By Harry McCracken | Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:03 am
Dan Lyons of Newsweek has a good, unedited interview with Steve Wozniak:
I took a year off from college to earn money for tuition. I was working as a programmer and I told the company that I knew how to design minicomputers. This exec said “If you can design one, we’ll get you the parts.” So I designed a very simple computer, and they got me the chips. I was working on it with a friend, Bill Fernandez. We were in his garage building this thing. Bill said “You should meet this guy Steve Jobs, he’s at our high school and he knows about this digital stuff. And he’s played some pranks too.” So Steve came over. We talked about what pranks we had done. Then we started talking about music. I was turned on to Dylan, reading the words and analyzing them. We agreed Dylan was more important than the Beatles because he had words that meant things. He was serious. He was not just about enjoyment. We started going to Dylan concerts together. We would go through music stores looking for Dylan bootlegs. We found some pamphlets with Dylan interviews, and then we drove down to Santa Cruz to meet the guy who wrote the pamphlets. He showed us some rare pictures of Dylan and we listened to some rare music of Dylan.
October 13th, 2011 at 9:50 am
Sadly, Dennis Ritchie (who recently died) has never been known outside of tech circles, and his life will never be celebrated world-wide like Jobs’ was, but without his work in creating C and Unix, the world would be a much different place today. That’s sad, because without the influence and work of the Ritchies of the world, the Jobses could have very easily ended up spending the rest of their lives flipping burgers at McDonald’s…
October 14th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
I think largely due to the reaction of tech sites to death of Dennis Ritchie that story is being picked up by the big news sites. Here in Canada I saw it in the paper, on the CBC and CTV sites.
Sadly the article is very misinformed about what C and Unix are but still.
October 13th, 2011 at 11:28 am
I know enough about Dennis Ritchie to know his name and mourn his loss–and you're right, guys like him are hugely important.
–Harry