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Wozniak's Comments on "Pirates"
webslacker wrote in
to tell us that Steve Wozniak has posted his commnts on
the TNT Movie, Pirates of the Silicon Valley. He notes several things and
clarifies other things. As many of you noted, the movie made
him out to be one of the coolest guys ever to live. I'd say
thats very deserved. And I'm not saying that just
because we had an Apple ][ (on a cart wheeled from class
to class!) in my elementary school.
SimonK wrote many things I agree with, but he also wrote:
Give it a few years and you'll be joining the libertarian party, reading Ayn Rand and being beseiged by the FBI in some compound in Montana.
Hey, painting the stroke of Libertarianism a little broad are we. While many Libertarians admire and agree with Ayn Rand, she does not speak for all Libertarians. Many do not follow her Objectivist philosophy.
Secondly, those people who form anti-government anti-conspiracy militias have nothing to do with Libertarians. Libertarians generally feel that there is a place for government, it just should be a much smaller place than the one we have now occupies.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Good ole' Gerald Holmes. You must admit that he's a mildly talented satirist (grin).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by 2B||!2B:
I totally agree. If only it were possible! But it's probably about 5 years too late. At Phase5 in Germany (www.phase5.de) they used to have lots of info on their A\\Box project, which is a modern (and just as leading-edge for its time) version of the Amiga they planned on creating. But the info has gone away, which means it probably won't happen. Gateway makes a bunch of promises about reviving the Amiga, but I'll believe it when I see it. My guess is at best they'll do a faster (PPC) version of the 4000.
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
People don't "deserve their money" for "working harder". They are given money in exchange for something that someone else considers to be of even greater value. If you can provide something of value (say, a good haircut, for example) to somebody, he'll give you somewhat less money than he thinks the haircut is worth TO HIM. How hard you work, what it's worth to you, and all other such considerations are irrelevant to the person who pays you. If he thinks that he'd rather have the money than the haircut, you won't get the money. Simple as that.
In a world where hair stylist are plenty, hair grows on (most) every head, and it's the norm for folks in the workforce to tailor their image through hair style, you're certainly right. Given this there's implicit demand for hair styling, there's many small shops providing a popular service among the community, and in this situation a free market works quite well.
But your analogy here in comparison to Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and the many other would be technological Robber Barons of the late twentieth falls quite short.
If you provide the same haircut to two people, you'll get twice the money. That's because you've created twice the value, not because you've worked twice as hard. How hard you worked to do it isn't what gets them to pay you. It's solely the sum value you have provided to those two people, IN THEIR OWN OPINION.
In a free market, where many barbers provide similar services, one gets competition by price and quality of service. I'm all for this, and find this model of many small shops competing on product and service value quite appealing. By no means do I support government management of production either in the Fascist or Communist model. But by that very token, neither do I support single corporate producers either. This is no different from a single air carrier like Delta monopolizing the Cincinnati airport, locking flyers in to their pricing scheme.
In this example those wishing to fly into Cincinnati airport don't choose which air carrier based on some imaginary quotient of "value", but simply based on who can sell them the ticket. That is, one air carrier, Delta, who gets to choose the ticket price based on their local monopoly. Where have we seen this kind of behavior in the software industry? Don't you find it relevant to note that Office2000 will be sold at over $800 per license when it's released?
That's value for you.
Now, if you can figure out a way to snap your fingers and provide the same haircut to a million people, you'll get a million times the money. Not because you worked a million times as hard, but because you have created a million times the value, as judged by the people who owned the money that was given you. Nobody else's opinion matters, because it was THEIR money. They presumably valued their own money, but they demonstrably valued the haircut even more.
Ironically, as far as software distribution goes this is exactly the case! It costs almost no more money to distribute 1000 copies as it costs to distribute 1 copy... especially if we're talking about Internet distribution. By arguing that buyers have the economic power to refuse the sale you're simply blinding yourself to the obvious power a proprietary standard can impose upon a whole society, thus forcing us into economic bondage.
