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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.
i hear hissing sounds from the apple camp.
I'm sure we already all knew it, but it is good to hear it come from him for once.
I think that's obvious. As a developer you have my respect and my sympathy for crossing paths with such assholes like Jobs.
but with fruit
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.
The best product is meaningless if you don't have someone like Jobs shoving it down people's throats to get them to buy. Same with Woz, if you don't have something really cool to sell, then no one would have listened to Steve for very long. Two sides of the same coin. I'm not an Apple or Jobs fan, but obviously Steve did a lot of things right for a long time.
I doubt Woz was very good at sales. I doubt Steve was very good at building computers. No product "sells itself", and anyone who really believes that is an idiot.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that
au contraire mon ami... He invented a style that makes billions. Do not be so hasty in judgement.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yes, we knew Jobs had an over-inflated ego. That came out long before his death.
I am so sick of the cult of authority worship.
It's part of the worship of the wealthy.
It's part of the denigration of work, as the executives go around saying that engineers are and should be interchangable, we're fry cooks, and working us to death is slightly more efficient than allowing us lives. And so we should all be worked to death.
because of the media's worship of Jobs. What's he anyways? An executive? The man famous for bullshit? "Reality distortion field"
For bad decisions like making the first macs impossible to expand?
For bad decisions like not making products where you can change a battery that's lost half it's capacity in six months?
Don't you feel a bit cheated?
Mr. Wozniak, like most real doers got wrongfully overshadowed by a BIG TALKING BLOWHARD BULLSHITTER named Steve Jobs.
* I do NOT like "speaking ill of the dead" but it's only FACT... my fellow polish descended U.S. Citizen got screwed for a big mouth bullshit artist - a fucking LEECH who hung onto Mr. Wozniak's coattails since he lacked what it REALLY took (technical know-how) since ANY damn fool can do P.R. work!
APK
P.S.=> It's always that way - & it ALWAYS makes me laugh when I see things like "The 'great inventor' Steve Jobs" who invented ZERO getting headlines like that... apk
Considering how Apple nearly died when Steve was gone, and became the most profitable company on the planet after he returned, it's obvious that he did something.
Basically, Jobs was no engineer at all, he was a salesperson, the kind who could sell ice to eskimos by dressing it up somehow. A technology company needs both. Most companies aren't going to get far if they can't figure out how to sell stuff to customers, but a tech company also needs technology to sell, meaning you need engineers to make it.
I don't think any of this stuff is a revelation. Steve was obviously gifted with being able to market and sell stuff, and probably also at being able to know what kind of things *would* sell well and what wouldn't, and maybe some very high-level direction for changes to be made to sell things. The engineers like Woz are the ones who actually made everything happen though.
Quote is addressing a wee bit of a straw man. Still, it's a good drop of blood in the water for the Jobs haters to turn out.
Which was no doubt the idea behind posting it in the first place.
This is hardly news for anyone, but reminded me of an anecdote from when both Steves were in their early twenties that summarizes the dynamic between them nicely:
When Steve Jobs worked at Atari, the company was working on creating the arcade game Breakout, which required 80 Integrated Circuits (ICs). The less ICs there were, the cheaper the games would be to produce, so Nolan Bushnell (Atari's president) offered $100 for every IC that could be knocked out of the design. Jobs brought Woz the challenge, and over four days and nights at Atari they put together a design that only required 30 ICs. Bushnell gave Jobs his $5000 bonus, which Jobs "split" with Wozniak by telling him it was a $700 bonus, giving him "half," or $350.
They were both exceptional. Woz an exceptional engineer, Jobs an exceptional sleazebag.
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?
I'm not sure many people actually believe that. The funny part of that though is that Gates really did have a direct hand in building the first MIcrosoft BASIC interpreter, and indeed was contributing code right up until the version of MS BASIC that made its way into the Tandy portable computers of the 1980s.
