While not the most flattering Jobs story, what this exemplifies is that Jobs was the exemplar of the entrepreneur and the primary role the entrepreneur plays in wealth creation. As technologically brilliant as Wozniak was, without Jobs, Wozniak would have been just another successful engineer -- he had no vision, drive or willpower to turn Apple into what it became. Without Wozniak, Jobs undoubtedly would have found a Wozniak replacement and Apple would still have developed substantially the form we know it today. I am at a loss to understand at how Leftists/Marxists can look at the history of Apple and then deny that wealth creation is ultimately the product of the vision, drive and willpower of individual entrepeneurs and instead attribute wealth creation to the labor of the other 99%, or deny that wealth creation is dependent on social structures that enable the Jobs of the world to pursue their vision as opposed to hindering them.
David Shemano -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Fernando Cassia Sent: Monday, October 10, 2011 10:56 AM To: pen-l Subject: [Pen-l] Steve Jobs, Liar Great story: Steve Jobs, Atari Employee Number 40 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/37762/ quote: ----- Jobs and Woz Break Out As the story goes, Atari suddenly found itself facing competition in the arcade video game industry it created, most of it from former Atari engineers who struck out on their own, stolen parts and plans in tow. No longer able to survive on various iterations of Pong, the company designed a single-player game called Breakout, which saw players bouncing a ball vertically to destroy a series of bricks at the top of the screen. The game was prototyped, though the number of TTL chips used would have made manufacturing expensive. The company offered a bounty to whoever was up to the task of reducing its chip count: the exact numbers seem to have become muddled throughout history, but the general consensus among those who are there said that the company offered $100 for each chip successfully removed from the design, with a bonus if the total chip count went below a certain number. The young Jobs, who in retrospect comes across as an excellent liar, somehow won the bid for the project. "Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed," Alcorn later recalled. "It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to 'come in the back door' and do all the work while he got the credit." Jobs convinced Wozniak to work on the game during his day job at Hewlett-Packard, when he was meant to be designing calculators. At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester. Allegedly, Jobs told Wozniak that he could have half of a $700 bounty if they were able to get the chip count under 50 (typical games of the day tended to require around 100 chips). After four sleepless days that gave both of them a case of mono (an artificial time limit, it turns out: Jobs had a plane to catch, Atari wasn't in that much of a rush), the brilliantly gifted Wozniak delivered a working board with just 46 chips. Jobs made good on his promise and gave Wozniak his promised $350. What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. Though it's often reported that this caused a rift in their friendship, Wozniak seems to have no hard feelings. "The money's irrelevant -- and it was then. I would have done it for free," he said in a recent interview. "I was happy to be able to design a video game that people would actually play. I think Steve needed money and just didn't tell me the truth. If he'd told me the truth, he'd have gotten it." ----- I guess he eventually figured that if he could do it for long time friend Woz, he could also do it to his customers! ;) FC _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