This is no different from how speculative investments ravage our world economy by moving capital without productivity gains across local economies to exploit minor price differentiations. Bill Gates is betting you, the buyer, would rather pay an exorbitant fee in order to stay up to date with his ever changing document format standard, rather than attempt single handedly to overthrow his standards control... but do you honestly think Gates is providing real value to the economy as a whole by these means? I sure don't.
MIT economist Lestor Thurow discussed a similar issue in last months Atlantic Monthly, where he published a long article on the "New Economy", and how it relates to the monopoly economies of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. It's a well written and informative article, I encourage others to go to the library and check it out. Anyway, the point I'm pulling from this article is that there's a huge difference between someone who creates a new thing which generates real economic value in the traditional sense, and those who use differences in market evaluations of any arbitrary good across markets in order to generate a false profit through speculation.
Of course, you're also under the false pretension that people act as rational buyers, which one look at a all the junk for sale at most supermarket checkout counters should dissuade you of such silly ideas.
Huge wealth, unless it is taken by force, is evidence of a lot of people having received a lot of value, in their own opinion. How hard YOU judge the wealthy to have worked couldn't be more irrelevant.
Or evidence that those buyers had no choice but to buy from a single source. In that event the monopoly holder must use a form of economic coercion to force buyers and choke out potential competition. This is a form of either gambling or graft and corruption, because such a situation cannot last forever in an economy which favors equilibrium through competition.
Now, how does this relate to open competition, Free Software, and Steve Wozniack? There are plenty who have argued that the Free Software and Open Source model support competition through meritocracy. While this isn't the same as competition by price and service, it is a foundation for competition among the developers which creates a fitness function allowing for an evolutionary model of development. And how different is this from a traditional economic model, except that what's exchanged is not monetary tokens, but the value of peer support and recognition.
And Woz most certainly deserves the recognition of his peers for having created many useful things, and also for having behaved responsibly in our community. His support of schools and children stands head and shoulders above anything of "value" the like of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs may have ever created over the course of their lives.
Just as Woz says:
I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it.
He is the proverbial compassionate hacker. He was perfectly happy to just give out the schematics, and found ethical dilemma in building a business which might turn into a serious money maker. This is no different from the likes of rms, Linus, Eric Raymond, Larry Wall, and the now very large number of people out creating such wonderful things as gnome and KDE, GIMP, Python, Apache, and the list just goes on.
Doesn't it just blow your mind that this guy is out teaching high school instead of finding new ways to make himself richer? Don't you wish you could have been lucky enough tp have taken classes from this guy? He does these things because he enjoys the labor, and wants to help others enjoy the success of creating new things! What better lesson would you want your children to learn?
That he made enough money to comfortably live in ease for the rest of his life may be blind luck -- but don't you think he deserves it more than Gates, Jobs, Ellison, and all the other blowhards who probably haven't written a line of code in 20 years?
Woz is a man I can respect.
I would wager Woz is an INFP ... a rare type of person. He seems very cool, perhaps even uninterested in things unless he can give it an ethical purpose. I just kind of pick that up from him; the way he was uninterested in the business, and the fact that he teaches children now.
.. what do you think? INFJ? INTJ? INTP?
I wonder what his take on OSS is.
Stallman
support gun control: take guns from cops
There is a difference between economics the sort-of-science and the normative interpretation of capitalism you are relying on to disparage people.
Economics says nothing about whether people deserve their wealth or whether they have any control over other people's. It is a science, and therefore makes no value judgements. It is not a very good science either, and therefore does not seem like a good basis for your morality.
Nice to see you've got a good persecution complex going there as well. Your post is a +1, insightful, which I have to say is not where I would have put it, since it has no relevance. Give it a few years and you'll be joining the libertarian party, reading Ayn Rand and being beseiged by the FBI in some compound in Montana.
To get back to the subject in hand, Economics says nothing about whether people 'deserve' their wealth. It most certainly does not say that people's wealth corresponds to 'how much value they've provided' (which incidentally is pretty close to being as daft as saying it corresponds to how hard they've worked). Thats a conclusion you can only reach by assuming all markets are perfect, which they domonstrably are not, and that people judge value correctly, which the do not.
