
Jobs and Woz (2011) - pmoriarty
https://www.filfre.net/2011/09/jobs-and-woz/
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_hardwaregeek
Woz is an absolutely stunningly good hardware designer and programmer, but I
agree with this article's characterization that Jobs, had Woz not been around,
would have found another Woz. Maybe not as good, and maybe with less success,
but Apple would have been built in some fashion.

The impression I got from Founders At Work was that Woz was a big big reason
for Apple's short term success, but also didn't really understand Apple past a
certain point. After all, a product like the iPhone, with its fused body and
minimal hackability is utterly opposite to the values of an old school
hardware hacker like Woz.

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mch82
Based on the data points of “iWoz”, “Steve Jobs”, “Becoming Steve Jobs”, NeXT,
and Pixar my guess is Jobs without Woz does something different, but doesn’t
create Apple.

The Mac was mostly created without Woz, but the Apple ][ is what paid for the
Mac & access to Xerox’s tech. Pixar shows Jobs’ ability to find & develop a
team, but the Pixar team is unlikely to have created Apple. NeXT was Job’s
attempt to do Apple without Woz and it didn’t work because he missed
affordability & efficiency elements Woz excelled at.

If iWoz is accurate, Woz created floppy drives, monitors, and a number of
other technical firsts. Based on iWoz, a Woz without Jobs keeps working at HP
for life and becomes a Jason Kridner (founder of BeagleBone.org) type
influencer, which is still exceptionally cool.

The other critical factor, that really was clarified in iWoz, is how lucky
they were to grow up where & when they did. By a roll of the dice they had
access to electronics components that most people in the world never knew
existed. They also grew up in an intellectual property environment
unencumbered by the 30 years of rules based on companies like HP and Atari not
wanting new hires like Woz and Jobs to fork a startup. Modern law and
information availability will prevent anyone from ever repeating their
successes in the “computer industry”. But people will repeat their success in
other industries.

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Aloha
Woz didn't crest floppy drives or monitors, he figured out how to implement
them more cheaply.

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ddingus
Specifically, floppy drive controllers and machine language monitor programs.

Also exploited NTSC to do artifact color.

All great hacks.

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mch82
> “Ironically, [Woz’s] design was so minimized that normal mere mortals
> couldn’t figure it out. To go to production, we had to have technicians
> testing the things so they could make sense of it. If any one part failed,
> the whole thing would come to its knees. And since Jobs didn’t really
> understand it and didn’t want us to know that he hadn’t done it, we ended up
> having to redesign it before it could be shipped.”

I encountered this kind of thing at an Autodesk event a couple years back. AI
was generating bridge designs the civil engineers didn’t understand. So,
Autodesk had to dial down the AI until the designs could be evaluated by
enough people to get a building permit.

Edit: quote is from the article & about Woz’s design

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chubbyrabbit
It's always nice to see Woz' recognition within the tech community as compare
to popular culture where everyone talks about Steve.

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brandonmenc
I feel the exact opposite - that Woz is elevated by programmers and engineers
to a much higher status than he deserves.

Jobs was a once in a generation visionary. Woz was extremely talented, but not
singularly unique.

Jobs, one-in-a-billion; Woz, one-in-a-hundred-thousand or so.

~~~
ShamelessC
Yeah, Woz came to speak at my university about 6 years ago and it was pretty
underwhelming as a Computer Science undergraduate. He may have been a
brilliant engineer at one point, but now he seems primarily interested in
investing his wealth and talking about business. Hardly the nerdy hero of
Apple the internet often props him up as.

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momentmaker
Would highly recommend reading Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

It goes way in depth about the journey surrounding Steve Jobs.

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duxup
I feel like a lot of importance / a lot is assumed in this article based on a
few contrasting quotes and events.

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bluedino
I never hear much about Paul Allen. Bill was a bit of a business shark, I
wondered if Allen was his ‘Woz’

~~~
Ididntdothis
As far as I know Gates was a very good developer himself.

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wolco
Paul Allen was known as a much better programmer than Bill Gates. But
comparing them to Steve/Steve doesn't make sense.

Bill Gates didn't write DOS he purchased it after selling it to IBM. More of a
business guy than pure programmer.

Steve was in a class himself creating the hardware/software for the orginal
apple.

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jsjohnst
> More of a business guy than pure programmer.

Bill Gates actually was a very strong programmer in the early days, so this
characterization is misguided. He was very passionate about writing code for
other developers, not about catering to end users. It wasn’t until later in
Microsoft’s history that he was more business focused.

Happy to dig up articles to back this up, but seriously it should be trivial
to find tons via a simple google search if you really care.

Edit: re-DOS, sure they bought it. Do you know anyone who can write an
operating system in under a month (the timeline MicroSoft had with IBM)?

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ddingus
See the Model 100. Gates wrote that system ROM. 8085 assembly language.

It is a nice system for the time.