To give Jobs some credit, as I understood it, he did demand the plastic case for the Apple II (which might sound completely uninteresting except that it was a major part in making the II look like a professionally designed tool for everyone, rather than something a nerd soldered together in his or her garage.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Au contraire, mon cher, he did not invent a style, if at all his designers invented it for him. Big difference.
By your logic, the US Patent Office should get the credit for Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
On this Labor Day, you should know better than most that labor precedes capital.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Correct. I did the engineering brain work to design the Apple ][ but Jobs productized it and sold it. His productization, like a plastic housing, was very important to the usability of that product. He did excellent marketing of it. Even though it wasn't his conception, it was his only major business success at Apple until his return. The monies it earned allowed Jobs to create the Apple ///, LISA, Macintosh and NeXT cube. I think the marketing and execution errors of those products were largely due to Jobs wanting to make himself a leader and often rushing products out too fast with poor marketing judgements, despite the fact that he spokes as the marketing genius. When he returned he took time and didn't share the iPhone with Bill Gates in advance. He got the product done the right way and it was very good because it was for himself too, not outsiders, a market that would make him money. It had to be good enough for him to use.
He doesn't SOUND like a Republican
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.
Apple would have collapsed even if Jobs stuck around. It was a company that grew too big, too fast. It was a feeding ground for people with grand ideas and even more grandiose egos. Like many of it's contemporaries, it was doomed to fall.
Jobs' return was a different story, but a lot can still be attributed to luck. To Jobs credit, he was a more mature businessman and he reentered at a time when Apple realized that it had to be more humble. He probably would have saved the company regardless of what happened. Yet there was a lot of luck. Things like the iPod were initially directed at Apple's existing customers. The growth that it triggered and the products that it enabled were far from a bygone conclusion.
The vacuum of consumer demand for computers was created and Steve Jobs was in the right place at the right time.
He's no more special than any other lottery winner.
As mentioned, NeXT was not a fork of Mac OS. The other choice at the time was Beos as the replacement for OS9 which would have made an interesting parallel future if it happened.
I'm old enough that I think of Jobs as the guy who almost killed Apple. I can still hear the echo of him saying "Apple II forever" as he milked it to death in favour of the stripped down Lisa. It was hard to sell a 32 bit computer with a graphical UI and only 128 KBs of memory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Avie Tevanian was one of the more important software engineers at NeXT, but he wasn't the only one. He wasn't one of the NeXT founders, he was hired after NeXT was started.
Woz's design was genius level work, things like an RLL floppy controller while others were using FM or MFM, or FSK to tape (ack). Computer designs back then were dead simple, no reference designs needed for conventional work. Designing with the 6502 was particularly easy.
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NeXT was a flop. They couldn't sell anything. It was vastly overpriced and hardly world class. The only reason that Jobs ended up back at Apple was because the OS that Apple was using at the time was hopelessly outdated and unstable and Scully was running the company into the ground. Obviously they couldn't use Windows so they needed something and the UNIX based system that NeXT was using fit the bill.
Mind you, the first few iterations of OSX were pretty bad as well. Slow, buggy and crash prone but it was a start. Apple stuck with it and got it right. I'll give Jobs credit for switching to Intel based processors. That was probably the smartest thing he did. And I'll give him credit for the whole "vertical stack" thing where Apple builds the hardware and designs the software. That was smart.
But Woz was the hands on guy. He was the guy that got it done and I don't think he gets enough credit for the overall success of the company. I'm not anti Apple or anything. I like their products. I just tend to think that Jobs gets more credit than he deserves.
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.
Now this all comes out after his death..Sounds like an over inflated ego to me
That thought crossed my mind as well. Since Jobs ain't there to contradict him....
Speaking as a former Apple ][ dev, this was all common knowledge. Jobs was the salesman, Woz was the engineer. That said, sales was certainly a very important and critical role. Both Steves were absolutely essential to Apple's success. Jobs got an upgrade in our view post-Mac due to his look-and-feel design work, but still he was never thought of as a hands on tech person.
