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Comment by batgaijin | Hacker News Reader

If I was considering computer science in the UK during the 50's, I would have immediately left after Turing's death.

That man could have lead a revolution, could have started one of the most influential and powerful corporations on this planet. He had that potential. To say otherwise is disingenuous.

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I think it's disingenuous to make assumptions about what anyone may have done in an imagined future.

Or to make assumptions about what you may have done in an imagined past.

Your comment is a fantastic summing up of the hyperbole coming from turing fetishists.

And the reason Steve Jobs DID start one of the most influential and powerful corporations on this planet was because he was such a brilliant computer science theorist. Or are we getting our logic all backwards and sideways here?

Would Apple still exist without Wozniak? Nobody knows, which is why such arguments are always about sour grapes and nothing more.

I do have high expectations from engineers who should be knowledgeable enough to know that revolutions and hurricanes happen not because of a single reason, but because of a sequence of events and fortunes that happen at the same time, and if you analyze this, trying to get to the root of what led to the rise of an industry, you'll end-up like Mandelbrot, discovering fractals, which is otherwise in the curriculum of universities these days.

Would Apple still exist without Wozniak? Nobody knows

Luckily we can test your theory. Woz left Apple in the late 1980s. What happened to Apple. Did it die? No. From the history of Apple, its obvious that Jobs with Woz is able to make a massive influence on Apple.

The question is less "Can a company like Apple function without a Woz" and more "Can a company like Apple form without a Woz".

To 'test' this theory it would be better to find an Apple-like company that formed without an obviously Woz-like figure. I think there are several examples of varying quality.

Well look at Apple's return to power in the last ~ 10 years. That happened when Jobs, not Woz, came back.

Though I disagree, I fail to see why it's being downvoted. (Added my grain of salt to fix it.) The thing is I'm sure there are some exceptions (Wolfram?), but it's quite rare to find a person who's both an outstanding scholar and an outstanding entrepreneur.

>(Wolfram?)

Wolfram is largely considered a crackpot by actual scientists and mathematicians, and for very good reason. See: http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

Attention conservation notice: Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata. Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret of Wolfram Research. I am sorry to say that our employer knuckled under, and so did we, and we replaced that version of the paper with another, without the offending citation. I think my judgments on Wolfram and his works are accurate, but they're not disinterested.

I'm curious what proof Wolfram Research was so protective of that they would interfere with academic research to keep it a secret.

They knuckled under much too soon then. If you came by your conclusions independently then they just lost their trade secret. Trade secrets only protection is that they're secret, and you have no innate right to that secrecy.

> If I was considering computer science in the UK during the 50's, I would have immediately left after Turing's death.

For where? Similar persecution would've been present everywhere.

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