Edit: Steve Jobs believed that everyone should learn how to program, I don't think that statement would make any sense if he didn't know how to program himself (even if it's just the basics): http://vimeo.com/64572687

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_%28video_game%29

This is covered in iWoz--Woz didn't take it super personally, but it was kind of tacky, and Jobs never mentioned the bonus in his payment discussion for a 50/50 split.

http://web.archive.org/web/20110612071502/http://www.woz.org...

The low-level programming needed for the Apple I is very different from "general programming". It made sense for Woz to do the hardware and the software.

In fact I doubt most "coders" of today could do something simple for an Apple I, even given modern resources (like a ASM compiler).

A Mad genius, to paraphrase Ang ( from Avatar the last Airbender )

There is no parallel to him and i don't believe there is anyone who can do both original hardware design and low and high level coding like woz.

Your point is so correct though -- he was a genius, and such diversity of skill should be respected and significantly more valued in the field today.

Nowadays a generalist is someone who can do both the front and back end of a website, let alone assembler or hardware. (That's why I find Jeff Atwood's keyboard work interesting, independent of the caliber http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/08/the-code-keyboard.h...)

Yes. Byte had Steve Ciarcia's articles, which were one of the main features of the magazine. We used to modify and build hardware, not just to overclock it, but piggyback memory chips or talk to bench equipment in the lab.

By the time I got out of high school, military and university I had: Built a pirated Apple II+, etched circuit boards, worked with 20 different operating systems, built radios, modems, remotes, door openers, set up a BBS, repaired TVs and stereos for beer money, modified a radar system and so on...

Well yeah, for the Apple I. But that Basic had limitations, it didn't actually supported float point types and that's why they had to license Microsoft Basic later on.

But yeah, at that point I believe Microsoft had more experience with Basic interpreters as well as a code base.

MS Basic on MSX for example was very good.

It's not a fair comparison.

Coders today don't have to drop to assembly or solder or wire-wrap or burn EPROMS. But it is something that many engineers and hobbyist did back in the day. (Myself included...)(And most commuters today don't have to harness horses up to go to work...)

But given time, I bet Woz or a few of us could teach someone interesting enough assembly to do something useful.

I have been programming for 15+ years. It doesn't mean that I instantly know every application framework in existence. Especially the (looking back at it now) the pretty complex way the original Mac OS apps were written.

If I am getting someone to build me an Android app and I don't know how to do it. Then I am not going to learn Java, SDK, tool chain, build process and buy a device just to show them how to do it. I am going to send them an email and tell them to change it and go back and forth until I am happy.

If you aren't able to produce that then probably your programming skills are not higher enough and hence you could say that you can't code (not that is a bad thing anyway)

Apparently for Jobs this was very important to him (he was very picky about details anyway), and if you sum all of his time wasted on each interaction I can see how they are equivalent, he just changed a few UI things anyway.

I think Steve took one look at it and said "yep, this is how you design a user interface". NeXT and Apple kept coming back to this idea.

I'm sure he had a vision for it, but it wouldn't make sense for him to have been bogged down at that level.

Cue jokes about dead code, bit-rot, etc.

I don't mean to diss Jobs or imply that he wasn't important, but I don't clearly understand what his role was in Apple's success.

His role was basically convincing woz to:

a) start AAPL as a company

b) quit his job an HP

c) sell the Apple 1 instead of giving it away.

Needless to say he was pretty important:)

If you watch some of the presentations Jobs gave e.g. during his NeXt days it's pretty clear that he absolutely understands every bit of the technology as good as any engineering manager. The ability to combine technical knowledge with exceptional design, marketing and product development skills is what made him vital to Apple's success.

You realize that late 70s and early 80s were full of 100s companies trying to do the same exact thing as Apple right? Just like there were 100s of competitors to Facebook, Dropbox, Reddit and anything you can think of.

Building a successful business is much much harder than building a product - I'm sorry, but speaking as someone who codes, there is no shortage of good technical people really, there is a shortage of people that can build multi-billion dollar businesses from nothing.

