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Wozniak Interview In Failure
Plastickiwi writes "The current issue of the online magazine Failure features an interview with Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak. Woz waxes humble about his role in founding the microcomputer revolution, claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs, and weighs in on the Microsoft antitrust trial." Tons of interesting stuff: he also talks about Pirates of the Silicon Valley and other bits. As always, Woz is a joy to read.
What makes his work exceptional is that there were no simulators available for modeling computer behavior; he and the other designers of the era had to SIMULATE THE ENTIRE COMPUTER IN THEIR HEADS. That is a very rare talent.
While there are many people today who can do digital designs, the available tools are much better than they were just 25 years ago. To find out how good Woz was you would have to use the same tools he had - with the same low level TTL chips, a 'hock your calculator' R & D budget to work with, and do your work in a garage.
Great work Steve, thanks.
Okay, great, you know who Tesla was. We are all happy for you. Now never bother us with his sad story again.
Steering back onto the topic, I would say that Woz has achieved all the wealth and fame that he actually wanted, and if he wanted more he would have had it. On his own terms, he is a total and complete success. That is why he is not a bazillionaire; he never wanted to be anything more or less than a really great engineer and inventor.
(This message brought to you by a fan of Thomas Edison, the Wizard on Menlo Park. Deal with it, pink boy!)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
I think the above quote points out a major flaw in the thinking of many in our Geek community. There's a clear difference between what I call science and engineering ... and by this I do not mean the usual technical definitions. The mis-concept is that something is worth admiring only if it has pushed the frontier ... while in reality, there's a lot of value to activities that take what is at the frontier and make it more readily accessible to the common people.
The glory of Woz is not that he pushed the frontier of knowledge. Rather, he brought much of this knowledge and power to the masses. We often forget that there is a huge divide between what the few, select know and understand compared to the general public. For example, Edison was by no means a great scientist. His methods were crude and unorthodox, based on massive trial and error experiments (not what people today would call rational design). But his brilliance was that he was able to take solid scientific fundamentals and develop a tool (distributed electricity, light bulb) that could be appreciated and utilized by the society as a whole.
Similarly, Woz did not necessary develop the great paradigms or technologies (most of what was in the Apple ][ had already been developed) ... he brought it together in a package that could be exploited by others.
Does Woz get too much credit ... sure, he didn't single handedly build the PC. But should we still respect and hold some reverence for him? Absolutely. Not all of us can be the great frontier researchers, pushing the bounds of what we know and understand. But we can strive to do what Woz did ... which is take what we do know and distribute it better to the general public.
Woz is a teacher now. If you can think of something more admirable than a teacher, I'd like to hear it.
Well, I guess "Failure" magazine is aptly named. Goodbye server. I'll just have to stay here with the other slowpokes and make humorous/offtopic remarks.
"...claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs..."
Probably because neither of them uses blood. Woz is clearly an advanced AI left here by aliens while Jobs probably upgraded from blood to a secret liquid compound that speeds his "boot time" in the morning from 10 minutes to an insanely great 5 seconds.
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there's a documentary-like feature done by PBS called "Triumph of the Nerds" and my dad being the Director of Engineering at an affiliate of PBS, I had him get me a copy. They cover Woz pretty well. By this I mean, they show his technical genius and accomplishments as well as his humility. I can't help but get the impression from *everything* I read, hear or see about Woz that he's a genuinely good human being and really one of the greatest hackers ever. It's always nice to hear about him in the news from time to time.
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I do think we give him too much credit. Sure, we all see the humble genius developer/hacker in him and (at least I do) strive to even maybe find that in ourselves, but come on.
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
Many people have contributed greatly to the advancement of computers, and they deserve to be written about in the history books. But Woz was a man, and we give him more credit than he deserves by glorifying him as we do.
Personally, if I did some really cool stuff back in the day, I'd love for people to still be talking about it 20 years later but I would be nervous if I was built into the ultimate computer man, and I think that shows a lot in his writing.
http://kered.org
I had never read any of "The Woz"'s writing before, and it is nice that he does not have the "look at me, I am wonderful" problems of Steve Jobs. To listen to SJ, one would think that he--with some technical assistance from SW--created the microcomputer. SW is a lot more accurate.
Also nice was the mention of Mike Markkula, but like most stories of the founding of Apple no mention is made of the role of Nolan Bushnell.
I was very, very pleased to see mention of Atari engineeer Al Acorn in the article, however. If you know the full story on Atari--which SW does not cover--the complicated reasons for Bushnell's decision were what eventually brought the fall of Atari. Bad management from a ex-Burlington manager ran Atari into the ground, and a ex-Pepsi manager came inches from killing Apple. When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
Woz has his head on a lot straighter than most of the people in SV.