Re:Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment,...
by WalterBright on Thursday August 14, 2025 @11:53PM
(#44908449)
> most definitely without Woz there’d be no Apple.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.
I'm less sure about that. In the late 70's, I worked at a small startup in Pasadena, designing and building single board computers. The engineers in it could have designed and built an Apple. They also wrote professional tools to do it - like a first class macro assembler running on a minicomputer, while Woz hand-assembled his code. For example, Hal Finney did a stint there and wrote a BASIC interpreter in assembler in a few days.
What the company lacked, however, was drive and vision. We all thought the Apple was a toy. We just didn't get it. Jobs got it, Jobs had the drive and the vision.
Sometimes I wonder what Hal could have accomplished if he'd partnered with a visionary.