WTF?! One person? I am not even making any moral judgement here, I am just shocked of how schizophrenic it is. People don't even bother about coherence any more? And them the movie goes on to show another people joining, two more engineers, a investor. It was just weird...

Woz was the critical factor to Apple's early success, and the momentum the Apple ][ bequeathed gave Jobs the significant runway to make real his vision.

And vice versa, being a stellar engineer alone won't necessarily lead you to success...Woz readily admits at he'd still be at HP, making calculators, if it weren't for Jobs (though Woz would be content either way because, well, he's the Woz)

I disagree, if he would never met Wozniak, Jobs wouldn't have any product at all (hence he wouldn't have an engineering role to fill at all). As for Wosniak, he would eventually find an executive guy inside HP with the guts to produce it (Woz mildly tried that when he was forced to go full time to Apple)

To put you in context, Apple I was the first personal computer that resembles the ones that we have today, before that there was just the Altair which was a kit to build a computer unit with switches as input and leds as output)

Maybe it would have been better?

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I : "They were designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak"

And From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II : "designed primarily by Steve Wozniak"

Steve Jobs isn't even in the picture here. Yes he might have sold them.

But that makes him a good salesman, not the one who started "The revolution".

In this case, no Woz = no Apple.

By the way, Jobs was not any of those two people. The real revolutionary guy was Wozniak and the business man who turned the Apple I into the Apple II (with money and business skills was Mike Markkula)

I would highly recommend you to read Accidental Empires and iWoz if you are curious about those stories.

It's amazing how 'right' Markkula was, at least in the bits cited by Isaacson.

It felt he continually found some one whom he could exploit to keep his career going.

I understand Jobs had a exceptional understanding of one thing- 'Aesthetics'. This one thing is what separates him from rest of the pack. I don't know if it was because of his Buddhist faith- but he did understand beauty and simplicity in a unique winning combination. This explains why nearly everything he touched turned to gold. Because you are now delivering very beautiful products which are also at the same very simple to use.

But that is besides the point. They are repeated instances on how he was anti-loyalty. The whole book had stories how he screwed his friends regularly.

But the point you see here is totally ridiculous. Steve Jobs did by no means start 'The revolution'. Revolution is what I call TCP/IP, Internet, Unix and things like that.

I look at Job's awesome products as Toys. I've seen brilliant toys out there. They are awesome in their own right.

But this hero worship, and things like 'one man revolution' is going a bit too far.

Wikipedia: "In addition to providing "adult supervision" to the younger Jobs and Wozniak, as a trained engineer Markkula also possessed technical skills. He wrote several early Apple II programs, served as a beta tester for Apple hardware and software, and Wozniak designed the Disk II floppy disk drive system after Markkula found that a checkbook-balancing program he had written loaded too slowly from a data cassette."

Maybe it should have a sunset provision for the sake of free speech, although I don't think you'll find many MPs signing up to sponsor that bill.

The same goes for holocaust denial, those who deny the death of millions of people risk repeating history, thus making their 'opinion' dangerous for society at large.

As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.

It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax. Very very few people are going to become customers. Except it's much worse, because you are criminalizing ideas.

You can't believe a country like Germany with one of the strongest cultural and scientific traditions could have accept genocide of such magnitude.

Are you not? It would seem to pretty clearly defame everyone who have made claims to have witnessed holocaust and been in concentration camps. And in fact, holocaust denial is often explicitly framed in a way where defamation is a substantial part of the intent. So yes, you are harming living human beings even if we ignore the

> As to the risk of repeating history: Anyone positing the holocaust didn't happen is competing in a marketplace of ideas where the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Not to mention fierce competition from the European equivalent to K-12 education.

The rise of the nazis happened in a situation where it was competing in a marketplace of ideas where a substantial majority of the population o the countries involved had first hand experience with the effects of World War I, and despite that the nazi's still succeeded in getting enough support in elections to be able to form an elected government.

The nazi rise to power was a horrific demonstration of just how easy it is to ignore history even when the knowledge is widespread. I'm not even decided on whether or not these bans are necessary, but not out of any kind of fantasy belief that these kind of ideas can't gain support again.

