
All these companies were a lot smarter than us. What we had was luck (1984) - janandonly
https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php
======
disgruntledphd2
I adore that apparently Steve Jobs and Wozniak wrote Breakout while they were
at Atari.

I absolutely adored that game as a child.

As an aside, this article was _wonderful_ and if you haven't already done so,
you should read it right now. (I especially liked the why you should get a
computer argument at the end).

~~~
lonelygirl15a
Well, Woz wired it. There was no software, right?

~~~
greenyoda
Right, it was TTL logic - no microprocessor (too expensive at the time), no
software. Also, Woz's design wasn't the one that was ultimately used:

> _Atari was unable to use Wozniak 's design. By designing the board with as
> few chips as possible, he made the design difficult to manufacture; it was
> too compact and complicated to be feasible with Atari's manufacturing
> methods. However, Wozniak claims Atari could not understand the design, and
> speculates "maybe some engineer there was trying to make some kind of
> modification to it." Atari ended up designing their own version for
> production, which contained about 100 TTL chips. Wozniak found the gameplay
> to be the same as his original creation, and could not find any
> differences._

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_\(video_game\)#History_and_development)

~~~
prox
Whatever happened to that computer club, does it still exist, the Homebrew
Computer Club?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Now it's called Hacker News.

Well - kind of. At least a little.

~~~
oblio
HN, half Homebrew Computer Club, half "get rich quick" schemes, half
California housing law discussions.

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fendy3002
Luck (as a factor to make someone / something successful) is too underrated.

~~~
credit_guy
Stated like this this assertion is unprovable and unfalsifiable. Another
person could state that luck is too overrated, who is right, who is wrong, and
how do you decide?

In a controlled setup though, like backgammon or poker, luck is definitely
overrated. Just try to play a single game of backgammon with a professional
player, and see if you stand a chance. You can play 100 games, and without
fail you would lose all of them.

So, how can a professional player of a game of chance consistently win? By
maximizing the win when they get a lucky roll, and minimizing the loss when
they get an unlucky one. In the long run the number of lucky rolls is roughly
equal with the number of unlucky rolls, but they will manage to get a positive
expected value.

Maybe real life is similar to a game of chance. Maybe not? I don't know for
sure. But my hunch is this: both Mark Zuckerberg and I were faced with a long
string of random events in our life. Many, many, many. After each such event,
we both had a number of ways to respond. Somehow Zuckerberg got richer pretty
much every day of his adult life, and he now sits at #3 at the top of the
world. I, on the other hand, made whatever choices I made and sit currently at
#1e9 or #2e9 (not sure). I can think that Zuckerberg has been dealt a luckier
hand in life, or I can think he was much better at playing what he was dealt
than me. Nobody will ever know for sure. But my personal belief is that he was
a more skillful player than me.

~~~
Hercuros
To be fair, you don't hear (as much) about all the Mark Zuckerbergs who
weren't quite so successful. If you're going to look at some of the richest
people on the planet, then of course you'll see a string of successes, because
without a long string of successes they wouldn't have been the richest people
on the planet. I also think that as the string of successes becomes longer (or
you become richer), you have more of a chance at further successes as well.

Looking at the most successful people in any situation is not a good way to
get a sense of the underlying probabilities involved. If you let 1000 people
flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads, you'll see an
extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful people.

The mere fact that there are really few people as rich as Zuckerberg indicates
a big luck / network effect factor in my opinion. Zuckerberg is probably more
skilled than the average person, but there are many more people like him in
terms of skills (I believe), and the vast majority of them didn't get anywhere
near as rich. Zuckerberg also didn't accumulate his wealth by lots of small
repeated increments: he won big by Facebook becoming successful (and there was
no guarantee of that, despite Zuckerberg's skills). Without that big win, I
doubt that Zuckerberg would have ended up anywhere near #3.

~~~
credit_guy
> If you let 1000 people flip coins 1000 times and count the number of heads,
> you'll see an extraordinarily high number of heads among the most successful
> people.

Not really. If you do this experiment you are virtually assured that all the
people will get between 400 and 600 heads. Not a single one will get 601
heads. Not a single one will get only 399 heads.

Zuckerberg is not one or two or ten standard deviations away from me. He's
thousands of standard deviations away from me. Luck alone cannot explain his
success.

Edit: For fun, here's a code snippet that shows the range of the number of
heads that 1000 people get when flipping a coin 1000 times. I ran the
experiment 10 times.

    
    
      import numpy as np
    
      for seed in range(10):
          flips = np.random.RandomState(seed).binomial([1000]*1000,p=0.5)
          print(min(flips),max(flips))
    

This is what you get:

    
    
      442 556
      455 546
      453 550
      452 551
      446 557
      444 552
      435 549
      446 564
      454 562
      452 548
    

You need to run this experiment many millions of times before you see a
minimum less than 400 or a maximum higher than 600. As you can see most often
the range is much tighter.

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MaysonL
A few months ago I heard about the concept "return on luck". It seems to me
that Apple had the highest return on the luck they had of any of their
contemporaries, with the possible exception of Microsoft.

~~~
petra
Microsoft's luck was that IBM gave them the license to make the OS, because
they thought the money is in the hardware.

That's one of the biggest business mistakes ever.So that's a huge amount of
luck.

So I'm not sure Microsoft is so unique with regards to "return on luck".

~~~
koolba
That wasn’t luck. That was Bill Gates being his genius self.

~~~
palJl
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates)

"In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee
member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).
Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few
weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software
firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."

~~~
graeme
That helps explain Gates talking to IBM. It doesn’t explain IBM’s taking the
contract, or their massive blunder in allowing Gates’ non-exclusivity clause
on the OS.

Lots of companies contracted with IBM without IBM signing off their whole
business to them.

Bill Gates clearly was very fortunate in his life, but it’s a mistake to chalk
the IBM blunder up to 100% luck.

~~~
philistine
The commoditization of the PC is not wholly due to Microsoft’s luck: IBM used
common parts that could be copied legally. It helped a great deal.

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api
> We were finally going to get control of our own computers. It wasn't a
> million-dollar thing that belonged to the company you worked for.

Too bad it's gone full circle. The cloud is the new mainframe.

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everybodyknows
When did Wozniak write this? Don't see a date.

~~~
shadowprofile77
Next to the post it says 1894, which is decidedly, uh, odd, if Wozniak wrote
it.

~~~
labster
I’m disappointed it wasn’t about Gilded Age business, written by a robber
baron or something.

~~~
schemy
I was expecting something about Morse code. I too was disappointed.

