Slashdot Mirror
Steve Wozniak "Steve Jobs Played No Role In My Designs For the Apple I & II"
mikejuk writes: In a recent interview with very lucky 14-year old Sarina Khemchandani for her website, ReachAStudent, Steve Wozniak was more than precise about the role of Steve Jobs. "Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He'd never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn't know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that's what he wanted to do. The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed." He also says a lot of interesting things in the three ten minute videos about life, electronics and education.
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Plenty of computer manufacturers manage to sell product without you ever hearing the names of any of their marketing workers. Apple's janitors were also essential to their success as a company, but unless we start giving everyone praise, it's not fair to give any to someone like Jobs. It's the engineers who made the product, everyone else was auxiliary.
Of course, but if you listen to the narrative being peddled by a lot of people (including prominent media and websites), you'd think Jobs was nothing short of a one-man company genius, able to do tech design, aesthetic design, management, logistics, sales and marketing all by himself. The Steve Wozniaks and Jonathan Ives of this world tend to be quickly forgotten when attempting to create the new messiah, which Jobs entirely embraced, and fuck the ones who helped him. As with most large success stories, it involves a talented team and lots of luck rather than a single person magically doing everything perfectly.
It doesn't help that Jobs leveraged people like Woz, who's very candid and even humble, while being a total arrogant prick himself, even as the media try to portray him as an aspirational model.
Basically.
Although I'm not a fan of Apple or Jobs, I am a fan of Woz.
When you let techies build things you get Linux which is great. But I'm not installing it for my 70 year old mother.
My older sister was in her late 60s and not at all tech savvy when she first encountered Linux. It only took her five minutes with a live version of Ubuntu to decide that it was what she wanted. I helped her install it, dual boot with Windows, and with access to her Windows partition so that she could get at much-needed files. It's been years since she's needed to boot Windows, and after the first few weeks of getting used to Linux, her tech-support questions to me dropped to less than 5% of what they were under Windows and have stayed that way ever since. (Most of her questions I can solve in just a few minutes and the rest go to the Ubuntu forum.) You don't need to be a computer geek or a Unix guru to run Linux; you just need to select a distro that's designed for average people, such as Ubuntu.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers.
No doubt true. But if were not for Steve Jobs, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Woz probably wouldn't be uncountably rich, and no-one would have heard of the Apple I and Apple II (they probably wouldn't have even been called that).
Why do tech people consistently dismiss the contribution of people who actually market what they make?
Sometimes people forget that Linux has their own "asshole with a vision" as well. In fact, I'd say Linux actually had two. Both of those individuals had a very strong presence (along with contentious personalities) and helped to shape Linux into what it is today during it's formative years, and not only from a technological standpoint.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Largest company by capitalization value, not by revenue. That just means the stock is way overpriced.
By revenue, Apple is ranked 17th.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So Jobs role was to judge that Apple had enough of a monopoly on design to make more money by screwing the customer and throwing away the downscale/rational part of the market.
Make products that deliberately wear out, make products that can not keep pace and must be replaced. That was his contribution.
No one can prove that Apple wouldn't have been just as successful or more successful if it didn't try to screw its consumers that way.
But I must admit that by screwing the proles they gave themselves some cache and the proles seemed to beg to be screwed. Maybe there's some weird classism where people WANT to waste money on an inferior product to prove that they can afford act like a rich person.
Devils advocate.
How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's? Jobs provided much success so people could use the Apple II and bring in the revenue.
I am a fan of Steve Jobs for marketing and his CEO abilities. If it were not for Steve Jobs the Mac would not still be here. Actually Apple finally killed the floppy drive and gave us USB. The original iMacs were so popular it finally got the peripheral makers on board which benefited the PC.
Steve also saved us somewhat from a more evil MS. When the iPhone came out WindowsCE finally died! Remember you could only buy something from the carrier store like $4 for a crappy .mid syntthasized ringtone etc? Windows improved and pricing became better for those stuck on the PC side. Google helped too with making Windows 10 and VS community edition free.
Yeah I would probably admit I would not want to work directly for him. I am a PC user in the camp of not hating Apple but acknowledge his move to perfection did help move the PC and mobile industry over and people love his products whether you do or not.
Long term it was healthy for computing ecosystem. Even Intel today is making each new i5/i7 use less and less power which really started from Jobs perfection in the days of the Ipad which Intel wants in. How is this a bad thing?
http://saveie6.com/
As someone who programmed and used an Apple II and III and original owner of a Fat Mac...this is all common knowledge. Essentially Steve saw what Woz had and said, "hey, we should sell this."
Apple ][ dev here as well. My recollection from those days was that Woz was the engineer and Jobs was the salesman. From Mac days onward Jobs was the salesman and the designer in the look-and-feel sense, not in any technical sense.
While sales and look-at-feel are certainly important, when at a '83 trade show as a developer and returning to our booth and telling my buddies I just talked to "Steve" for a few minutes over at the Apple booth, they were excited. Then I confessed it was Jobs not Woz and the mood shifted to, eh, ok.
We certainly recognized that Jobs was essential to Apple's success, its just that we were engineers and the business/sales side held little interest for us. Again, post-Mac, our appraisal of Jobs improved due to his look-and-feel design work.
Woz is AWESOME!
I was playing around with putting an Apple 2 on an FPGA (yeah, I know. Been done before). I design ASICs for a living. But staring as hit clock generation circuitry, I could not make heads or tails of how the darned thing actually worked!
Given the specifications, I have do doubt that I could make a circuit that would do the same thing in a more straightforward way, but it would probably be bigger and cost more.
Waz is extremely clever in optimizing things. FYI. If you have not heard the story, reading how the floppy drive controller was developed is an extremely interesting story.
I am NOT an Apple fanboy. I do not own a single Apple product except an Apple 2. I hate the way that the current Apple locks everything down.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."