There's more than enough surveys demonstrating scary numbers of people doubt facts that are disputed by far less dedicated crackpots than holocaust denials to the extent that it is hardly a defensible position to claim that current education systems are sufficient to prevent obviously wrong ideas from gaining substantial support.

> It seems to me akin to criminalizing street vendors selling hot dogs made of ( sterilized, to minimize health counterarguments ) toe jam and ear wax.

And that is, indeed, likely illegal pretty much everywhere and certainly in Europe. If your product does not prominently state that it is toe jam and ear wax, and in any way present it as hot dogs, you'd go down for misleading advertising and likely for fraud. And regardless of that, chances are high you'd be on the hook for health and safety violations. So that's not a very good example.

In that respect laws specifically targetting a very specific set of lies, that also happen to be defamation of a large group of people (and so potentially actionable based on other laws in many cases anyway, including in many cases in countries without laws against Holocaust denial) is one of the most targeted, limited such restrictions around.

The entire lesson of the Nazis is that awful things can happen when the State appoints itself as the unquestionable arbiter of truth and refuses to allow open discussion about its own dogma. Freedom of expression simply does not exist when governments have the power to rule facts into law by fiat and render them illegal to question or dispute.

This was further shaped by the experience that the nazi rise to power was propelled by widespread popular support both in Germany and elsewhere, despite the millions that died in World War I just a couple of decades earlier.

In comparison, the limited harm done to people who have their speech restricted is seen as a relatively minor tradeoff.

Questioning the existence of the Holodomor, for example, even though it conservatively resulted in the deaths of 7 million people in one single year, more than the whole "6 million jews in 6 years" thing, is not illegal.

In fact most people in Europe are blissfully unaware of the Holodomor at all. Or of Stalin's and Mao's murdered millions.

Strange, yes?

edit - if you are going to post on the subject of the legal positions on political denial of events, then it helps to do some research to check that you are not actually talking bollocks yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Holodo...

Or are you talking about something else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial

France and Germany, for example, has laws that while containing bits and pieces that are specific to nazism, also targets genocide and crimes against humanity in general.

Switzerland and Portugal are examples of countries with laws that don't explicitly mention Holocaust denial but where many forms of Holocaust denial is covered by laws placing restrictions on denial of genocide in general.

It is a bit confusing as it looks wider until you consider the condition "such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945". That tribunal explicitly was only able to rule on acts carried out by Axis countries, so this law only applies to those acts specifically.

Also, "I've looked it up real quick but I can't see" is hardly the way to approach this if you think you have even the slightest point.

For those people acknowledging the holodomor and giving it the same status of the holocaust or even that of the armenian genocide means admitting they spent most of their youth defending mass murderers.

Also, it is illegal in France to deny the communist mass atrocities, just as it is illegal to deny the nazi ones.

What are you talking about?

And got a link to that? because all I could find was a petition from eastern european countries to the UE asking for penalties on deniers of the crimes of communism.

It has a law from 1990 which criminalises denying those crimes against humanity covered by the Nuremberg Charter, however that only dealt with trying the Axis powers, so doesn't cover the USSR.

There is then the law that got brought in in 2012 that makes it a crime to deny any genocide recognised as such as by the state. However that law got struck down by a court, and also they might count what happened in the USSR as a mass atrocity rather than a genocide, so it might not have covered it.

Even dating back to Odysseus, did he actually meet the sirens and the cyclops and see his men turned into pigs? Probably not, but it's a damn good story. You'd have to prove malicious intent before anyone could entertain the idea of folk stories causing damage to anyone.

They were one of a range of companies starting to mass produce "proper" home computers with keyboards and support for proper displays around the same time, and consistently in the third place in sales numbers of the three (Apple, Tandy, Commodore) that launched their computers on the West Coast Computer Faire in '77If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod.

EDIT: Of course the Apple I was out before that show, but it was produced in miniscule quantities - about 200 -, and just a board, and competed with a number of other small production runs of other home computers including ones that were out well before the Apple I, like the Altair; the Apple I had some firsts that made it significant, such as being the first pre-assembled board to come with support for proper displays (but display hardware had become available for other machines like the Altair as well). But pretty much every new computer from well before the Apple I and to well after it had some significant first.