Woz is the hero of the Apple story to engineers, Jobs is the hero to wall street. The mainstream news and the public at large merely lean towards the wall street perspective.
Of course I know who Weird Al is; I remember when "Even Worse" was brand new, but I never wasted time watching infomercials. If I stayed up late, I was either watching Johnny Carson or doing something on my computer.
Yes, Jobs was a salesdrone, but he helmed the company when it made the iPod and the iPhone, two phenomenally successful products. That's what he's going to be remembered for. Those products will be in museums (if they aren't already). Ronco products will not. Unfortunately, the nature of our society is that the corporate leaders are the ones who are remembered, and they're almost never engineers (and in fact, when engineers have headed companies, the results have usually been not that great). So the engineers who make the products are never remembered by name (except for Wozniak, a big exception, though even here most people-on-the-street probably won't recognize his name the way they would Jobs'), while the salesCEOs who peddled their products are.
Apple also had at least two internal Mac OS replacement projects over the years. Neither getting close to where NeXT was.
What killed Lisa more than anything else was the $10K price tag. I got to use one a bit and it was quite useable, at least to an Apple ][ and very early Mac user.
becuase they're geeks and (understandably, self-servingly) want to point how how central and important geeks are to, say, computing and technology hardware and software development, design, and production.
But it is one of the rarest geniuses on earth to be able to conduct a group of people to produce to their maximum potential, to be able to somehow lead talent to actually produce what the talent is capable of as a group and to do things that everyone else wants to do, but everyone else also falls short of time and time again.
The founding of Apple was really far less miraculous than the turnaround, when Jobs was able to get a huge bureaucracy to start making really high-quality, completely realized products without the significant compromises that everyone else took for granted. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro right now. For many years I used Thinkpads. There is a difference in the aesthetic, as is so often pointed out, but it's a difference that in the aesthetic of functionalism that has to be realized through design, logistics, manufacturing, etc. involving teams of many very smart people. The Macbook Pro isn't perfect, but it's a far superior machine to the Thinkpads I used to use, not because it's faster or has more features but because it has fewer flaws and compromises; it represents something far closer to a fully realized idea and goal.
The same thing goes for smartphones and tablets. I used to carry around Treos in the early 2000s. I used them heavily. They were my go-to tools. I wrote a book on a Treo, no kidding, riding on the subway every morning, that's still generating me about $20 in royalties a year (big money, heh). But I used them. The same thing for my Windows CE tablets, first a Vadem Clio and later a ViewSonic something-or-other. But they were exercises in taken-for-granted compromises. They were "as good as it gets," it takes a big company to design and make such things, and the end products, though flawed, were the best that could be accomplished. They were "hard problems" and "best-case solutions" as products. They worked well.
Or so everyone thought.
And then? iPhone. And iPad. And they set an entirely new bar and benchmark for their respective industries. The previous products were obsolete in a moment and everyone has struggled to catch up. Tim Cook has not been able to replicate this precisely because he does not have the particular genius that Steve Jobs had. That's not to say that other people inside Apple don't also have genuis of many varieties. Half of the people on Slashdot (okay, not half, but some) are probably geniuses in their own right, in algorithms, or some area of hardware engineering, or whatever.
That doesn't take away from the fact that Steve Jobs was a rare genius in management and leadership. He was the opposite of the pointy-haired boss. We make fun of the pointy-haired boss precisely because we realize that it is the norm. Jobs was not the clueless leader; he was the leader that always somehow managed to get it right and squeeze more great, historic, memorable, and compromise-free stuff out of the geniuses at his company, by far, than the vast majority of other leaders—even the highly regarded, very well paid ones—are able to ever come close to getting out of the geniuses at their own companies.
That's not nothing. And given the multiplier affect of getting the best out of many geniuses, it's quite a lot.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW