Anthony Ha, writing for TechCrunch, laid out this dialog from the new Steve Jobs movie:
Woz: You can’t write code, you’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board, the graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Parc, Jef Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project. Everything — someone else designed the box! So how come 10 times in a day, I read “Steve jobs is a genius.” What do you do?
Jobs: I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician, you sit right there, you’re the best in your row.
In the article comments, the real-life Woz weighed in with this:
I always give Jobs the credit for finishing a design into a product and marketing it and much more. The movie made up this part based on the first few months of the Apple ][ but I, instead of Jobs, should have been the one to say “I’m the best in my row, actually in every row.” I only wanted recognition as a good (great) engineer.
I hate to see even this movie promulgate the “graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Parc” line. For one thing, there was a trade: Xerox was given the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share. For another, what Jobs, Raskin, and other Apple employees saw at Xerox was the Xerox Alto, whose UI didn’t include menu bars, drop-down menus, scroll bars, icons for files and folders, or overlapping windows that would redraw themselves. All of those things that make a GUI recognizable today were developed at Apple.
“I, instead of Jobs, should have been the one to say “I’m the best in my row, actually in every row.” I only wanted recognition as a good (great) engineer.”
Woz wouldn’t have said that. He felt that way, and he’s right, but he just wouldn’t have said so. He did what he did and let others say he was amazing. His humble genius is one of the things that makes him so awesome.
Agreed. Xerox was compensated for their cooperation and Apple did what it does best, iterated on the design to make it better.
But above all of that – it WAS Steve Jobs that had the genius to SEE it. Everyone else looked and walked on by, including Xerox!!!
“Stolen.” That one word has put me in the “not going to see this film” category. Pisses me off every time I hear it.
Exactly, Steve saw potential where no one else did. That was his gift.
I hear you, but they gotta dumb it down for the masses. “Stolen” is just shorthand for “not invented by Apple” and telling what really happened would take valuable screen time away from the main story they’re trying to tell.
I would disagree. “Stolen” diminishes Apple’s efforts and “allows” people to be contemptuous. Sorkin is a writer – surely he could have come up with better shorthand.
cribbed…lifted…copied…grabbed All still less than accurate but better than “stolen.”
Jobs: I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician, you sit right there, you’re the best in your row.
Good to see Sorkin is a Ghostbusters fan. http://www.hark.com/clips/wgqsycjskm-youre-the-best-one-in-your-row
There’s a lot wrong with that scene beyond the Apple-Stole-The-GUI-From-Xerox chestnut. Would Woz really consider the NeXT Cube the “single biggest failure in the history of personal computing”? I have trouble with the idea of a guy who made all kinds of weird, amusing, and, some might say, useless stuff saying that a NeXT machine, despite how overpriced, “does nothing.” With an IDE built-into the OS, NeXT machines were the first computer to do anything, and a guy like Woz would have realized that. Sorkin is a dramatic guy who’s never let reality get in the way of a dramatic scene.
When I hear stolen, I take it to mean they got it “for a steal” considering their ROI, not that they took it without compensating Xerox. That’s how it sits in my headcanon, anyway.
yep, the xerox myth is debunked here, by the people in the room who coded these things:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt
especially considering the web was invented on a NeXT cube. does nothing? oops.
As the architect of the Apple Lisa hardware, I heartily agree with you. All the Altos was Smalltalk 79 Smalltalk 80. For those that don’t know what that is, it is a monolithic application that did everything within one application. Nothing like the birth of windows which Apple initiated.
half the monologue is crap. “you can’t put a hammer to a nail” is also crap if you know anything about Jobs childhood and teenage years, something voluminously documented.
It’s the standard trope: “Steve Jobs is a technical moron who cared about making things pretty”. It allows nerds to shunt him off into some Jony Ive Designer corner, as someone who didn’t know fuck-anything about tech or engineering.
That’s incorrect, but hey, why allow facts to destroy a good narrative.