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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.
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.
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.
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.