A timeline claiming Commodore talked to Apple first, doesn't work. Chuck Peddle, who ended up doing the PET, was at MOS Technologies when he started planning it, and had presented it to the board at MOS. When their board rejected the idea, he was considering leaving for another job when Commodore acquired MOS and got him to stay by entering into an agreement with him to build the Pet after Peddle presented his Pet idea to Commodore.

Then, after assembling a team at Commodore to build a computer, he approached Apple (whom he knew because they were of course one of the early customers of MOS, and Peddle designed the 6502) with the intent of considering an acquisition of the company as a quick way of getting a prototype done.

There are disputes about who did what to whom in terms of rejecting the deal. What is clear is that Commodore did see it as one option of serveral to get a prototype out the door quickly, but at the same time they had already assembled their own design team before talking to Apple, as well as talked Microsoft into doing a BASIC for them (despite Gates apparently demonstrating deep disdain for the 6502 CPU). The reason for talking to Apple in the first place was explicitly that Commodore would be using the 6502 which it now owned, and so it was natural to talk to them to short circuit the development cycle.

So both Commodore (and Tandy, who started even later) are quite good demonstrations at the pace the industry was taking with or without Apple: Commodore went from nothing to a working machine in 5 months, and to mass production in about 10 months. Tandy went from nothing to presenting a machine at the West Coast Computer Faire in three months.

In terms of margins, I don't think Apple had high margins at the time. Their production volumes were tiny, and contrary to e.g. Commodore, they lacked vertical integration - Commodore stayed on the verge of collapse for years despite owning the company (MOS) that manufactured both the CPU, graphics chip, keyboards and many other critical parts of the Pet and shipping far higher volumes than Apple could dream of.

Added to clarify: the claims I'm taking are that the ][ was the first PC someone could buy and use out of the box, dating from when that happened rather than the conference it was announced at, according to Woz; it was considerably better than the competitors for the first few years, if you could afford it; and they did not much cut prices as they ramped up production (that they might've had low margins in 1977 would be consistent with what I read). Woz's book had some stories about shopping it around before deciding to sell it themselves, and its influence on competitors, that I admit to being fuzzy about. And of course personal computers would have happened without them -- I never implied otherwise.

Also this: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-...

> "In my perspective ... science and computer science is a liberal art, it's something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It's not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It's something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that's how we viewed computation and these computation devices."

Now Woz was clearly Genius level when it came to tight hardware/software engineering. So, it is not at all surprising Jobs had limited input when it came to the Apple I and II design. In fact Jobs mentions that Woz was the first guy who knew more about electronics than he (Jobs) did. In Woz’s response, quoted here, he mentions that Jobs was technical enough to alter/change/add to the design. Does that sound like someone who doesn’t know anything?

I find it sad that engineers project their own insecurities in this whole Jobs/Woz saga. Jobs was highly involved in not just the technical aspects but the overall vision of Apple I, II, Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad. He was one of a kind. There is no need to pull him down and artificially elevate Woz to something he was not. Jobs could work with the best engineers/marketeers/design/retail people during Apple II and the iPad. A whole 35 year period in technology. How would you think Woz would have fared in deep technical discussions involving the iPhone? How many engineers do you know who have worked at the highest level for 35 years? Technology was only one of the aspects that Jobs understood quite well.

Edit: It's on the wayback machine since at least August of 2000.[1]

[0]. http://www.woz.org/letters/relationship-steve-jobs

[1]. http://web.archive.org/web/20000817233800/http://www.woz.org...

Absolutely. IIRC, this is at least strongly implied if not explicitly stated in Job's biography.

It seemed like a straight-forward, facts-only response to me.

Ah yes, I can see how anything that wasn't utterly worshipful of Steve Jobs would sound belligerent to an Apple fanboy.

