[defen]

On the subject of counterfactuals, I recently finished reading Jobs' bio and Woz's autobiography and found myself contemplating how their lives would have turned out if they hadn't met each other.

It seems easy to project the most likely outcome for Woz if he hadn't met Jobs - he'd probably still be an engineer at HP (assuming he didn't get laid off by one of their disastrous CEOs), his Apple ][ board a forgotten relic sitting in his garage. Less likely but still possible is that someone else would have helped him commercialize it, but there never would have been a Macintosh as we know it and the company would have ended up like Commodore, Tandy, and Atari.

With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

[erikpukinskis]

Here's a random theory:

They would've met each other a little later, and done the same thing. Jobs and Wozniak orbited each other a few times before they really connected professionally. If you change one little thing so they wouldn'tve met each other, they would've met each other some other way.

And if you change enough things so that they NEVER would've met each other, you'dve changed enough things that they wouldn't really be Steve Jobs and Woz anymore.

[mseebach]

We're doing counter-factuals. So what if it's not "never met", but "never went into to business together". Is it really hard to believe that fate could have conspired in such a way that Woz and Jobs didn't become business partners? Was the universe really curved in such a way to inevitably push Woz and Jobs to start Apple together?

[vidarh]

> With Jobs, though, it's much more difficult to imagine where he'd have ended up without Woz. I could see him pushing Atari into PCs (but Bushnell didn't want the Apple ][, so that seems unlikely), or he could have been a religious leader, or a burned-out hippie living in Humboldt County, or a tyrannical Silicon Valley middle manager, or any number of other things.

Makes me picture a variation of Kim Stanley Robinson's "Three Californias" trilogy based on your scenarios...