Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

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I like Woz, was never a fan of Jobs. And I mean that with regard to their personality — not their skillset.

My sense though, after having seen Woz talk a few times now, is that he seemed (seems?) to be on a tear to make sure his legacy is known. Now I would never say that he came across as a braggart in his talks ... but intent on making sure it is established that is was he the designed the Apple II (not Jobs, for example).

I always feel a bit of sadness though. It seems that he dropped out as the chief architect of the hardware not long after the Apple II ascendency. I'm thinking of the Apple IIGs, etc. — certainly the Lisa and Macintosh.

It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed — just thousands of very dense 4-layer traces and lots and lots of components.

I know he was not a "mere hobbyist" — he worked for HP for crissakes, but the machines became more like spreadsheets, less like "art" if you know what I mean.

He survived a plane crash with a head injury. That can cause you to reassess your priorities.

Good point. Perhaps you're suggesting he was finally just unwilling to dive in and layout the next Apple motherboard — allowing instead others straight from grad school to design the hardware.

Perhaps this was when he began drifting toward education.

> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed

It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it.

It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd bought the 6502 fab to protect their calculator business (and then they used it to assemble custom video and audio chips). From there, we were off to the races with respect to larger and larger engineering requirements.

Oddly, I wrote a bit about it a few days ago (in the context of John Gruber's recent discussion on the Apple and Commodore microcomputers): https://mschaef.com/c64

The Commodore machine contemporaneous with the Apple II was the PET.

    Apple I - July 1976
    Commodore PET - January 1977
    Apple II - June 1977
    C64 - January 1982

(Dates from Wikipedia)

All four used the 6502.

Apple made the II series for a long time. It was contemporaneous with the PET, but stuck around long enough to be relevant through the C64 and 128 (to the extent the 128 was relevant at all.)

That happened to every inch of the computer adjacent industry. Programming was like that as was games and game development at one point

Woz is extraordinary lucky that he has a legacy (and a lot of money). Clearly the bulk of the credit goes to Jobs. And it seems more than likely that if not Woz, Jobs would have found someone else.

It's clear to me that is false. It was Steve's engineering brilliance that made their success possible.

At that point in his career, I'm not sure who else would have had Jobs ;-).

From the outside it looks like the opposite though: Jobs was latching on to everything Woz created — beginning with Blue boxes. (Well, not everything Woz created — Jobs seemed uninterested in his dial-a-joke project.)

Woz is indeed truly lucky that Jobs did partner with him. Jobs saw that it was worth going all in (financially) to push the Apple to the masses. Woz seems like the type that would have remained a hobbyist — perhaps doing a write-up about his "Apple" for Popular Electronics.

Jobs too was extraordinarily lucky he had a smart friend who was just on the cusp of the budding personal computer revolution.

A lot of "survivorship" bias too since there were plenty of also-rans at the time.

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