Nobody asked for something "utterly worshipful", and nobody sounded like a "fanboy" in this thread, and surely not the original commenter (oh, and using such words as "fanboy"? Are you fifteen years old?).

His concern was if this was an accurate portrayal or if Wozniak was resentful and downplayed some of Jobs skills.

Nobody expected Woz to say that Jobs had Bill Joy level programming skills.

Please, take your special brand of crazy somewhere else.

The kind of knowledge and savoir-faire that Jobs had is not concrete, ineffable. Engineers tend to hate that, they think it's just a bunch of shit.

I guess none of us really know the score in that regard, but certainly everything in the rest of their careers backs up Steve's story.

Engineers hate lying, not soft skills.

Thank you for pointing out this very important distinction. I think it's important to realize that Jobs was human and not the most humane among us. It's easy to realize if you read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

Development of the Apple Lisa computer began in the year of Brennan's birth, just as Apple Computer, the company her father founded, began to experience significant growth. Jobs initially denied paternity, and he and Apple claimed that the name was an acronym for "Local Integrated Software Architecture".[5] Steve Jobs swore in court documents that he could not be Lisa's father because he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."[2] Decades later, Jobs admitted to his biographer Walter Isaacson, "Obviously, it was named for my daughter."[

The guy swore under oath and penalty of perjury that he was incapable of fathering the daughter he in fact fathered and concocted an elaborate story to explain away why he named one of Apple's computers after this girl that he claimed was not his daughter.

So I agree with you; engineers tend to deal in reality. Many people are successful because they successfully sell non-reality to people when it suits their purpose. Engineers tend to have problems with such people.

There are plenty of fields where "it won't work" if you lie. Law? Surgery?

Let's leave aside for a second the enormous number of programmers who aren't actually engineers (with an engineering degree) who still use the Engineer title.

The field of Law is based on interpretation and persuasive authority.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE...

Perjury is also a felony, despite the fact that your country's justice system doesn't seem to enforce it.

>I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...

I think I ought to admit that as an engineer I probably shouldn't hate soft skills, but I do (I also do hate lying, but that's not a bad thing). I dislike the fact that it's hard for me to gain some of those soft skills, and the fact that they're often necessary for complete success. I'm willing to call that jealousy, but I think we should recognize that it's natural for that to creep in, and maybe that explains some of the comments towards Jobs.

And then how about this quote: "This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head. [In March 1975], I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I." [2]

[1] http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jobs-ashton-kutcher-re...

[2] http://www.applegazette.com/steve-jobs/steve-jobs-quotes-the...

What he clearly meant about the Apple I was envisioning the end-user version of the computer, not how the transistors were laid out. My goodness.

But, convince me, don't belittle me. What words did Jobs say in that video to convey that what he did was envision the end-user version of the computer (which I agree is what he did).

edit: I am not suggesting something unheard of, after all. Google 'jobs takes credit for others work' and relevant links fill the page. Here's the top one: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-would-annoy-jony-i...

I think a good deal of the mis-placement of responsibility has to do with some people's attachment to novel-ness vs. other's respect for piecing together something marketable.

I think a good deal of the mis-placement of responsibility has to do with some people's attachment to novel-ness vs. other's respect for piecing together something marketable. I appreciate invention but understand that it is useless without marketing. Not so the other way around.

Do you think it does any good to elevate Steve Jobs above what he actually did? Who does that ultimately benefit?

We have a whole channel full of entrepreneurs here who deserve to know the true story because they may also have co-founders who claim too much credit or they may have resentful co-founders. They all need to know that friction does not mean that their businesses will fail.

Founders are human. Like Steve Jobs.

Or back on topic: I think someone like Woz would be totally miserable being in the spotlight and under constant pressure the way Jobs was.

You are not [supposed to make your boss look good].

Not that I would've interpreted it that way, however.

Kinda seems obvious now.

The fact is, he did have a proven track record of being able to distill various concepts and functions into products that people loved -- not just liked, but loved. When presented with a prototype or the beginnings of an idea, he knew what to keep, what to throw away, and what to change. He knew how to keep at it until it was truly great. So great that it could turn entire industries on their heads. So great that whole companies would spend years trying to imitate the results. He did this many times during his life, enough times so that it is pretty much impossible to say that it was merely accident; he clearly knew what he was doing.

