I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics.
Devastatingly he fell ill just before his trip and had to withdraw. Fortunately we hadn't announced anything however I still mourn over the missed opportunity to be able to introduce this living legend to our audience!
I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him.
My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
I once had sushi (at a group table) with the man at a JavaOne.
They say "don't meet your heroes", but he was exactly as gracious, humble, funny, and knowledgeable as you would expect.
This was just after the first "Embedded Java" specs came out and we all had grand fun recognizing the over-engineering and dead-on-arrival of that architecture.
Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.
Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.
I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.
Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
I feel like this was more accurate a long time ago when the first rounds of YCombinator hopefuls were all piling in here and nerding out. The vibe, tone, and content has dramatically shifted towards the finance and ambition side of tech over the years.
I just watched a Ken Thompson interview when he's 80 years old.
My god jolly, I feel like Ken's the person you might be referring to.
Wozniak is great as well. Perhaps we (or people?) might affiliate him more with Hackernews given he was co-founder of a company which many founders within HN might want to achieve (or replicate?)
But the other way I view HN is a place of curiosity, a place of tinkering. I saw the interview of Ken Thompson and I don't know about you guys, but Ken Thompson talked in his interview about how when he was in between houses at a hotel when he was in high school, and there were girls who he used to wave at so he was half-way through to making essentially a pixelated device through which he could write letters (from what I remember from his interview)
I personally have done something similar although from a software side and not with a hardware side. But I feel like after 70 years, the transition from hardware to software is one which is understandable :)
I mean... Ken's 80 year old and really sharp. I only saw him thinking about things literally 70 year old just once almost like loading things into his mind at the start of interview and he was effortless afterwards talking about it.
I don't know enough about wozniak to qualify him for this
But what I can say was that today I was watching the Ken Thompson interview and literally after 15-30 minutes of the 4 hour interview. I was like, this belongs on hackernews and submitted it here. (Not sure if this counts as promotion but seriously everyone just watch this interview of Ken Thompson!)
SO I don't know if there's a particular reason why my HN submission about got literally 0 response after 8 hours or if because of it, Ken Thompson wouldn't qualify for it. But I am gonna be honest and say that in my mind, Ken Thompson's the legend which really embodies the HN spirit. Not sure if other parts of HN community also feel so but I still feel that they do even though there was no response on the HN post (could just be the timing at what I posted and many other things) but yea.
I highly recommend everyone to go watch the interview if you have 4-5 hours of free time right now.
While I adore Woz - Apple fanboy from way back - it's a bit unusual for an aggregator and discussion site to "embody the spirit" of a guy who says that he hates business and politics, and doesn't like participating in discussions involving disagreement.
I can certainly see why he would be the "model employee" of the new tech elite/political class, though, and what they desperately want all of us to be! Sit down, shut up, and get back to work!
If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs.
Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer.
The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
Worshiping Woz is cool, but like the article says, there's only one Woz. And chances are you're nothing like Woz or Jobs. But Ballmer? That's someone I can look to emulate.
I was behind Woz in Heathrow security a few years back. I was taken aback he’d just be in the regular airport security line given he’s probably worth 1B+. I asked him if he was who I thought he was (he was wearing a face mask, but it was printed with a picture of his own face on it so I wasn’t sure). He said yes and asked if I wanted to take a selfie. Very humble dude.
Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new
My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story:
One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents.
The phones all stop working.
So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!".
He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms.
It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.
What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning.
It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract.
So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do".
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.
With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards.
I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.
I’ll share one of the few encounters I had with the Woz:
At age eight, I attended Steve’s 40th birthday party. My father was his insurance agent.
Steve had transformed his house in Almaden Valley into a playhouse. The attic spanning the entire footprint of the house was carpeted and filled with arcade games, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, snacks, and any fun a kid could imagine. You entered and exited via ladders built throughout the house, in various rooms.
In one room, “The Ball-oon Room,” the floor was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons.
Steve had a dinosaur cave constructed in his backyard that integrated into his pool and a pond. Glass viewing ports peered into the depths of the pond. A television embedded into the wall playing archaeology shows on loop, fossils in the walls.
Why? To learn. To play. To inspire. That’s who he is.
There were many extravagances at Steve’s 40th, like a stadium-quality stage erected on the hillside that could seat a few hundred.
The most memorable thing for me was the party gift: burgundy sunglasses with built-in flashing LEDs. As a little boy, that blew my mind and inspired me for a lifetime.
Hackers by Steven Levy is an incredible story of the industry’s early years (60-80’s) and the characters that were in it for the “love of the game” vs what is more common now (“status and money”). A lot of heroes like woz, but who are less well known in this day and age (Gosper and Greenblatt!). If you are familiar with and a fan of Dealers of Lightning or Dream Machine, check out Hackers! (this is not a paid endorsement).
Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote
“It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.
I saw him at a meetup in the south bay years ago. Definitely kind spoken and generous in answering questions. It was a highlight for me after moving to the bay area.
I once approached Woz about potentially speaking at Hacker News London, fully expecting my email to be completely ignored. A few days later, he actually responded enthusiastically and mentioned an upcoming trip to the UK. He loved the grassroots nature of the meetup and was really up for giving a talk (for free!) to the community. I then had multiple delightful interactions with his wife who managed his logistics.
Devastatingly he fell ill just before his trip and had to withdraw. Fortunately we hadn't announced anything however I still mourn over the missed opportunity to be able to introduce this living legend to our audience!
I sat next to him in business class on a flight back from Poland to the SF a few years ago and he was so gracious, talking with and taking photos with all his seatmates. I just wanted to sleep because I was coming back from a conference and I was actually annoyed with all the "fanfare" around him which was loud and kept everyone up! It must have been hard for him to constantly deal with. He was super nice though and made time for everyone who wanted to chat with him.
My other airline celebrity encounter was Pauly Shore, who I was standing next to at the baggage carosel and thought to myself, "huh this guy sounds just like Pauly Shore" and lo - it was the man (and his entourage) himself. I always thought the voice was an affectation but nope he actually does talk like that. Woz was definitely more exciting to encouter!
I once had sushi (at a group table) with the man at a JavaOne.
They say "don't meet your heroes", but he was exactly as gracious, humble, funny, and knowledgeable as you would expect.
This was just after the first "Embedded Java" specs came out and we all had grand fun recognizing the over-engineering and dead-on-arrival of that architecture.
I didn't know there is a HN meetup in LDN. How do I join up?
Unfortunately we shut it down when COVID hit. I think there's a smaller, less formal HN meetup still happening occasionally but I'm not affiliated with it.
2 replies →
Woz is by far the person in computing history for whom I have the most respect. Dude is an absolute legend, and from everything I have heard is humble and kind on top of his crazy skills. If I could get to the point where I had even 10% of his skill and generosity of spirit, I would consider myself to have done pretty well.
I can't think of a single person who embodies the spirit of this site more than Woz. dang could replace the guidelines with a picture of Woz and we'd all know what it meant.
Let's not forget url of this site is Ycombinator. As far as i know that is very far from “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”. It's more like “ambitious finance move fast and break things programmer”.
10 replies →
Woz may embody the spirit of hacking but does he really embody the spirit of venture capital?
11 replies →
I feel like this was more accurate a long time ago when the first rounds of YCombinator hopefuls were all piling in here and nerding out. The vibe, tone, and content has dramatically shifted towards the finance and ambition side of tech over the years.
Maybe Fabrice Bellard could be a candidate.
1 reply →
I just watched a Ken Thompson interview when he's 80 years old.
My god jolly, I feel like Ken's the person you might be referring to.
Wozniak is great as well. Perhaps we (or people?) might affiliate him more with Hackernews given he was co-founder of a company which many founders within HN might want to achieve (or replicate?)
But the other way I view HN is a place of curiosity, a place of tinkering. I saw the interview of Ken Thompson and I don't know about you guys, but Ken Thompson talked in his interview about how when he was in between houses at a hotel when he was in high school, and there were girls who he used to wave at so he was half-way through to making essentially a pixelated device through which he could write letters (from what I remember from his interview)
I personally have done something similar although from a software side and not with a hardware side. But I feel like after 70 years, the transition from hardware to software is one which is understandable :)
I mean... Ken's 80 year old and really sharp. I only saw him thinking about things literally 70 year old just once almost like loading things into his mind at the start of interview and he was effortless afterwards talking about it.
