You will always be a hero

January 3, 2018

Comment from E-mail

I just stumbled accross your commentary in response to a Dave Winer article published in a 1996 edition of HotWired. As a former Apple advocate, I wanted to tell you that you struck the nail squarely on the head as to why I chose the path of the PC in my career development. I grew up with Apple. My first machine was an Apple II+ with an external floppy disc (instead of tape… wow!). It was that machine that made me fall in love with computing. Reading your message recalled my sense of loss for what happened to Apple. But what really made me write this is the fact that I’m so impressed that you are doing what you’ve always wanted to do – teach. Of course, the article was from 1996. I hope you’re still doing what you like to do. In my eyes, you will always be a hero.

Woz

Well, I wish that Apple could be as incredibly great as back then…

It’s a thousand times harder. One view is that I’m taking the easy way out, teaching and all. My response to this view is that I always believed in finding the easy (or at least simple or small) way, but I had a strong internal feeling that I put into direct words long ago that I would NOT run a company and I did want to be a teacher and I did love kids. So others have the job of running the company, a job that I’m probably not capable of. I couldn’t even do great engineering again as I once did. It was too hard!