The economic system, and most especially the stock market by means of which most fabulously rich people get that way, is a human construct, and as such we can change it. If we want to change so people are rewarded for working hard, so be it. Personally I don't, but I can see the appeal of the idea.
Haven't seen _Pirates_ yet, but just wanna reminisce just 1 sec about the late 70s/early 80s, being about 10 years old, using my friend's Apple II, and knowing my life would never be the same. I'd later get a Franklin Ace 1000 (Apple II clone w/lower case & 64k!!) and that was it, I was hooked. Jobs may have been running the business, but to us kids "Woz" WAS Apple.
Woz had an attitude which, I can't fully say how, sublimated itself into my young conciousness. He was a cool, almost fatherly role model who set an example of what it meant to do the "Right Thing"... A crazy, bearded silicon Jedi Knight, a Wizard...I'll never forget going to the computer store to check out the IIgs "Woz" limited edition and seeing his handwriting...thinking "how cool!"
Oh, and YES, who can forget (in no particular order) Locksmith, Dalton's Disk Disintigrator, The Beagle Bros., H-Wings in Sneakers, The Novation Apple Cat, Castle Wolfenstein, 80-column cards, GBBS, Ruski Duck, Cat-Fur, G-files, Space Eggs, The Wizard and the Princess, peeks & pokes, "cracked by" splash screens, Ascii Express, Lemonade Stand in lo-res, call -151, 300/202/212, tape drives... ah, those were the days.
Thanks Woz!
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think, more importantly, that Jobs made the PC accessable to people who couldn't build their own my his "crass commercialism." If it just remained Woz handing out schematics for free to his buddies in the homebrew computer club, how many PC would have been made? Very few. Only the hardcore EE nerds would have built them. By selling them, Jobs actually spread Woz's vision of a PC to the masses. I think many people who got into computers in the late 70's and early 80's, and later went on to get jobs in the industry, have to thank Jobs as well as Woz. Well, OK, we'll thank Woz a whole lot more than Jobs ;)
The same can't be said of Gates. Granted, Microsoft did create an early monitor system for one of the first PC's, but that didn't really trigger the PC revolution. By the time he scored his major coup, tricking IBM into buying his non-existant DOS, the PC revolution was set to happen anyway. Whether he or someone else (such as Gary Kildall) supplied the DOS was irrelevant.
Pretty good Linux advocacy parody!
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Microsoft Multiplan for the TI 99/4A on cartridge.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Microsoft also made a 8080 card for the Apple II that allowed you to run CP/M. That and the old Bus Mouse adaptor card is the only internal MS hardware I know of.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I guess we'll all know who's a MacBigot now...
Quoting from my copy of "The Mac Bathroom Reader" (now renamed "Apple Confidential" by Owen Linzmayer:
"I was on a plane going to a user group club in Fort Lauderdale to promote the Mac, along with some other members of the Mac team," recalls Wozniak. "Andy Hertzfield had just read Zap, a book about Atari which said that Steve Jobs designed Breakout. I explained to him that we both worked on it and got paid $700. Andy corrected me, 'No, it says here it was $5,000.' When I read in the book how Nolan Bushnell actually paid Steve $5,000, I just cried."
I don't doubt this story for an instant, but still, it's apocryphal at best. The fact that it has been butchered so many times in so many ways says a lot. It's like all of those quotes that have been attributed to Bill Gates ( e.g. "No one will ever need more than 640k" ).
What kind of authority is Zap! anyway?
If Wozniak and RMS would get along well. Both are brilliant, and both have made incredible contributions to the field of computer technology. Both dislike suits that are in it for greed. But Woz is like a more docile, fun loving version or RMS.
RMS: "ALL SOFTWARE MUST BE FREE FOR EVERYBODY OR I WILL BE (am) ONE VERY UNHAPPY CAMPER. IF YOU'RE NOT WITH US, YOU'RE AGAINST US!!!"
