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This article exhibits the sort of passion that someone needs in order to become "really good" at something. Maybe 90% or even 99% of designers would only be in

This article exhibits the sort of passion that someone needs in order to become "really good" at something. Maybe 90% or even 99% of designers would only be interested in taking a regulator, connecting input, output and ground, and perhaps some adding bypass caps, and stopping right there. Good enough to make it work in most situations. But that final 1% are the really good engineers. They want to truly understand or grok what all the components of the circuit are doing. That's what lets them achieve so much more than the typical engineer. From what I've seen (but I haven't really studied his designs in detail) Steve Wozniak was (is?) the epitome of a great design engineer. His designs were magical for their time. The article also mentions Bob Widlar, who was also truly one of the greats.

kjs3 12y ago
Well put. I think you're about 95% right about Woz. The difference is that looking something Widlar or Pease did, I go "holy shit, that's genius! I would never have thought of that!". Some of Woz stuff (I'm looking at you, Apple II disk controller) are just "that's demented. I wouldn't have wanted to think that up. Genius, but demented".
- CamperBob2 12y ago
  You can't thoroughly appreciate Woz's disk controller until you compare it to the abortion that was the C64's floppy disk system, nor his display circuitry until you compare it to the atrocity that was the IBM CGA adapter. That's when you realize that he wasn't a once-in-100 years fluke of engineering genetics, but the once-in-500 years kind.
  - madengr 12y ago
    The abysmal performance of the C64 floppy disk was due to a bug, but management went ahead and decided to ship it anyway. It was supposed to be 10x faster, thus the 3rd party ROM replacements.
    - CamperBob2 12y ago
      The funny thing was, the same was true of Apple's DOS. With all the engineering talent including Woz's own, it never occurred to anyone there that they should have read the sectors in each track in descending rather than ascending order to save wasted disk rotations.

kjs3 12y ago

Well put. I think you're about 95% right about Woz. The difference is that looking something Widlar or Pease did, I go "holy shit, that's genius! I would never have thought of that!". Some of Woz stuff (I'm looking at you, Apple II disk controller) are just "that's demented. I wouldn't have wanted to think that up. Genius, but demented".

CamperBob2 12y ago
You can't thoroughly appreciate Woz's disk controller until you compare it to the abortion that was the C64's floppy disk system, nor his display circuitry until you compare it to the atrocity that was the IBM CGA adapter. That's when you realize that he wasn't a once-in-100 years fluke of engineering genetics, but the once-in-500 years kind.
- madengr 12y ago
  The abysmal performance of the C64 floppy disk was due to a bug, but management went ahead and decided to ship it anyway. It was supposed to be 10x faster, thus the 3rd party ROM replacements.
  - CamperBob2 12y ago
    The funny thing was, the same was true of Apple's DOS. With all the engineering talent including Woz's own, it never occurred to anyone there that they should have read the sectors in each track in descending rather than ascending order to save wasted disk rotations.