Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

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I can attest to that. I met Steve in the summer of 1976 when he was a barefoot hippie who'd just started a computer company with his buddy, and we got to talking about some software they needed, a 6502 disassembler. I told him I could do that and it was right up my alley.

We exchanged phone numbers and shook hands on a "deal" - no money involved yet but it just seemed like an interesting side project to do for the fun of it.

Steve called me back a couple of days later and chewed me out: "Mike, I've thought about this, and I've decided you couldn't possibly do this project. This is a microcomputer. It's nothing at all like the mainframes you've worked with. It's completely different, and you couldn't possibly do this project. So forget it."

I tried to persuade him that my eight years of experience in machine language programming in a variety of architectures just might mean that I could tackle a simple instruction set like the 6502. But no, he knew I simply couldn't do it.

Of course he wasn't a programmer and had no idea. But he did know for certain that a mainframe programmer like me couldn't possibly understand microcomputers.

The sad part for me (besides the possible billions of dollars I might have made!) is that I didn't get a chance to meet Woz before Steve dissed me. A few friends have told me that we probably would have gotten along famously - if I could have somehow gotten past the doorkeeper. But so it goes; you can't second-guess history.

I told a longer version of this story, with a few links to interesting stuff from the old days, here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h4n5w/i_was_one_of_the...

Had I gotten that call from Steve, I probably would've laughed in his face. Hard. For close to a minute.

When I was calmed down enough, I'd have been like, "Well, Steve, I was just reading through the instruction set, interesting how it does X, Y, Z, seems like that would make it easy for it to do that thing you said wanted in a disassembler, I was just about to borrow a little simulator time to test out my theories, knock up a quick and dirty proof of concept, but since it looks like you think I can't do it, I'll just go ahead and toss these pages of notes I wrote up away because they're obviously useless." Then shut up and wait for him to crack. You have to talk to people in a language they understand.

Indeed - Paul Allen, using a PDP-10, actually wrote an entire 8080 emulator that Gates/Allen used to develop the original Altair Basic.

Writing a disassembler at that time would have been trivial in comparison.

I'm surprised that no one seems to have considered that was exactly the outcome Jobs was after. You do the work for free just to prove him wrong, then he says "OK fine.." and offers some minimal amount. You take it, because you've done the work already.

Who wins there exactly?

You don't have to take it at all. You can walk away, putting Steve in the position of having an already working solution slip through his fingers and having to find someone else to do it. You considered it a fun side project, maybe you'd have done it even without someone like Jobs asking for it.

And you also now have something that somebody wanted, so there's a good bet someone else wanted it too. You don't have to sell to Jobs to get paid. Just sell it to someone else.

That does sound like Jobs. He might have been an asshole but he knew how to handle engineers.

In terms of who would have won and who would have lost, it's far worse than you might suspect.

I actually would have given Steve the disassembler for free, just to see where it might lead. It wasn't that much work, not much more than some of the coding tests companies ask for these days.

Or maybe I would have asked for a few hundred bucks. Not much difference one way or the other.

Suppose Steve then asked me to join up with him and Woz. I'd just read some crazy business book that said people shouldn't have stock in companies because you can't really influence the outcome of the whole company. Instead you should just get paid what you're worth, and the best way to do that was to be a contractor instead of an employee.

How exciting that would have been - I could have been Apple's first contractor!

> I'd just read some crazy business book that said people shouldn't have stock in companies because you can't really influence the outcome of the whole company.

Oh man, if only you'd have read about Standard Oil.

Back in Rockefeller's day, there was this event that was later called the "Cleveland Massacre". John was borrowing enormous sums of cash and buying out local refiners.

He had this routine. You'd get invited to sit down with him at his office, he'd have his checkbook with him. Very cool and refined-like, he told you you'd have no chance remaining in business and you had two choices, sell to him or get crushed. You could choose a check or stock in Standard Oil. "I suggest you take the stock."

Anyone who took stock at that time and held onto it would have gotten wildly rich. Most of them didn't. John had to scramble to ensure he kept enough cash on hand to continue his shopping spree. He had an unusual relationship with banks, they trusted him and were willing to extend credit to him that they wouldn't to anyone else. It wound up being his biggest trump card in those early days.

That is an amazing story, and a lesson to all of us. Thanks for sharing it!

Oh man, I wish I'd had the presence of mind to do that.

Instead, after we got off the phone, I went ahead and wrote enough of the disassembler to have a good proof of concept. Then, since the phone call with Steve hadn't gone so well, I decided to go show him the code in person.

