and he and Apple claimed that the name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture".[5] Steve Jobs swore in court documents that he could not be Lisa's father because he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."[2] Decades later, Jobs admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson, "Obviously, it was named for my daughter."[ The guy swore under oath and penalty of perjury that he was incapable of fathering the daughter he in fact fathered and concocted an elaborate story to explain away why he named one of Apple's computers after this girl that he claimed was not his daughter. So I agree with you; engineers tend to deal in reality. Many people are successful because they successfully sell non-reality to people when it suits their purpose. Engineers tend to have problems with such people.
• timbre 13y ago
  I don't see why you read this as belligerent, unless you think altering and changing designs is inferior to coding and original design. There were a lot of articles after Tim Cook took over that described Jobs' genius as that of a design editor, knowing what to cut and what to keep. Wozniak's comment here seems consistent with that.
  • lambdasquirrel 13y ago
    I think it's worse than belligerent. It makes both of them look bad (both Steve and Woz), to show that perceived split between them. There's what you say, and then there's what you say. It also makes engineers look bad because it only enhances the perception that we can only handle the raw technical aspects, and that we get bitter when someone passes us because of non-technical reasons. I don't know why engineers are singled out here because I've seen it happen in all other specializations. Perhaps it's in the way we generally react?
    • CatMtKing 13y ago
      I didn't read it as belligerent. He stuck to facts only and avoided emotional vocabulary.
      • bradbatt 13y ago
        Totally agree. I don't understand why people are reading Woz's words are belligerent...maybe based on their own preconceived notions or experiences, but certainly not because of anything Woz said. He simply stated the truth: "Steve didn't ever code." It's not a judgement. He didn't say it made him inferior in any way. In fact, he praised him in the very next sentence saying "he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs". I'm not sure any of this is a big revelation anyway...didn't we all pretty much know that Woz was the tech/programming guy and Jobs was the marketing/sales/business deal guy? They were amazingly successful together and it is doubtful that either one of them would have attained the same success if they had gone about it independently.
        • 13y ago
• tjogin 13y ago
  Yeah, it's fun to make shit up that but let's not ignore the fact that while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987, he did not play any role of significance at Apple after his plane crash in 1981, and was never involved in the Mac project at all. Any importance Woz may have had to Apple effectively ended in 1981.
  • objclxt 13y ago
    > while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987 I think that Woz is actually still employed at Apple even today. According to both his personal website and autobiography he still takes a paycheck (Wikipedia says around $120k a year). Like you say though, he has no involvement at Apple anymore despite the salary. That probably makes him technically the only Apple employee who's allowed to openly critique new product releases in public!
  • kamaal 13y ago
    That effectively makes Woz responsible for 50% of Apple's success so far.
    • tjogin 13y ago
      Well you can count any way you like if you absolutely want to make it so. But I count Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iTunes and the App Store as pretty good successes.
      • kamaal 13y ago
        >>if you absolutely want to make it so. I'm just stating history as is. Apple I and II were something like what search business is for Google. They were basically their bread and butter for nearly the entire early years. And Woz had almost entirely designed and built them. The products you mention are all large team products. Look at it anyway. If you count for the individual efforts. Woz is way ahead of any one at Apple.
        • Someone 13y ago
• gamegoblin 13y ago
  I saw the Woz speak just a couple of months ago and he spent probably half an hour (total, not consecutively) of the talk bashing Jobs in various ways, talking about how Jobs would take credit for his work, etc. He portrayed Jobs as a slick marketer who wasn't ashamed of making use of others' successes for his own gain.
  • lutusp 13y ago
    I was on the scene in those times (I wrote Apple Writer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer) and I have to agree -- I think Steve's role at Apple resulted from a combination of his narcissism, his bullying tactics and his evangelism for the person computer, in equal measure. He ended up with an insanely great career. :)
    • tomrod 13y ago
      Thank you for your work. I greatly enjoyed using Apple Writer.
      • lutusp 13y ago
        You're most welcome. At the time there was a rather stupid magazine article titled, "Will Success Spoil Paul Lutus?" When I saw it I laughed and said, "I hope so."
        • tomrod 13y ago
          Did it? :)
    • michaelwww 13y ago
      I was on the scene at the time too, hired by the author of AppleWorks. The only reason AppleWorks became Microsoft Works for the Mac, a computer which desperately needed software at the time, was because the author of AppleWorks (Lissner) couldn't deal with Jobs despite being very willing. I'm not knocking Jobs, but Wozniak has every right to complain if that's what he chooses to do.
