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by cma 2890 days ago
> We can look at what Jobs accomplished without Woz and what Woz accomplished without Jobs as a case study.

Not really fair, Wozniak was in a plane crash resulting in head injuries and 5 weeks of "anterograde amnesia" (inability to create new memories). It is possible he was never the same as an engineer.
2 comments
scarface74 2890 days ago
It's not meant to disparage his talent. All of the stories of Woz before and after his crash seem to make it obvious that he didn't have the desire to be great businessman, he just wanted to be a geek. I doubt that he ever had to skill to be a great businessman.

Again that's not meant to be an insult either. I personally have no desire to start a business or even be in management. Software development provides me with the comfortable balance of not disliking what I do, it's not stressful and it pays me well enough to be more than just comfortable.

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captain_perl 2890 days ago
That's my theory about Woz also.

He was as brilliant as the Sun before the crash, and not only designed optimal hardware, but also wrote Apple BASIC and designed the floppy controller software. Sounds easy today, but his work was all pre-Internet.

Around that time in Silicon Valley, there were several private plane accidents. A lot of flush engineers bought planes and treated them like snowmobiles. Nowadays the professional safety culture extends down to even private flights.

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scarface74 2890 days ago
Just to clarify, Woz wrote Integer Basic for the really early Apples. Microsoft wrote AppleSoft Basic.
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