Slashdot Mirror
Woz Still Misses Homebrew Computer Club and Apple
UtahSaint writes "The Electronic Design site has nabbed a short interview with the Woz, where he waxes poetically about his time growing up as an Engineer and founding Apple. Even to this day, he says, he still misses the Homebrew Computer Club and his days running around Apple leading the technical teams. 'I miss the technical camaraderie ... The whole feeling of being on a revolution, on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies.'"
Restrict the domain of discussion to the US and you get a better sense of the uniqueness.
Why restrict the domain to the US?
Nowhere else in the world of that time could this kind of talent have been expressed. (I'm not sure there is _any_ place in the present world where such talent could be expressed.)
Only sixty thousand people like him among six billion may not be unique if you are talking about, say, the Midland, Texas of the same time period. (One city full of truly unique individuals, matched in uniqueness only by its slightly larger neighbor a half-hour to the west, but we aren't talking about engineering genius any more. Wait, the analogy is slipping here.)
Okay, let's try it this way: If you put all sixty thousand people theoretically like Woz into one small city in the southwest US, perhaps none of them would any longer seem so unique. (Maybe?)
But when you spread sixty thousand "similar" people across the world, you really can't say that, because there are sixty-thousand of them, they must not be unique. How often in one day are you going to meet one of those sixty thousand people?
I look back with nostalgia at the time myself, in part because it was a time when a young guy with an engineering bent could still believe he could change the world for the better just be inventing something. You could get your mind around a 64K address space and a character set smaller than 256 encoding points in a way that you can't with 2G+ actual RAM and, erm, well, Unicode. (Bad pronoun transitions, I know. Bad topic transition, too.)
Anyway, Woz is unique. So is Jobs. Gates and Ballmer, however, are a wannabees, still trying for something that six-ty billion _dollars_ can't buy.
joudanzuki