The results are so striking and so clearly beyond that which other people working at the same time were able to produce that I think it's safe to say Steve Jobs was exhibiting a next-level talent, one of those talents that even people whom we normally think of as extremely talented find difficult to even comprehend, let alone replicate. Because of this I think it is truly fitting to use the word "genius" when describing what he could do, even if it was not the skills of an engineer. I know using that word will probably incur some of the replies I was just talking about, but that's how I see it.

When it comes down to it, Steve Jobs probably could have been a good or even great engineer if he had set his mind to it, but he had a much rarer talent around which he chose to build his career. I can't help but feel that a lot of the vitriol directed at him is because people either do not understand or on some level actively resent what made him different.

Which is not intended to counter your "next-level" talent claim - I wholeheartedly agree. I guess statements like "he knew what to keep" give me pause because he did, clearly, make plenty of blunders. As Woz said [1] "Steve never created a great computer. In that period, he had failure after failure after failure. He had an incredible vision, but he didn't have the ability to execute on it. I would be surprised if the movie portrays the truth."

One can be (must be?) flawed and still a genius. Some people (not you) deny the flawed part, and that rankles me. [1]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jobs-ashton-kutcher-re...

edit: sorry, the floppy thing was NeXT, not Apple.

It also makes engineers look bad because it only enhances the perception that we can only handle the raw technical aspects, and that we get bitter when someone passes us because of non-technical reasons. I don't know why engineers are singled out here because I've seen it happen in all other specializations. Perhaps it's in the way we generally react?

He simply stated the truth: "Steve didn't ever code."

It's not a judgement. He didn't say it made him inferior in any way. In fact, he praised him in the very next sentence saying "he was technical enough to alter and change and add to other designs".

I'm not sure any of this is a big revelation anyway...didn't we all pretty much know that Woz was the tech/programming guy and Jobs was the marketing/sales/business deal guy? They were amazingly successful together and it is doubtful that either one of them would have attained the same success if they had gone about it independently.

Unfortunately, society at large does not really care about "fairness." People have a tendency to blame the victim, and that victim would be us.

People do not intrinsically value what we do. They value what we can do for them. To that end, it's easy to understand why they would prefer the story of Jobs to the story of Wozniak. Saying that Jobs was not a coder did not significantly hurt Jobs. Jobs may have been an asshole, but he had enough charisma to go keep going. Saying that Jobs was not a coder hurt engineers because it pigeonholes us into the technical-only side of things. Woz did the engineering and hardware design. Jobs did everything else.

Ultimately, in any such situation, it is important to keep this kind of drama under the sheets. Most people are not like Jobs. Most management would not be able to deal with the fallout of these kinds of statements.

I know a lot of engineers IRL who resent Jobs because of these things. My response to them has always been: start your own business, because the more technical entrepreneurs there are out there, the less likely that a future Jobs figure would act the way that Jobs did.

[Citation needed]

Perpetuating these sorts of things spreads them.

I think that Woz is actually still employed at Apple even today. According to both his personal website and autobiography he still takes a paycheck (Wikipedia says around $120k a year). Like you say though, he has no involvement at Apple anymore despite the salary.

That probably makes him technically the only Apple employee who's allowed to openly critique new product releases in public!

I'm just stating history as is.

Apple I and II were something like what search business is for Google. They were basically their bread and butter for nearly the entire early years.

And Woz had almost entirely designed and built them. The products you mention are all large team products.

Look at it anyway. If you count for the individual efforts. Woz is way ahead of any one at Apple.

If Jobs and Bricklin hadn't been around, Woz' design might be a footnote in history, smaller than the Commodore Amiga.

But after the Apple Works initial release, Lissner left and refused to work on the code base any more. So Apple asked me to take Apple Works over with the same arrangement Lissner had had, but by then, spoiled by the royalty arrangement and having heard too many stories about Steve's behavior, I refused.