I don't know enough about wozniak to qualify him for this
But what I can say was that today I was watching the Ken Thompson interview and literally after 15-30 minutes of the 4 hour interview. I was like, this belongs on hackernews and submitted it here. (Not sure if this counts as promotion but seriously everyone just watch this interview of Ken Thompson!)
Video link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46793919] Kenneth Lane Thompson, 1983 ACM Turing Award Recipient (Video Interview)
SO I don't know if there's a particular reason why my HN submission about got literally 0 response after 8 hours or if because of it, Ken Thompson wouldn't qualify for it. But I am gonna be honest and say that in my mind, Ken Thompson's the legend which really embodies the HN spirit. Not sure if other parts of HN community also feel so but I still feel that they do even though there was no response on the HN post (could just be the timing at what I posted and many other things) but yea.
I highly recommend everyone to go watch the interview if you have 4-5 hours of free time right now.
1 reply →
While I adore Woz - Apple fanboy from way back - it's a bit unusual for an aggregator and discussion site to "embody the spirit" of a guy who says that he hates business and politics, and doesn't like participating in discussions involving disagreement.
I can certainly see why he would be the "model employee" of the new tech elite/political class, though, and what they desperately want all of us to be! Sit down, shut up, and get back to work!
To me he's second only to stallman for me. Woz is an engineering genius, but stallman is pretty much the reason we're on this site right now in a way
Care to explain?
14 replies →
Everyone chooses the wrong Steve to worship.
If you're an engineer, you should admire Woz, if you're a product manager or marketeer, Jobs.
Jobs was a brilliant product manager and marketeer - every bit as brilliant as Woz is an engineer.
The truth is, the sharpest engineers struggle to make a marketable consumer product - because they make it for themselves, and while thats quite laudable, however it's generally a tiny market compared to one targeted at normal people.
31 replies →
Worshiping Woz is cool, but like the article says, there's only one Woz. And chances are you're nothing like Woz or Jobs. But Ballmer? That's someone I can look to emulate.
https://medium.com/packt-hub/how-to-be-like-steve-ballmer-cf...
2 replies →
You could argue that Apple would exist without Wozniak, but it would definitely not without Jobs.
I worship both thank you very much.
I was behind Woz in Heathrow security a few years back. I was taken aback he’d just be in the regular airport security line given he’s probably worth 1B+. I asked him if he was who I thought he was (he was wearing a face mask, but it was printed with a picture of his own face on it so I wasn’t sure). He said yes and asked if I wanted to take a selfie. Very humble dude.
I think his net worth is probably a couple of orders of magnitude lower https://swipefile.com/steve-wozniak-co-founder-of-apple-on-h...
3 replies →
Woz is great, but I'd still go for Alan Kay.
Great mention of Alan Kay - however I enjoy hearing from them both. Both have an infectious enthusiasm for teaching and making things so dang simple. I enjoy coming back to their talks and learning something new
My dad was Woz's RA in the Berkeley dorms. He often tells this story:
One night, dad was on duty, probably smoking pot with his student residents.
The phones all stop working.
So dad goes down to the maintenance closet, opens it up... and sure enough, there's Woz digging around the building's phone wiring. Woz immediately says "I'll fix it, I'll fix it!!".
He was down there installing one of those phreaking devices for free long-distance phone calls for everyone in the dorms.
My dad let him do his thing.
It’s a stark contrast to today's mindset where we often just throw more resources at the problem. His obsession with elegance over features is something I try to keep in mind, even if it's harder in modern web dev. " Let's make it shorter and punchier. "Woz's floppy disk controller design is still the gold standard for doing in software what competitors needed a whole board of chips to do. That kind of obsession with elegance over brute force is exactly what's missing in modern engineering.
modern engineering is launching an electron to-do list app that uses 2gb of ram.
