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The Beginnings of Apple Computer
John Burek points out an article written by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine, and one of the first retailers to deal with the fledgling Apple Computer in the late 1970s. Veit describes his introduction to the Apple I and his early interactions with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as they developed their early models. Quoting:
"After Woz hooked his haywire rig up to the living-room TV, he turned it on, and there on the screen I saw a crude Breakout game in full color! Now I was really amazed. This was much better than the crude color graphics from the Cromemco Dazzler. ... 'How do you like that?' said Jobs, smiling. 'We're going to dump the Apple I and only work on the Apple II.' 'Steve,' I said, 'if you do that you will never sell another computer. You promised BASIC for the Apple I, and most dealers haven't sold the boards they bought from you. If you come out with an improved Model II they will be stuck. Put it on the back burner until you deliver on your promises.'"
Priceless
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When Apple went public, Jobs would not give stock to several employees who made the Apple possible. My son gave them stock out of his allotment, or they would have never benefited from the long hours and devotion they put in to start the company. If you had given Jobs the money, he would have found a way to keep you from getting the stock.
I guess Wozniak is a class act. And as far as Jobs is concerned, well; I guess he and Gates are similar people. Actually, I don't think I've heard of Gates screwing employees out of stock.
I can't imagine that Woz isn't happy. He has money, time to play, time to spend time on whatever he wants without deadlines, and even a fan following.
Jobs clear gave and continues to give Apple a customer-focused vision - something that almost every other company fails at - to the level of a fault.
It is one thing to design an awesome computer - its another to take one that propels a multi-billion dollar industry forward.
Mr. Jobs: If you're going to post on Slashdot, at least log in.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"It is one thing to design an awesome computer - its another to take one that propels a multi-billion dollar industry forward."
Apparently it always takes a raving ego maniac to do it, however. And I'm not just talking about Steve Jobs. The world is run by the nearly and the wholly sociopathic. One could argue that those types drive progress, but there is plenty of wreckage left in their wakes. And in the end it might be that some people who got screwed over by people like Jobs refused to see him--and others like him--for what he was simply because they got dollar signs in their eyes.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
From 1986 to 1996, Microsoft's stock soared more than a hundredfold as the company's Windows operating system and Office applications dominated the PC industry.
That explosive climb made millionaires of employees who had accepted options as a substantial part of their compensation for 60-hour workweeks fueled by a diet of Twinkies, Coca-Cola and marshmallow Peeps. The sudden riches led many to refer to themselves as "lottery winners.
"While the exact number is not known, it is reasonable to assume that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000," said Richard S. Conway Jr., a Seattle economist whom Microsoft hired to study its impact on Washington State. "The wealth that has come to this area is staggering."
The Microsoft Millionaires Come Of Age [May 29, 2005]
_____
Not everyone draws the winning hand, of course - some simply come into the game too late.
The Few, the Tech-Savvy Few: Option Millionaires [Feb 11, 2007]
For comparison's sake, Microsoft currently employs about 90,000 world-wide.
In 1990, around 6,000.
"'...You promised BASIC for the Apple I, and most dealers haven't sold the boards they bought from you. If you come out with an improved Model II they will be stuck. Put it on the back burner until you deliver on your promises.'"
And lo, the hardware/software upgrade cycle was born.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
The movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ does a great job of showing the dynamics involved at the birth of the 'Personal' computer.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Not that I'm disagreeing completely with that statement but I don't think Jobs is anything like sociopathic. Egotistical and obsessive, perhaps, maybe narcissistic as well, but not sociopathic.
He is inarguably brilliant, in any case--not that I'd want to work closely with him.
This ain't rocket surgery.
I liked my old Apple II. Then one day apple was all about MAC and those of us who already spent a lot of money and time on the Apple II were left behind with no upgrade path, as though we were nothing more than garbage. That is why I have been a PC user ever since.
- James
The Apple users were much more oriented toward software and graphic applications. They were more interested in what a computer did then how it did it.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
In the 1980s, I made the following call, which changed my career -- and my life. call -151
C'mon. You think if that really was Jobs, he'd post anonymously? And miss another chance to have his name appear somewhere?
