Forget Jobs, Let's Worship Woz

[mgraham333]

Commentary by Leander Kahney | Also by this reporter

02:00 AM Feb, 08, 2006

Two week's ago I attacked Steve Jobs and made myself the most popular columnist in the Mac universe -- even my own wife called me "an idiot." So this week I figured I'd balance things out by talking about someone I admire greatly: Steve Wozniak.

Most of the stuff written about Wozniak portrays him as an amiable buffoon. By most accounts, Woz is a talented engineer who got lucky in his early career and became fabulously wealthy. Then he dropped out to be an unsuccessful concert promoter, launch a couple of go-nowhere startups and teach school.

It appears Woz has bounced from one thing to another without much commitment or direction. Along the way, he squandered much of his fortune and was a soft touch for every charity and cause under the sun.

Biographers play up Woz's lighthearted character, his lifelong commitment to pranks and naiveté. Sharks like the concert promoter Bill Graham, Woz's partner in the financially unsuccessful Unuson concerts, famously called Woz a "simpleton." It is generally believed Woz was mercilessly ripped off turning his Los Gatos mansion into an elaborate funhouse for his kids. Woz's explanation: "I don't feel attached to my money in normal ways."

Perhaps this portrait is true -- Woz suffered a plane crash that may have affected his memory and ability to work -- but an alternative reading of Woz's biography reveals a man who has lived his life according to deeply geeky and humanistic principles.

There's a lot to admire about Woz, but let's start with four things: his dedication to kids; his support for his community and its public institutions, especially schools; his casual relationship to money; and his egoless appraisal of his own place in history -- a realization, absolutely true, that he was a good engineer but has been disproportionately rewarded for simply being in the right place at the right time.

Consider:

Asked who his heroes are, Woz cites his engineer father, the fictional engineer Tom Swift and a pair of childhood teachers. It seems Woz has devoted his life to emulating these heroes. After becoming one of the most celebrated engineers in the computer industry, he dropped out to teach school.

Woz spent nearly a decade teaching computer science -- unpaid -- for the Los Gatos Unified School District, and he ran weekend and summer school classes in the garage of his hilltop mansion. Each student got a $5,000 PowerBook, and Woz has equipped dozens of school computer labs. "By all accounts, teaching children has given Woz as much joy and meaning in his life as creating the first personal computer," wrote Owen Linzmeyer in his excellent history of Apple, Apple Confidential. His commitment to public education is striking. Who in California cares about public education anymore? Most people who can afford it pull their kids out of public school and educate them privately. Not Woz.

Woz has been generous with his fortune, financing scores of educational initiatives and sponsoring dozens of public institutions, including San Jose's Children's Discovery Museum, which sits on Woz Way.

Before Apple went public in 1980, Woz gave away a lot of stock to friends and family, or sold shares at face value to fellow engineers whom he felt weren't fairly recognized in the stock allocation. In fact, Woz gave away so many shares, he forced the company into an early, possibly premature IPO. (The company had to go public or be in breach of SEC rules dictating private companies can have no more than 500 shareholders.)

Woz wanted to give the first Apple 1 he and Jobs made to an itinerant computer teacher called Liza L00ps. But Jobs made Woz buy the computer from the fledgling company they had just incorporated together -- and then he gave it to her.

Woz lost an estimated $20 million of his own money hosting a pair of giant Unuson ("unite us in song") rock concerts, but considered them a tremendous success because they were great fun and he got to hang out with "a few thousand of my closest friends.... I run into more people that thank me for those festivals than thank me for Apple," he said.

In several interviews, Woz has downplayed his contribution to the development of the personal computer. Lauded as one of the founders of the industry, Woz says he's merely a good engineer who got lucky. In an interview with MacCare, he said: "I wonder why, when I just did kind of normal things -- some good engineering and just what I wanted to do in life -- why everywhere I go, some people think that I'm some kind of hero or a special person.

"People want to say, it's one special person in the world that does the good thing. But it's really the body of people and their mass thinking that caused computers to happen. But you always want to pinpoint a few individuals and say this is why. That is dodging the fact that all people, really, were going that way. There was a long development of technology that was leading to what we have today."

Woz recognizes that he stood on the shoulders of giants. He didn't invent the personal computer single-handed; it was group effort.

Woz embodies the most admirable qualities of the hacker. He's a great engineer, who designed beautiful machines and made a fortune from them. Good for him. But he wasn't greedy, he didn't screw anyone over and he took care of his friends. He values education, and by his own count, his greatest achievement is being a good father to his kids.

A few years ago I spent a magical afternoon at Bruce Damer's Digibarn, a private computer museum on a small farm outside Santa Cruz.

When I visited Bruce, he was in the process of organizing his collection. On one dusty workbench sat several old Apple machines and a long cardboard contraption called the "Mac chimney."

A tapered box open at both ends, the Mac chimney was an after-market add-on designed to stop the original Macintosh from overheating. Placed on top of the Mac, it drew heat upward by convection.

Bruce thought it hilarious. It was big and preposterous and ruined the aesthetics of the neat, compact machine -- it looked like the Mac was wearing a dunce's cap.

The chimney was necessary only because Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the driving force behind the machine, couldn't stand the sound of a cooling fan. So the Mac shipped without one, even though it needed it, and a lot of users were forced to buy cardboard chimneys to stop their machines melting on their desks.

Bruce thought the chimney was a charming example of Jobs' uncompromising genius. Jobs wasn't always right, but he always got what he wanted. Bruce noted that most people couldn't jury rig their own fan because the case was sealed shut, requiring an unusual screwdriver to crack it open. Next to the Mac sat an old Apple an Apple II GS Woz Edition -- a limited run of the last of the Apple IIs, named in honor of its chief designer. As I reported at the time:

"Damer popped the lid to reveal the GS' motherboard. It's a classic Woz design,' Damer explained. 'Few chips. Lots of slots. Open.'

"He gestured to the original Macintosh, the brainchild of Steve Jobs, sitting on a bench nearby.

"'The Mac is from the same time but is the total opposite,' he said. 'Jobs closed it up. You need a special screwdriver to open the case. No slots. Closed and proprietary. There's the two cultures of Apple right there. One open, one closed.'"

Source: Wired.com

[sheldonm]

...fun story, thanks for posting!

[chandra]

...fun story, thanks for posting!

Yeah, thanks for posting. I had read about Woz and quite taken by his humility. Quite a contrast with Jobs. The story had a vibe towards a bad ending 'Woz lost all his money and he is now homeless' ;-) Hope not, that would indeed be sad. I want good people to do well.