Woz: "Wow! This is cool! What would happen if i tried doing this? Neat! Heay, come check this out! What would be a cool practical joke I could pull off using this?..."
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Steve Jobs got an assignment from Atari to design the circuitry for the sequel to Pong, which would be called Breakout. After a while, Jobs decided he was in over his head, so he asked his friend Woz to help him finish. Jobs told Woz that if they could design it with less than 50 chips, they'd get $700, and if they could design it with less than 40 chips, they'd get $1000. After four days of work, they got it down to 42 and decided sleep was more important than the 300 extra bucks they would've gotten. Jobs turned in Breakout, and wrote Woz a check for his half of the $700.
It wasn't until 1984 that someone showed Woz a chapter in Zap! (a book about Atari) where Steve Jobs got credited for making Breakout. Woz explained to the guy that he and Jobs worked on it together and they got paid $700. The guy says no, it says right here in the book that it was for $5000.
The quicktime lawsuit was settled beforehand for an undisclosed sum. People estimate it at $400 million, but that's just speculation.
Suck.com
AFAIK, the commitment was that for 5 years, Microsoft would publish Office for Mac on parity with Office for Windows. Since the commitment was made in 1997, it follows that it'll expire in 2002. And yeah, I also wonder what'll happen after that...
Wow... for someone who had such a big part in personal-computer history, he sure looks like a pretty down-to-earth guy.
:-) I, for one, can attest to having encountered a great many hamsters named after him.
Of course, with a name like Woz, you just can't help but be lovable
P.S.: Sharp-looking site, too!
iSKUNK!
You're misremembering.
:-)
The MITS Altair (the original) had the metal toggle switches. The one with the red and blue plastic switches (which I thought looked cooler, because they looked like the switches on the front of a PDP-8 or PDP-11) was the Imsai, a different company. (And perhaps the first microcomputer "clone", being essentially the same as the Altair behind the front panel.)
(And having toggled my share of PDP-8 and PDP-11 programs in through the front panel, I'd guess that the Imsai was easier to program -- less wear and tear on the fingertips than those metal toggle switches!
-- Alastair
I see the woz.org has been slashdotted. So I've posted a mirror at
http://www.discover.net/~still/
No images, just the important stuff. I expect woz.org to be back up soon.
Jonathan
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The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
People who make their own fortunes do work extremely hard. They eat, drink, breathe, and sleep their business. They work 24/7 and take naps in their rented offices. It is a specific personality type.
There is a reason why Bill Gates stays constantly busy running Microsoft, even though most of us, with his money, would buy a gigantic compound outside of a major city, have it networked with 1000-or-so top-of-the-line workstations, and hold a non-stop LAN party for the rest of eternity (well, at least, that's what I would do). It's not because he wants to get richer. It's because doing work, building businesses, etc. is what people with a personality like Gates' live for.
I'm not justifying his riches, just explaining how you get to be worth $50B
No sig.
Did anyone see this? This was buried a little more deeply on his page, and refers to the auction of the first Apple I.
WOZ: I wanted to give the first Apple I, on a PC board, to Liza LO*OP of the LO*OP Center in Cotati, California. I took Steve [Jobs] up there and she showed us how she rolled a PDP-11 around to elementary schools and told the students how a computer was just a collection of programs written by people and didn't have a mind of it's own. 4th through 6th graders. I admired this and wanted to give her the first one. Jobs actually made me buy it, if you can believe that, for $300. I did and gave it to Liza. The one being advertised must be number 2.
This is very interesting. I wonder if the auction house realizes that it isn't selling the original Apple I like they claim? Supposedly, Jobs had identified it as being authentic, so I guess Woz disagrees. Hmmmm...