• tomphoolery 13y ago
  There's a difference between "knowing how to code" and actually doing it. I know a lot of people who know the basics HTML/CSS, but most of them don't do it for a living for whatever reason. Just because "Steve didn't code", doesn't mean "Steve couldn't code"... Perhaps Steve's greatest contribution to Apple was being its ultimate guinea pig. He wasn't an engineer, so he wasn't bogged down by the insecurities and fears and analytical thinking that plague the engineer's mind. He could "let go", as it were, and really evaluate the products coming out of his company for what they ARE, and their usefulness, unlike an engineer who always has the potential of making really geek-oriented products that fill a specific niche and aren't very useful outside that niche.
  • lightcatcher 13y ago
    Off-topic, but do you consider knowing just HTML/CSS being knowing how to code? If so, do you consider knowing something like LaTeX, Markdown, or reStructuredText to include knowing how to code? Not that I'm any authority, but I generally considering "knowing how to code" to require at least being able to use some sort of branching operation as well as some some sort of looping/recursion (which yes, is really just branching).
    • stass 13y ago
      There is a difference between "coding" and "programming". Programming is an act of producing a formal computational solution for a problem. Coding, on the other hand, means literally encoding that formal specification of computation in a way that computer will be able to execute. In that sense, yes, HTML/CSS is a coding as the end result can be executed on a computer to produce a visual representation of the page. What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another.
      • lightcatcher 13y ago
        I've always considering "programming" and "coding" to be synonyms, but you've pointed out an interesting distinction I've never considered. Thank you. > What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another. I meant this at a really low level. Recursion is just a conditional jump and a stack push. When I said branching, I was thinking of the jump instructions in assembly (which allow you to jump to any point in a program, including instructions that have already been executed).
• nsxwolf 13y ago
  A lot of engineers are incapable of seeing the value that someone like Steve Jobs brings in the technology industry. These might be the same people that wonder why Linux has not succeeded on the desktop.
  • hackula1 13y ago
    I appreciate having bosses and sales guys around to play up the BS so I don't have to.
  • MrBra 13y ago
    Which values are you talking about in this case? I'm just curious to see what is so great, in your opinion, about Jobs contribution to IT world? Since personally, being a tech enthusiast myself, there has never been so far anything produced by Apple that I couldn't live without.
    • nsxwolf 13y ago
      Personal computing, WIMP interface, WYSIWYG fonts, object oriented operating systems, multitouch interface, digital music distribution. Jobs invented none of them, but they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse) today without his contributions.
      • MrBra 13y ago
        > they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse) Do you really think we would be swimming in a sea of technological shit if Apple didn't come up with its own technological innovations ? I don't think so... Of course look and feel would be slightly different... but that would also have happened in case one "Orange" company had existed too. Probably the main differences would be 1) less instagram pics 2) podcasts not called podcast but audio files 3) you got me...
        • nsxwolf 13y ago
          Everyone thinks everything we have now is obvious. It's not. Take fonts. The Macintosh came out in 1984. It took over a decade for WYSIWG and fonts to catch on. By 1995, Wordperfect for DOS was still massively popular. We think the desktop metaphor with on-screen typesetting just "makes sense" today. Why shouldn't we just be typing on a virtual piece of paper, working directly with fonts of the desired type and size? But that is an entirely new metaphor. Writing and publishing never worked that way. You'd write a draft on paper or a typewriter, then give it to some layout guy who would work with the typesetter to get the press set up. The early text-mode-only word processors extended this metaphor is a natural way - you became the layout guy and the typesetter using markup inside your draft, and the software and printer would work to get you the output you wanted. This was a big deal, and to many, was the way it was going to work forever. The iPhone is "obvious", and that's how all phones work now, but there was nothing like it in 2007 and there were plenty of skeptics that predicted failure because of its lack of a stylus and physical keyboard. If we could be shown the world without Steve Jobs, it wouldn't surprise me at all today if we all had to drive over to our local IBM "Computing Center" where we could pay to send people "Electronic Mails", and we'd all think we were living in a futuristic wonder world.
• rickjames28 13y ago
  It looks like the response was written when Jobs was still around. I doubt Woz would sound so belligerent now. It sounded pretty matter of fact, and not belligerent at all.
• brymaster 13y ago
  Are you implying that you know better than Woz would on the topic?
• pessimizer 13y ago
  >I find it sad that engineers project their own insecurities in this whole Jobs/Woz saga. You seem to be the one projecting here, if you're seeing this terse recitation of facts as belligerent. I am happy you posted, though, because you inadvertently caused this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296217
• baddox 13y ago
  > How would you think Woz would have fared in deep technical discussions involving the iPhone? I think he would fare quite well, even if he hasn't done any coding or engineering since leaving Apple in 1987.
  • xradionut 13y ago
    He has done coding and engineering since leaving Apple. You might want to do a little research like read his biography or scan his web site....
    • baddox 13y ago
      You misinterpreted my statement. I meant to emphasize "even if," my point being that even the level of technical knowledge and experience he had in 1987 should easily qualify him to have intelligent technical conversations about the iPhone.