Please read the whole interview. If not, we'll agree to disagree.

"My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don't just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something. And how good you can build it without errors and bugs and flaws.

Livingston: You were designing all of these different types of computers during high school at home, for fun?

Wozniak: Yes, because I could never build one. Not only that, but I would design one and design it over and over and over—each one of the computers—because new chips would come out. I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips."

Steve Wozniak recreated a disk controller in assembly on a motorola 68k chip in less than a day, and it worked pretty much perfectly first time, and you are complaining that he's not much of a hacker?

What do you do in your spare time, if I may ask politely?

6502, not 68k

Oops, thanks!

From his head and from his listings? How much was from the listings? Do you know what listings are? (I know Woz is a godly Hacker, I'm just playing devil's advocate)

Heh. For what it's worth (and at the risk of karma annihilation), you're probably correct. A lot of the seemingly-godly things people have done are from 'simple tricks' that they've learned. People just don't like to admit it.

Woz was as brilliant as technical brilliance could possibly ever be, though.