The full story was published in Next Generation magazine a few months back. Jobs was working for Atari at the time, and the company was designing the mainboard for the Breakout arcade game. Breakout was a pre-microprocessor machine, built with discrete logic, so it was to Atari's advantage to optimize the design to use as few chips as possible. Jobs took the problem to Woz, who did a phenomenal job of optimizing the board in exchange for half of Jobs' bonus. Jobs told Woz that he got $500 out of it and paid him accordingly... but Jobs really got $5000! Woz literally cried when he found out, several years later, what his friend had done.
The punchline (if you can call it that) was that Woz's changes worked, but were totally incomprehensible to the engineers at Atari, so his design never went into production. Sad but true.
--
Ruthless exploiter and brilliant visionary are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I'm not arguing that Jobs was more than a mediocre techie (although, he was hireable by Atari...). But consider:
Apple - graphics, keyboard, and BASIC
PARC - limited GUI, mouse, computing by metaphor
NeXT - microkernel, advanced OOP libraries
Pixar - digital media done well
Apple - iMac - the first viable step towards a network computer
Jobs seems to have a pretty good knack for seeing something cool and then imagining how it could be even cooler, and exploited more fully. He's tried to articulate his ideas and sell people on them. That's what a visionary does, and it's hard to think of anyone else in the computer industry who does it better than Jobs. Contrast Jobs' ventures with Microsoft, which has shown itself to be a purely reactive, paranoid corporation.
To a certain extent, Jobs reminds me of Miles Davis. He's restless, demanding, smart, and temperamental. I love Davis' music but I'm not sure it'd've been easy to be friends with him.
Btw, he's only come of his business skills of late. He's learned those the hard way and I think he's still probably learning. And if he cared so much about business, he'd be worth a lot more than he is now (ie. he gets paid $1/yr. by Apple and he dumped off all but one of his shares of Apple stock long before they rebounded; not that he isn't a billionaire...).
So, y'know, don't want this to be a stereotypical "Macs suck!" thread or anything; this is just how I see things.
Jon
Hey, if those are still out.. does that mean I can build my own Apple I?
I don't know this for sure, but I think the chips that the Apple I used are hard to come by anymore (Like memory chips, processors, etc.) I'd imagine that your best chance would be to partially redesign it to use modern-day, easily available parts. That might be something worth writing to Woz about.
Oh, wait a sec, it might violate US Supercomputer Export laws... Sorry, couldn't resist.
-- Terry
In an article (I think it was in Byte) there's a story about Woz going back to college to continue his academic education. Of course, by then Apple was a billion dollar company so he enrolled under a false name. During an economics class, the lecturer went on a rant about how companies only try to cheat and steal from customers with bad products, and Woz stood up to disagree, but was cut down by the teacher. He says something along the lines of - "Here I was, the founder of one of the most successful companies in history, and he was telling me I didn't know what I was talking about and I had to just sit there and listen." Cracked me up.
Another really good one - Woz hacked the phone to make free international calls, and as a prank, he and his buddies called up the Pope. The bishop who answered asked them who wanted to speak to him in the middle of the night.
Woz: "Henry Kissinger".
Bishop (now suspicious) : "You don't sound like Henry Kissinger".
There's another story he relates about writing a spreadsheet at Apple, and being the nice guy he is, he's nervous about the deadline and worried about being fired. Woz. Worried about being fired from Apple. Well, he had some Star Wars contacts call his boss and tantalize him with some rare memoribilia. I forget what exactly it was, but it was a pretty funny trick he played.
One more story I've read (and I don't know if this is true) is that during their early days together, Jobs told Woz they'd split a payment 50-50. But he lied about the amount and told Woz it was $500, when it was actually twice that, while pocketing the rest himself. Apparently Woz found this out, and things were never the same between them again. (Can somebody confirm if this is true?).
L.
For those of us who don't get TNT or missed it. I have the move in RA, on my web site.
http://kozmik.guelph.on.ca
Enjoy.
Oh boy if you wants to see a cartoon I mades for pirates of the siliconium valleys you should looks at http://www.fre eyellow.com/members7/geraldholmes/MScartoon1.html its pretty funny theres also other cartoons and some good stuff about how Bill Gates is the smartest man ever to live ever.