The Apple I and II BASIC were basically the same thing and the project was never put on hold. The Apple II had very little extra code, only for handling character I/O differently, some color graphics commands that I added, and the slot-directed character I/O commands (PR #6). If there was some trying to back out of implementing this BASIC on the Apple I, it was never communicated to me. I never spoke to Stan Veit myself about this.
In fact, I definitely had the completed Apple I BASIC running Star Trek on a dozen Apple I's in a store in Orange County, long before BASIC was adapted for the Apple II.
Bottom line is...it's news to me although it makes some sense (the push to support the Apple I).
OK a new size TV
That's a shock. Woz tends to be overly frank. But based on the article, Jobs acted in an impulsive kind of way, and stuck the author with big shipping bills without asking.
Table-ized A.I.
I read about this awhile go ago and thought it was relevant. For those that are still addicted to the Apple I, there is a functional replica with a few extra features. http://www.brielcomputers.com/replica1.html Just thought someone might get a kick out of it.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
It takes someone willing to take the risk, somone who can herd all the right cats, someone willing to endure scorn that comes with success, someone who loves their dreams more than their social life. That such people tend to be egotists and jerks is not at all surprising. Look at the people running free software projects: Linus, Richard, Theo, etc. They tend to be egotists and jerks too, for exactly the same reasons.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Wozniak just wanted to innovate and see how he could push the technological envelope. Jobs just wanted to see how far he could push his financial envelope... at the expense of the Woz and anyone else he could manipulate.
The glaring contrast between Wozniak and Jobs was one of the earliest influences that led me to despise manipulators of all varieties. I admired Woz and hated Jobs.
I agree with you. I met both in the early 80s and Woz was amazingly funny and cool. Jobs was a complete dick, and is probably why until this day my last apple products I have ever owned were my //+ and //E.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
To be more precise, it was TBWA Chiat/Day. Here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=436198
Circumcision is child abuse.
An associate of mine opened the first retail computer store in Anchorage selling the Apple II and the Commodore PET and hired me (supposedly on a share of the profits) to run it for him. I could have sold at least one Apple II each day, but the distributer in Seattle was hording the inventory and distributing it to local stores. I could only get one Apple II per week. I called Apple, talked to Steve Jobs, and he passed me off to someone else who flat-out told me they depended on the distributor so much that they couldn't do anything to make the distribution more fair, and I couldn't order directly from Apple because they had a territory agreement with the distributor. (I felt that orders should be filled on a first-ordered, first-filled basis, and we were paying cash up front for our inventory, so there was no credit problem. Dumb move; the distributer was probably using the money we sent with the order to finance their friends' stores.) It got worse when Apple came out with the hard drive. I was selling accessories, but they weren't moving very fast when nobody could get the computers to attach them to. I remember ordering a digitizer tablet from Houston Instruments, and how surprised I was that I couldn't just plug it into the computer and make it work. There was no interface, and I ended up buying the parts and soldering them together to make a serial port. (Lucky background in connecting modems, teletypes and CDC 160A and 160G systems earlier in my career.) Then I had to write the software: I tried to write it in the BASIC that was included on the Apple, but a couple of conversations with Bill Gates and he convinced me to write it assembly language. I spent many hours after work writing, first the communications code (which we would now call drivers), and then a small application to draw geometric shapes using the tablet. I had some help from Steve Wozniak and a lot of help from a guy named Chris Espinoza who was absolutely brilliant at explaining things over the phone. I was also lucky that I had a good background in assembly language programming from the Army and subsequent stints with CDC and Honeywell writing things like light pen interfaces. I managed to write the software and sell both tablets and two Apple II's to a couple of Burroughs guys for enough money to keep the store open a little longer.
