It looks like the response was written when Jobs was still around. I doubt Woz would sound so belligerent now. In any case, if you watch some of Job’s old videos and biographical material, it was clear he knew coding. There was some mainframe terminal in his high school that he first learnt how to code.
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.
I agree. I think there is a real resentment among people who work hard to master technical details, only to have guys in positions like Jobs's more or less float over that. It's like, you didn't put in the hard work to learn endianness like I did, so you don't know shit.
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 don't see why you read this as belligerent, unless you think altering and changing designs is inferior to coding and original design. There were a lot of articles after Tim Cook took over that described Jobs' genius as that of a design editor, knowing what to cut and what to keep. Wozniak's comment here seems consistent with that.
I saw the Woz speak just a couple of months ago and he spent probably half an hour (total, not consecutively) of the talk bashing Jobs in various ways, talking about how Jobs would take credit for his work, etc. He portrayed Jobs as a slick marketer who wasn't ashamed of making use of others' successes for his own gain.
There's a difference between "knowing how to code" and actually doing it. I know a lot of people who know the basics HTML/CSS, but most of them don't do it for a living for whatever reason. Just because "Steve didn't code", doesn't mean "Steve couldn't code"...
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.
A lot of engineers are incapable of seeing the value that someone like Steve Jobs brings in the technology industry. These might be the same people that wonder why Linux has not succeeded on the desktop.
I agree. I also think that Jobs probably recognized that Woz was well beyond him technically and that he would just get in the way for the most part. Nothing worse than someone "who used to code" deciding to "get their hands dirty" and just end up slowing down the whole process.
Yeah, it's fun to make shit up that but let's not ignore the fact that while Woz was technically employed at Apple until 1987, he did not play any role of significance at Apple after his plane crash in 1981, and was never involved in the Mac project at all. Any importance Woz may have had to Apple effectively ended in 1981.
>I find it sad that engineers project their own insecurities in this whole Jobs/Woz saga.
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
Kind of OT, but a little sad thing I noticed in the "Jobs" movie trailer (at least the version they are showing in Brazil) is that while the images are clearly showing Woz showing what he did (Apple I) and then he and Jobs working together all the time, the text was saying "It only takes one person... ...to start a revolution".
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...
Actually it was one person who "started" the revolution, but at least one more person (with money and business skills) was needed to make that product accessible to the masses.
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.
That's just sad, and something that inspires an all too common megalomania among wanna-be CEOs who think that, if they have the same ego as Steve Jobs, that their vision and passion shall too drive a revolution.
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)
If you're going to nitpick about that, then Apple didn't start any revolutions either until the iPod.
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.
I know it sounds bad, but some "penalty" (adding a rating system for lies?) should exist for plain lies and fake revisionism in films. The extreme of this in another context are the laws against Holocaust denial: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial we can't obviously compare the Steve Jobs film with it, but the cinema has a long tradition of modifying historical facts without the typical disclaimer.
Well, the quote is about just starting the revolution, not finishing it. If it helps, consider this - Jobs could probably have found another brilliant engineer to fill the role of Wozniak in the startup of Apple. I don't think Wozniak could have found another Jobs (or would even have tried - after all it was Jobs that found Wozniak, and not the other way round).
Issacson's biography doesn't indicate that Jobs ever wrote code, but at the very least we can say that he was one of the few non-coders who didn't treat it as a fungible commodity given that he literally threw a crying tantrum to get Woz to co-found Apple.
> "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."
I wonder if Woz's response is only in context of Apple. IIRC Steve Jobs did actually code when he worked at Atari.
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
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.
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).
How much technical experience did Jobs actually have? Did he actually have a part in designing all the successful products or was he just a manager and marketer?
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.
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.
Woz's response exactly conforms to Jobs' account on the topic in his biography, "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson. Woz's response is not all belligerent, as somebody here implied.
I don't have time to read all the comments. But from the first several ones I read it seems that folks, for a change, missed Woz's response. Woz didn't say that Steve couldn't or didn't know how to code, but that "Steve didn't ever code." Very different answers!
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.
It is quite an irony. If an engineer were to come across a "Jobs" like character, he/she would ignore him/her for the most part. This makes it harder for a "Jobs" like character to make a breakthrough to big stages. To me, he was a brilliant Product Manager. I have seen really good Product Managers who could not write a "select *" query. They have a sense of technology like no others in the sense that they can apply technological solutions to real life problems and envision product futures. They don't care as much about the intrinsic details.
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.
I listen to a lot of entrepreneurial podcasts, mostly focused on bootstrapping, with an emphasis on SaaS products. On these shows, the entrepreneur is king. They often emphasize outsourcing to VAs, which makes sense. However, I see some of them with an attitude that technical skills are of this same value: something you just buy when you need it, as cheap as possible. Yesterday I think it was the Smart Passive Income podcast I was listening to where they (Pat had a guest) encouraged going to vWorker (yes, I know it's been acquired) if you need a developer to implement something.
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.
Not trying to minimize anything he did with NeXT, but I would be shocked if he did the coding for it..... he was already wealthy, and was an executive trying to launch a premium product.
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.
There are degrees of knowing how to code. Did Jobs know enough to write a simple program? Probably. Was it ever his job to write programs? Did he ever contribute code at Apple? Probably not.
Oh look another engineer whining because he didn't have the vision or business chops to create something great on his own. Woz was an idiot who would have given Apple's original technology away and NOTHING would have come from it as a result. If you enjoy Apple's products at all you should thank Steve. Woz was replaceable as Apple's history has shown; they have grown immensely without his involvement.
There is also matter of perspective here. Woz is that hardware/software genius and hence what he means by "knowing to code" is really different than the person who asked the question. Woz seems to have interpreted it as "knowing some programming language to the extent of making some significant contribution".
Does it really matter whether he knew to code or not ? Job's area of brilliance was complimenting to Woz's technical competence and they both managed to stay "generally" out of each others way yet focused on the same goal.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
[+] [-] npalli|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] badman_ting|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] timbre|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamegoblin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firichapo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomphoolery|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hvs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjogin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
I think he would fare quite well, even if he hasn't done any coding or engineering since leaving Apple in 1987.
[+] [-] goblin89|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brymaster|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WayneDB|12 years ago|reply
It seemed like a straight-forward, facts-only response to me.
[+] [-] rickjames28|12 years ago|reply
It sounded pretty matter of fact, and not belligerent at all.
[+] [-] soneca|12 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pmelendez|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wslh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sagat|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antimagic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theycallmemorty|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] wsc981|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] angersock|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] raverbashing|12 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] sp332|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sagat|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] threeseed|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chollida1|12 years ago|reply
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:)
[+] [-] rythie|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamesjguthrie|12 years ago|reply
He would "hang around that machine and write programs for it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=m8m...
[+] [-] MarlonPro|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruexperienced|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hbharadwaj|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|12 years ago|reply
Woz doesn't say Jobs didn't know to code. He merely says that he didn't code at Apple.
[+] [-] bdcravens|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JPKab|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kyllo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shocknawesome|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tn13|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jt2190|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrBra|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KeepTalking|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NDizzle|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|12 years ago|reply
I put my net worth on Jobs.