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In the early years Woz was undoubtably important. In particular, I think it is clear that electronically, technically the brains was Steve Wozniak. This is obvious especially if you hear about the story of them working on Breakout together. And at that time in the late seventies where computers were expensive and being very clever about reducing the number of chips to the bare minimum, Woz's skill set was important. These skills became less important as hardware became cheaper and economy of scale made ASICs practical (look at the design of the Commodore 64). You could argue the weird interleaved video memory was a design flaw that hung around on the Apple II forever, but it was necessary to get color cheaply enough with just stock 74 series logic and 6502 CPU. On the other hand, the idea of making an all-inclusive consumer item with an injection molded case was definitely pushed for by Jobs (apple 2 history). That is what made the Apple II sell where the Apple I didn't. Woz's world view was that everybody could just put together a kit and choose a keyboard and their own TV (that was the Apple I). That wasn't going to fly in the long run, and Woz didn't see that, but Jobs did. I think a lot of people here are saying Jobs was a great salesman. That is true, but I think it is more that he wanted to make a beautiful product that he would enjoy and thus it would sell because others would enjoy the beautiful deisgn too.

I think in later years, especially the development of the Macintosh, Jobs was much more influential. Read folklore.org. There are concrete aesthetic pushes that Jobs asked for. That is good leadership. Did he make the prototypes, did he design the prototypes. No, but he had taste and pushed it and chose people that would satisfy it. You can see the difference between the Atari ST, windows 1.0, amiga OS and Mac OS. Mac OS had a brillaint aesthetic with good fonts (he had taken calligraphy and cared about fonts). The others were rubbish. It took until Windows 95 for PCs to look as good as Mac OS did. But by 2000 MacOS X had pushed the visual aesthetic of operating systems to the next level. It's hard to over-estimate how important it is for a machine to look good and to have good aesthetic, and many of the nerds here that are all function over form kind of people just don't get it. The rounded rect anecdote on folklore.org is another great thing to look at.

I think that is what he added to the equation, even on the Apple II. I think where Jobs was smart was that he wasn't just form over function. He desired to have things looking good everywhere, but if it wasn't going to electronically work, then he wouldn't force it (see mac PC board).
  He had insight on how to do that several times. Apple II was the start of it, Mac was even better, NeXT was a refinement of Mac, but the ipod, iphone, and MacOS were the things that sealed his legacy.
Did Steve Jobs design everything. No. Was he the messiah. No. But he often acted as a catalyst and had a unifying vision and was capable of building teams to realize that vision.

No, integer basic did not have hi-res mode:

    http://www.landsnail.com/a2ref2.htm

However I'm not certain that the apple II hires mode is even relevant to this "Intellectual Property" problem.

--jeffk++

Okay, I just can't let that one pass... this is what Apple was selling in 1976. They were marketing the Apple I to hobbyists who were not only expected to write their own software, they even had to design and build their own case. Ask Mac users to do either of those things and they will run screaming from the room.

So I'd say that yes, Apple's focus has changed a bit since 1976. Maybe "since 1984" would be a better argument... :^)

Yeah, but who do you think invented Apple? A couple of HP employees, that's who.

Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.

He did, though it was a long time ago. See information on Raskin's Canon Cat. It would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.

Of course, the release of the original IBM PC a couple of years later completely overshadowed Apple's moment in the sun.

The IBM PC played its part in Apple's fall from grace, but don't underestimate Apple's miserable attempt at a business-centric machine, the Apple III -- it likely put the final nail in the coffin as far as Apple's role in the business computer market.

As long as they don't borrow Steve Wozniak's plane, they're all good :)

Just kidding Woz. Love ya work :)

The bit about 'application-less' interaction with the computer sounds like a further development of the Canon Cat, Raskin's post-Mac project from the mid-late 80's.

Well since he was the actual genius who invented the Mac (not Jobs), I can cut him some slack as far as feeling he has some right to speak up. How big would anyone's ego be if they had invented the Mac. Heck, Gates, merely copied it for the most part, and look at him! [joke]

He did not invent the Mac, at least the Mac as we know it. His ideas of a UI were "out there" and not that great, IMO. To get an idea of what he wanted the Macintosh to become, look no further than his creation, the Canon Cat For those who won't follow that link, the cat was a command-line machine that was nothing more than a word processor (you remember those single-purpose "Brother" WPs?).

If he realized his ideal computer at Apple, the macintosh would have died a horrible death and/or certainly wouldn't have become the publishing/graphics professional's choice. MS certainly wouldn't have developed a decent GUI (I'm not arguing that Win is "decent, so don't start) so designers would probably be using $50,000 SGIs or X-acto blades and chartpak tape.

Another try in that direction was the Xerox Star. Imagine a machine with a great mouse-oriented user interface that runs a word processing/spreadsheet/mail/database app and nothing else. That's the Star, Xerox PARC's attempt to build the ultimate office computer. Clobbered by the far-dumber but more flexible IBM PC.

That said, the UNIX interface is a holdover from the teletype era. Command-line interfaces have been done far better. X is a horrible approach for a local GUI. And the text-file approach to system administration needs to be trashed, not papered over.

Ease of use probably peaked around the end of the 68K Mac era. By then, the Mac had been perfected. It finally had enough engine behind it to be useful, but the apps hadn't yet been run over by Microsoft. If Apple had stayed with the 68K, and pushed Motorola into improving that product line, it might have been a win. But they got sucked into the IBM PowerPC deal, which basically cost them two years and their lead over Microsoft. (There's also the fact that Apple botched about five new OS projects in a row. The jury is still out on the latest try.)