As bad as my experience with Apple was, my relationship with Commodore pissed me off each time I had to deal with them. We had to buy 5 Commodore PET systems at a time. We had to put up $5000, which gave us a "credit line" of $5000 dollars, and which was enough to buy 5 systems (which sold retail for $1499). However, the manufacturing of the PET was sloppy, to say the least. I've had as many as 4 of the 5 in my order come in DOA. So I had to RMA the defective systems for repair. Then, in order to get more inventory, I had to put up another $5000 to "increase my credit line". In order to keep enough stock to sell, we ended up letting Commodore have $15,000 of deposit money. This shouldn't have been news to me: Before I worked for Honeywell in 1968, I sold business machines in Minneapolis. The guy I worked for sold Commodore calculators. Commodore actually came out with the first truly programmable calculator, which used a Nixie-tube display and magnetic cards to preserve the programs. (Marchant and Friden also had "programmable" calculators, but neither of them did recursion and both of them were twice the size of the Commodore.) My boss used to complain about the way Commodore treated him, for the same reasons. In 1990, in Houston, the vendor I worked for who sold the Amiga was still complaining about the same problems. (Rumor has it that Commodore was a Mafia-owned company and very risk-aversive while not being particularly customer-sensitive.)
Eventually, the owner/investor of the store decided that there was no point in keeping it open since there was not enough saleable stock to satisfy the customers or make a profit.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
I fail to see the connection to your shopping habits and Steve Jobs's personality.
Is there some kind of grudge where if someone who acts like a dick ever gets associated with a product, you will never buy it?
Cause that rules out Windows and all Microsoft products, most Chinese made products, most Korean made products, most Japanese products, etc.
GPL Deconstructed
This is from an excerpt from "Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer," published in 1993. You can buy the hardcover version here: http://www.amazon.com/Stan-Veits-History-Personal-Computer/dp/156664030X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228605724&sr=8-1. I have the softcover version. Just thought I'd point that out.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
There are a number of characteristics of good managers (risk taking, the ability to give negative feedback, and the drive to leverage other peoples work) that sociopaths are pretty good at. That's not to say that only sociopaths are good managers, but they are better managers than the average Joe.
My parents spent a ton of money buying the computers I wanted, and making sure I met my heroes of the time. They made my dreams come true. Jobs could have shook my hand and that would have made my day. Instead pushed my aside and kept walking. Woz gave me his autograph and talked to me for about 20 minutes. I met Gates in the late 80s and the mid 90s, and he was a nice guy both times. Jobs has always been a flake, so yes, it does take a toll on my shopping habits. If there is something of equal value and quality, and someone else sells it, I will buy it. Think Differently.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
In 2004, Woz gave a great presentation about his early work at Gnomedex 4.0.
"The Gnomedex Geeks-Gone-Wild crowd was fixated on this rare and brilliant presentation by Steve Wozniak, a true geek's geek. His playing started with games and pranks, crystal-set radios, reading Popular Electronics. Then he met Captain Crunch and got into telco-busting Blue Boxes.
Woz wanted to be an HP engineer forever and never thought he'd start a company, but his friend, Steve Jobs, said, "Let's sell it!" at every opportunity. Good thing he did, and good thing HP turned down Woz's offer for the rights to build what would become Apple's first computer. You'll enjoy this -- one of the best from Gnomedex 4.0."
The recordings are still available in MP3 form:
Part 1: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail214.html
Part 2: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail215.html
Direct links to the MP3s:
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Steve%20Wozniak%20Part%201%20-%20Gnomedex%204.0.mp3
http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/Steve%20Wozniak%20Part%202%20-%20Gnomedex%204.0.mp3
"Look at the people running free software projects: Linus, Richard, Theo, etc. They tend to be egotists and jerks too, for exactly the same reasons."
So what does that make the leader of the most trafficked site?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Those industries exist to concentrate wealth into the hands of people like Jobs. The fact that we get new toys to play with is almost incidental...
They go hand-in-hand.
Economy of scale. Hobbyist pursuit vs wide-market pursuit. The fact is Woz hanging out at a computer enthusiasts group doesn't get his machine into millions of homes without somebody like Jobs to expand the vision, get investment, hire other people, etc.
I know it's easy to hate rich business people, and there's a lot of bad with the good, but there are tangible benefits.
because of his leech-like attachment to Wozniak and his ability to manipulate him.
Woz made his choices. He was an adult. He seems to have done ok by Jobs. Maybe you should ask Woz himself if he agrees with your sentiments. He's already posted once in this thread.