> It's 100% true that Jobs needed a Wozniak. But there were many that could have filled that role.
Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.
Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.
No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.
[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.
There are some pretty insane optimizations for code size, and the result is a remarkably capable program in just 256 bytes. You don't get this stuff from a replacement-level engineer.
Yup. To put it another way, if any company back then had Woz building things with that high a capability to cost ratio, it would have been very easy for them to punch way above their weight and capture significant share with even modest marketing talent.
And arguably, Apple could have been much more successful in the 80s and 90s if they had leveraged technical excellence at an Apple II-like price point, instead of ascending into the pricing stratosphere like they did in our actual timeline. Jobs arguably realized this a bit, as he priced the iMac ($1299) a lot better than the Macs that came before it (about $1699 for a comparable all-in-one in 1997).
He suffered a TBI in an airplane accident in 1981 or so. Though IIRC, most of the design of the original Mac's framebuffer design (likewise done with in-house engineering and not with a off the shelf VLSI controller as was seen in other contemporary platforms) was his work.
Tell me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller[1] without telling me you've never looked at a teardown of a Disk ][ drive and controller.
Apple shipped hardware in the summer of 1977 that took the rest of the industry *three years* to catch up to, and that only happened when Atari (and later Commodore) dedicated VLSI designers and fab bandwidth to custom chips that had like 9x the die area of the chips that shipped in the Apple. Woz had it working with a bunch of junk you could get at Radio Shack.
No, there's no one contemporary who was doing anything remotely like that. But it's sort of true that brilliance like that doesn't scale, so post-1979 or so he really didn't have much to offer and later products were produced via different means.
[1] Or the original board's timing and scanout brilliance too, but the disk controller really is his best single masterpiece.