Which, at least works relibly across all platforms and devices unlike desktop frameworks?
People wouldnt use electron is they had good alternative
13 replies →
What I'm seeing more and more of is junior folks blindly taking LLM-generated code and including it into their systems, without even trying to understand it or think critically about what it does and where it might break.
Maybe I am living in the past, but it does make me think that they might be depriving themselves of an opportunity to develop key skills.
4 replies →
Created by an llm using a super computer cluster haha.
Then they justify it because they vibe-coded a proof of concept in Tauri, and it was even worse.
Had to let this here: A TV clip on YouTube of an episode of “That’s Incredible”, featuring Apple co-founder Stephen “Woz” Wozniak (aged 38) running through a maze and nearly winning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoJexQjoMtk
(found on the blog of Cabel Sasser: https://cabel.com/woz-vs-wooz/)
It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract.
So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do".
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.
With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.
> his post-Apple life has mattered in ways that have nothing to do with money or power.
Sounds a bit like Jimmy Carter. His best and most influential work came after he left The Oval Office.
Maybe best, but suerly not most influential.
I guess it depends on people’s priorities. He won that Nobel for some stuff he did in office, but probably more for his peacemaking efforts, afterwards.
I think his Habitat for Humanity work was pretty damn important.
I’ll share one of the few encounters I had with the Woz:
At age eight, I attended Steve’s 40th birthday party. My father was his insurance agent.
Steve had transformed his house in Almaden Valley into a playhouse. The attic spanning the entire footprint of the house was carpeted and filled with arcade games, Nintendo Entertainment Systems, snacks, and any fun a kid could imagine. You entered and exited via ladders built throughout the house, in various rooms.
In one room, “The Ball-oon Room,” the floor was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons.
Steve had a dinosaur cave constructed in his backyard that integrated into his pool and a pond. Glass viewing ports peered into the depths of the pond. A television embedded into the wall playing archaeology shows on loop, fossils in the walls.
Why? To learn. To play. To inspire. That’s who he is.
There were many extravagances at Steve’s 40th, like a stadium-quality stage erected on the hillside that could seat a few hundred.
The most memorable thing for me was the party gift: burgundy sunglasses with built-in flashing LEDs. As a little boy, that blew my mind and inspired me for a lifetime.
Videos exist.
I find it amusing people still port in WozMon for modern 6502 trainer hobby machines. =3
I learned some very bad jokes from him.
Only one Woz? What about Scott?
As someone who never heard Steve Wozniak being called "Woz", Scott was the only Woz on my mind.
Same here hahaha
There would be no Scott were it not for Woz (or even Avi.)
The fact that you have to be more specific than "Scott" says a lot.
That’s more likely just you.
Anyone who knows Apple knows who “Scott” is referring to. Scott Forstall.
9 replies →
Hackers by Steven Levy is an incredible story of the industry’s early years (60-80’s) and the characters that were in it for the “love of the game” vs what is more common now (“status and money”). A lot of heroes like woz, but who are less well known in this day and age (Gosper and Greenblatt!). If you are familiar with and a fan of Dealers of Lightning or Dream Machine, check out Hackers! (this is not a paid endorsement).
he's also not afraid to speak out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck-f3qZVcWM
People are crediting Woz here with great things but not going far enough.
Woz invented the consumer personal computer.
That is one of the greatest inventions in human history, perhaps the greatest.
>Woz invented the consumer personal computer.
Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
Well, that's a highly contested claim. There was quite a bit of prior art.
Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote
“It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.
As far as I know, Don never had a computer and the Mark-8 used LEDs.
[dead]
That “but” needs to be an “and”.
Coincidentally one of the earliest Apple I prototypes ends its auction tomorrow if you have over $500K to spare:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46605420
I saw him at a meetup in the south bay years ago. Definitely kind spoken and generous in answering questions. It was a highlight for me after moving to the bay area.
For me, anyone who is involved in FOSDEM in any way deserves more respect (regarding revolutionary things we can learn)
You can just go to FOSDEM, it's open entry. If you're in Brussels this weekend.
Woz is the man
[dead]