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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

lol. Woz did work on Breakout for Atari (Atari didn't know this). Jobs got most of the money (Woz didn't know this).

It's literally one of the "big prick" items of Job's history, along with disowning his own child.

I saw an interview where someone asked woz about getting screwed out of a lot of the Atari money It was apparently new information to Woz, and he simply deflated a little, and muttered "not again, Steve..."

It was heartbreaking.

I think you are dramatizing it a bit. Woz says he found out about it from Walter Isaacson's book.

https://youtube.com/shorts/MpuPbQ8TY-I

That’s not what he said in the video. He said he found out 12 years later in a book. So sometime in the mid-1980s. That book is "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari" by Scott Cohen. The quote is "Jobs earned himself a five-thousand-dollar bonus." on page 55.

Source: https://archive.org/details/zaprisefall00cohe

Not another Steve good, Woz bad myth.

With Woz at the helm, Apple would have gone the way of Commodore and Atari, it's a good thing he got out.

So what? The world got more benefit from c64s and vic20s than all the iProducts together.

An Apple that made little more than the AppleII and ran it's course would have been a perfectly fine thing.

We would all be far richer for having 20 different companies in place of the Apple we got.

"The world got more benefit from c64s and vic20s"

I started coding in 1981 on an VC20, learned a lot from it, but wonder how did the world benefit more from vic20s?

As a happy smartphone user, I think the world did benefit a lot e.g. from the Newton (loved mine, dropped a Palm for it, sad it died, but it was too heavy).

The world got more benefit because it was kids like us who learned on these Commodore machines who rose in ranks in the tech world in the 1990s and laid the groundwork for products like the Palm Pilot, the iPod, and the iPhone.

This. An iphone doesn't inspire anyone to do anything except maybe try to be a tiktoker by pointing it at themselves.

An execrable membrane keyboard machine with 1k of ram inspires you to somehow make a working DonkyKong.

The iphone can do anything but doesn't let the user do anything. It exists to sell you finished solutions to problems. You don't even get to choose the problems let alone the form the solution takes.

The 1k Sinclair can't do much, but doesn't impose any artificial limits or proscriptions either. It not only allows you do to anything you want but demands it. It offers practically no finished solutions.

No matter how limited the hardware, the options are actually infinite because you can do whatever you want with that hardware, and that open-endedness causes people to explore it and try to fill it.

If I'd had an iphone as a kid, maybe I'd still be the same kind of person and develop the same kinds of skills with the help of some other tools besides my iphone, but we'll never know. What happened was I had a 4k trs-80 that objectively sucked and yet absorbed 100% of my time, and none of that time was passive consumption.

Probably would have just been Microsoft

With Woz at the helm you probably would have ended up with a completely open hardware computer company.

What would have Jobs been?

With Woz at the helm he would have worked on the Apple II architecture until the company went down, same fate as Commodore which didn't drop the Amiga and Atari which didn't drop the ST.

Without Jobs there never would have been an Apple Computer Inc. Woz would have been a kickass HP engineer and its very likely not many would know his name.

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