In retrospect, I had no difficulties upgrading Apple Writer and accommodating user suggestions, because I was hundreds of miles away and I wasn't an employee. By the time Apple asked me to take over Apple Works, I understood that fully -- Lissner's circumstances were unbearable -- as a result of which there was no imaginable incentive that could have gotten me into a closer working relationship with Steve.

Trust me, that is nearly a mandatory skill you will need to have to succeed in a place of any significant size.

If you think you can just be successful by working hard you are living in a perennial state of delusion.

That sentiment divides the stories of the well-known and the truly great. Einstein prevailed by working hard, not by stealing the work of others. The careers of many scientists follow the same pattern -- a conscientious attribution of credit where due, followed by an important personal breakthrough. Darwin is another notable example.

Same applies to scientists. They work individually, and pretty much do work and are judged in isolation.

If you work with a group of people. Politics is a inevitable consequence due to human nature and you will see how that will effect hard working people.

I don't think this is true any more.

Historically, you had individual scientists working hard on very specific problem areas.

Even this didn't get rid of the divide between (perceived) genius and (perceived) success. Witness the classic example of Edison vs. Tesla.

However, modern scientists seem to work predominantly in groups, and are subject to the same petty intrigues and political nonsense as the rest of us.

> I don't think this is true any more.

True, and to me unfortunate. Some recent LHC papers have more than 1000 authors, each of which actually contributed something to the outcome.

"Did Higgs yield the most authors in a science study?" : http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57509551-1/did-higgs-yie...

Quote: "Two articles by the teams are each about 30 pages long. The combined author list takes up 19 pages of single-spaced text and appears to have roughly 6,000 names. Wouldn't that be fun to cite as a footnote in full?"

> However, modern scientists seem to work predominantly in groups, and are subject to the same petty intrigues and political nonsense as the rest of us.

All true. The movie portrayal of a 19th century scientist working alone toward a basic discovery is now a popular myth.

Well, Poincaré might want to disagree. Well, it's not like he "stole the work of others", it's about gaining from their successes. And Einstein did that too, as any scientist did: he "stood on the shoulders of giants" (Maxwell, for one).

Yes, certainly true, but not by stealing or failing to attribute prior work. And I agree with your suggestion that Maxwell might be a more important figure in the shaping of modern physics than most people realize.

It's important to remember that what we now understand to be special relativity, with its spacetime interpretation, was crafted by others (primarily Minkowski) after the original paper. This is important to remember when reading the original paper -- we might be suffering from perfect hindsight.

But I might have chosen a bad example, because it's true that Einstein tended not to attribute the work of others as much as he should have. Compare to Newton's "standing on the shoulders of giants" remark.

Self promotion is a skill that we all need, and do not think for a moment that people like Einstein were not well skilled in it.

As for claiming credit in higher proportion to one's contribution, that is evil in proportion to the exaggeration. However, perception being limited as it is, no one, not even the other contributors are in a good position to judge.

As for outright lies, they are, well, outright lies.

Perhaps Steve's greatest contribution to Apple was being its ultimate guinea pig. He wasn't an engineer, so he wasn't bogged down by the insecurities and fears and analytical thinking that plague the engineer's mind. He could "let go", as it were, and really evaluate the products coming out of his company for what they ARE, and their usefulness, unlike an engineer who always has the potential of making really geek-oriented products that fill a specific niche and aren't very useful outside that niche.

Not that I'm any authority, but I generally considering "knowing how to code" to require at least being able to use some sort of branching operation as well as some some sort of looping/recursion (which yes, is really just branching).

What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another.

> What you are talking about is a programming, although I do not understand how branching and recursion are the same. I am not aware of the way to express one by another.

I meant this at a really low level. Recursion is just a conditional jump and a stack push. When I said branching, I was thinking of the jump instructions in assembly (which allow you to jump to any point in a program, including instructions that have already been executed).

Jobs invented none of them, but they represent a few things that would either not exist or be radically different (i.e., far worse) today without his contributions.

Do you really think we would be swimming in a sea of technological shit if Apple didn't come up with its own technological innovations ?

