I’ve been breezing through the very excellent iWoz recently. For those of you who aren’t geeky enough to know who he is, Steve Wozniak is considered by many to be one of the true geniuses of the past 50 years. When people think of Apple Computer, it’s hard to see anyone else working in that company apart from Steve Jobs; he’s such a dominating presence that I’ll betcha there are a lot of people out there that believe he actually had a hand in designing any of their products. (Try Jonathan Ive, down the hall. Or any number of brilliant engineers and designers that we’ll never know the names of.)
In the early days of Apple though, the whole outfit could very easily be summed up as just two guys: Woz building ‘em, and Jobs selling ‘em. Specifically, Woz was the one who created the desktop form factor that we all know and love today (i.e., monitor, keyboard and cpu). Prior to that, computers were little more than rows of flashing lights with slots for punch-cards, which made them impossibly difficult for average (or even above average) humans to fathom. After Woz released his first machine though (the seminal Apple I), everybody started implementing the monitor/keyboard/cpu triage, and the world was forever changed.
I guess the most impressive thing about this guy’s story is that the majority of his innovations were created while working alone, without the benefit of the large-scale engineering teams and support staff of the modern computer industry. It’s very sobering, especially for people like me who are busy trying to delegate as much as work as they possibly can, because it highlights the importance of the individual revolutionary over the throngs of passive followers.
Anyway, fascinating read. Check it out.