I looked up the address of Apple Computer - 770 Welch Road in Palo Alto - and dropped in to show Steve the code. When I walked in I didn't see anything computer-related, just a row of telephone switchboards.

I told the nearest operator that I was looking for Apple Computer. She hesitated a bit and said "uh, this is their answering service."

So I walked out and told myself, "Those guys are flakes. They're never going to make it."

I think I like your idea better! :-)

edit: I just remembered a strange coincidence. I was reading Michael Moritz's Return to the Little Kingdom last year and ran across this:

> At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple’s prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, “People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying ‘These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.’”

Nah, your solution was not so bad really!

But of course nobody expects an answering service in place of the real thing.

> Then shut up and wait for him to crack.

I don't know if this is what would happen. We don't know whether Jobs believed what he was saying about the fellow who programmed mainframes. But I suspect that Jobs was also playing upon the fellow's desire to do the project in order to better his own bargaining position.

I'm pretty sure Steve wasn't bargaining. He was simply so certain of his own opinion that mainframes and microcomputers were totally unlike each other, that it was inconceivable that someone who was an expert at one could ever bridge the gap to the other.

There was some evidence for his position if you knew anything about the computing culture in the Cupertino area in those days, especially at Tymshare where I was working at the time.

Tymshare had a profitable business going, selling dial-up access to their mainframes for $30/hour. They knew about these newfangled microcomputers, but one thing they definitely knew was that they didn't want to get involved in them. Because if they did, the microcomputers could turn into a threat to their mainframe business.

And you know, it turned out they were right! The microcomputers were a threat to their business, but they didn't get in on it.

Tymshare wasn't the only company like this. There were several little timesharing companies in the Bay Area, and they all must have looked like dinosaurs to anyone who was playing around with microprocessors.

I had told Steve in our first conversation that I was working at Tymshare, so really the most straightforward explanation is not that he was negotiating, but that he thought I was just one of those dinosaurs.

You should still meet Woz. From the likes of it, you probably would get along swimmingly.

Thank you for saying that, and I think you're right, we probably would. Woz just seems like a really nice guy, personable and interesting and fun to be around.

I've bumped into him once or twice over the years, most recently at the Homebrew Computer Club reunion, where he gave a great talk full of enthusiasm.

Woz was a breath of fresh air after Ted Nelson's keynote-of-sorts, which was interesting enough but so sad and bitter! (Anyone who was there will know what I'm talking about.) I suppose I can relate to that, as someone who's never had the kind of success I could have imagined for myself.

But Woz reminded me that no matter what happens in your life, stay cheerful and enthusiastic and never let yourself become a bitter old person.

I was a huge Ted Nelson fan before that reunion, and his keynote was the main reason I attended (wasn't expecting Woz to make it). Still am a huge fan but his talk was not what I expected at all, and was a bit hard to listen to.

Fortunately, Woz had me walking out in high spirits. Woz is an awesome, awesome engineer and creator for all engineers and creators everywhere.

I am trying to find a way to go meet up with that Wizard Woz myself right now, since I didn't get a chance to talk to him at the reunion.

I wish more engineers were like Woz, in that he builds technology but isn't blind sided by its effects. He stops when he doesn't think it is right. It does have consequences in how it is used and we are part of that. I had a huge falling out with a friend of mine, he has a completely amoral philosophy when it comes to technology creation, that it is the users responsibility, the engineers just make tools and don't need to think about the application.

I myself, agree with you on the principle of being principled. At the same time, I can see how your friend's side (but perhaps not his reasoning), could be argued in some cases.

If you are working at a very high level of abstraction (compilers, programming languages, protocols), there is infinite potential for your work, and its purpose is going to be determined by the principles of its users. Their principles may be different from your own, possibly even evil.

I do think standing for principles that are for the good of humanity is something worth doing as an individual, regardless of the technological abstraction you work on. And if you can build or promote your technology using those principles, then the both will be stronger for it.

Yes, I see this two from end users in my company. They us as just a code monkey.

They think they know the best way to do something, not realizing the fact that as someone creating the code, you have probably seen similar problems numerous times, and have a far better way of solving the problem.

I am constantly asked for a new excel to upload data. I refuse these days, (they are far too error prone). Instead I build a web form instead, with JavaScript emulating whatever usability features they required Excel for (usually just a bit of copy pasting). Last time I did showed the user what I had come up with the response was "this is shit". I asked her what it was missing, sorted the JavaScript, and two days later she asked if I could replace another of her Excels with a similar form.

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