"My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers."

Posted on Sun, Mar. 26, 2006
Didn't want to change the world, just wanted to work on computers
By John Boudreau
Mercury News

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14191453.htm

Steve Wozniak says he never intended to change the world. That was the other Steve, Steve Jobs. He just wanted to build computers. Oh, and he really -- really -- wanted to spend his career as a Hewlett-Packard engineer, a position he reluctantly left.

Life turned out very differently for the self-trained electrical engineer. In 1976, he and Jobs started Apple Computer, which would help launch the personal computer revolution. Observers say Apple would never be what it is today without either Steve -- Jobs, the tech evangelist and visionary, and Wozniak, whose technical genius created computers for the masses.

``I didn't want to start this company,'' said Wozniak, known in Silicon Valley simply as ``Woz.'' ``My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only started the company when I realized I could be an engineer forever.''

Wozniak, 55, left Apple in 1981 to work on his engineering degree at the University of California-Berkeley and dabble in other things. He returned for three years in 1983. Though he has been involved in other ventures since Apple, Wozniak will always be identified with the Cupertino company.

Clearly a fist class act. He spends a lot of time working with kids.
http://www.thetech.org/revolutionaries/wozniak/i_c.html

Good. He can do what Jobs hasn't: Making excuses for ditching SCSI, the proprietary GUI in favor of FreeBSD (and they should have fixed MacOS's instability bugs a long time ago without having to leech), and now the Motorola processor in favor of Intel... ditching ipod batteries in third world countries to poison the local ecology... and so on.


He built a company because he realized he could be an engineer forever? Or couldn't?

Get over it already. :P

Guess that's why zero high-end storage systems uses IDE.

SATA is just now getting enterprise acceptance while iSCSI is poised to take a lot of the high-end storage market in the next two years for tier-2 applications. iSCSI is a method of presenting block-level disk via ethernet by encapsulating SCSI commands into TCP/IP traffic. It works really, really well.

Apple ditching SCSI was probably a shrewd move for controlling costs in desktop systems (it was cheaper), but it certainly introduced a performance bottleneck. SATA eliminates most of these problems, but it took SATA-II to introduce command queueing to the interface.

IDE is being phased out, replaced by SATA. SCSI persists and is still at the top of the food chain.

And the SATA could never compete with the WOMBATS which had IDS-hamster processors.

So there!

:P

But I certainly have no love of SCSI. External SCSI devices have caused me more crashes (on both Mac and PC) than anything else. And now that I have all my scanners on Firewire, my co-workers are subjected to much less screaming and yelling from me. This is a happy thing. :)