I don't think so... Of course look and feel would be slightly different... but that would also have happened in case one "Orange" company had existed too.

Probably the main differences would be 1) less instagram pics 2) podcasts not called podcast but audio files 3) you got me...

Take fonts. The Macintosh came out in 1984. It took over a decade for WYSIWG and fonts to catch on. By 1995, Wordperfect for DOS was still massively popular.

We think the desktop metaphor with on-screen typesetting just "makes sense" today. Why shouldn't we just be typing on a virtual piece of paper, working directly with fonts of the desired type and size?

But that is an entirely new metaphor. Writing and publishing never worked that way. You'd write a draft on paper or a typewriter, then give it to some layout guy who would work with the typesetter to get the press set up.

The early text-mode-only word processors extended this metaphor is a natural way - you became the layout guy and the typesetter using markup inside your draft, and the software and printer would work to get you the output you wanted. This was a big deal, and to many, was the way it was going to work forever.

The iPhone is "obvious", and that's how all phones work now, but there was nothing like it in 2007 and there were plenty of skeptics that predicted failure because of its lack of a stylus and physical keyboard.

If we could be shown the world without Steve Jobs, it wouldn't surprise me at all today if we all had to drive over to our local IBM "Computing Center" where we could pay to send people "Electronic Mails", and we'd all think we were living in a futuristic wonder world.

I have this cartoon in my head in which one caveman is stood at a stall selling round wheels, surrounded by eager punters desperate to buy them for their stone age carts, whilst a bunch of other cavemen stand around with square wheels that no-one wants to buy complaining that they invented the wheel first and that they can't see why the round wheel is so much of an improvement.

Ok, now is time for those flashy details.... I'd like one of those trendy expensive flashy wheels ... I'm sure it will fit in perfectly in my new large white-walled sexy cave...

It sounded pretty matter of fact, and not belligerent at all.

You seem to be the one projecting here, if you're seeing this terse recitation of facts as belligerent. I am happy you posted, though, because you inadvertently caused this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6296217

I think he would fare quite well, even if he hasn't done any coding or engineering since leaving Apple in 1987.

He would "hang around that machine and write programs for it"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m8m...

Every time I see a post on HN stating "Here are the things I look for in a Product Manager", I begin envisioning Jobs trying to take on such tests and it is quite funny.

Woz doesn't say Jobs didn't know to code. He merely says that he didn't code at Apple.

Part of me was angry; the other part of me realized the truth of what they were saying. On one hand, some companies require their technology to be a competitive advantage. At a company like Apple, this isn't the case. The tech in their products is actually pretty good, but that's not what sells the products. Yes, they'll mention processor speeds etc at WWDC to thunderous applause, but then you'll never hear those things mentioned in the marketing. Apple has always been about vision, beauty, and simplicity. During Jobs's hiatus, they went down the multiple configurations and flexibility route; Jobs revamped their line and simplified it when he returned. The tech facilitates, doesn't lead.

I put my net worth on Jobs.

I mean, even a monkey can be tough how to code at least at some level. Now, the level at which Woz was coding was not your standard Ruby scripting mombo jumbo, and hence it's a world apart from what some folks consider coding, which is implicit in what he's saying.

Also by Woz saying that "(Steve) wasn't an engineer," he was clearly stating the fact that Steve at that point in time was more about the business, the direction of things and the big picture rather than the nitty gritty stuff for which he had Woz to do it for him/them.

All in all, lets be honest, Steve forte was never ever his technical prowess. I'm sure some business majors here, who get away with getting other folks do to stuff for them, truly believe they are very technical as well, even though they don't know shit!

Steve definitely had a good eye at what could and couldn't sell, particularly at the end of his career. Now, what Steve was really good about was in getting very good technical folks in house and getting away in pushing them to the limit of exploitation, because after all it was Steve Jobs. Hence, he was great at causing confusion and manipulation, which is why he was so good at marketing.

If Woz wouldn't have been around, Apple simply wouldn't have existed with Steve alone. Now, Steve was definitely a hustler and probably would have started another type of business, but we simply wouldn't know about it.