Apple's Steve Jobs: Visionary, dreamweaver... and the kind of fellow who might tell a porky or two on his job application

The world is close to discovering how much a person is willing to pay for a brush with the Jesus phone's maker – a job application penned by heroic Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is about to go under the hammer later this month. "A single page signed job application from 1973 is being offered for sale," says the blurb from …

[Mike 137]

Expertise in self promotion

It's a shame that Woz and a succession of other smart engineers got less credit themselves for their inventions than Jobs, who actually did very little if any real engineering. Just like Musk. Money out-shouts expertise every time.

[DS999]

Re: Expertise in self promotion

At least Woz and his contributions are known, if not as well known as Jobs as far as the general public goes. How many other equally capable engineers from his time were forgotten decades ago because they didn't have the good fortune to partner with someone able to bring to market what they built?

"Build it and they will come" has never been a thing, the public has to know the product exists, and why they would want to own the product. Sorry, but that requires marketing, and actually producing them requires money (at least when you move past the "assemble them yourselves in a garage" stage) You don't need Jobs level let alone Musk level self promotion to make that happen, but you definitely need something beyond what the engineers bring to the table.

[billdehaan]

Re: Expertise in self promotion

The reason Woz didn't get credit was because he didn't seek it, or claim it.

Steve Jobs is a lot like Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, another icon who is a household name, but whose co-contributors are not well known (to the general public, at least).

People like Jobs and Lee are first and foremost salesmen. Everyone knows them because they're always talking about themselves. When Apple had an announcement to make, it was Jobs who was calling up journalists and going to the trade shows. Woz didn't.

It's not money, but personality, that got Jobs noticed. Love him or (quite commonly) hate him, Jobs was memorable. Memorable people get talked about. People like Woz who are quietly competent, don't.

[ThomH]

Re: Expertise in self promotion

You've fallen for a bit more of Apple's myth-making there, in my opinion.

The Apple II started being head and shoulders ahead of its competition — the only one of the 1977 launches with bitmapped graphics, colour or sound — but quickly ran to ground. Woz's cool $0.015-saving hacks that so impressed all his engineering mates, added up through compound platform development to a system with paging logic like "this area will be ROM if RDCXROM or RDC8ROM is set; RDC8ROM is set if SLOTC3ROM was reset before an access to page C3 which was not followed by an access to CFFF". Multiply that sort or nonsense by the ten individually-pageable sections of memory, ranging in size from 512 bytes to 8kb, depending on which way the wind was blowing that morning.

As of the IIgs — a Woz-managed product — the official Apple documentation had formally labelled the-house-that-Woz-built as the quagmire state. Which is fairly polite.

Woz as a hardware engineer is like a software engineer who can write something small very quickly, then turns it in as a rats' nest of global variables and gotos, to save four cycles.

Compared to people like Jay Miner or Jim Westwood, the amount of praise Woz already gets is hugely disproportionate.

[Anonymous Coward]

A4 ??? Try 'Letter'... as defined by ANSI.

[JassMan]

A4 and Letter

Yep, it was almost certainly Letter (other non-A series sizes also exist).

Although A4 has been used in Europe for a couple of centuries before being named as A4 by DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) 100 years ago, it didn't become an ISO standard till 1975 - 2 years after Jobs wrote the application. It is unlikely that many merkins had even heard of A4.

[Red Ted]

Re: A4 and Letter

Yep, the cause of much paper wastage over the last 30 years!

[chivo243]

Re: A4 and Letter

Talk about paper, but what about my time spent switching everything from letter to A4 when users accept defaults.

[amanfromMars 1]

Great Game Changing Events that Never Happened in Real Life. However, ....

...... in an Imaginary Space Place .....

It is maybe just as well Steve Jobs and Dominic Cummings didn't get in a huddle together. Goodness knows what would have emerged from that encounter?

What are you busy planning on being done remotely and almost autonomously nowadays, Dom, now that one is not hindered and burdened by the high flying junkies and power drunken flunkies that invest and infest practically every public office of state power with their grand delusions of the effective beneficent exercise of great remote virtual command and control? Anything really tasty which might be of particular and peculiar interest to The Register Vultures? :-)

[Tail Up]

Apple. A Fruit To Bear... And Wear

In my 16 in late 80s, I received a Happy Birthday letter from 20525 Mariani Ave, with a "Sorry, we can't send you a computer"... but there were an Apple sweatshirt and an Apple logo pin in the parcel box. Hardly a single dozen people in around hundreds of thousands of square miles of the Soviet Union near me knew just little anything about Steve, Woz and Co, but maybe a half of my city have checked in wearing my sweatshirt, which, as I remember, was very comfortable and warm enough for Siberian Spring.

Thank you Mr Dave Barram of Apple, Inc. Such things are never to be forgotten.

[Tail Up]

Re: Apple. A Fruit To Bear... And Wear

... By God, Apple could beat all IBM sales in the block (-: by this time, thanks to a simple sweatshirt, tiny me and excellent people wearing it with enthusiasm, because --

it was sent to their friend straight from the United States. Perestroika, etc.

But what are you doing to it now, dear America...

[FIA]

Apple's Steve Jobs: Visionary, dreamweaver...

He was no Garth Marenghi.

[Claverhouse]

Re: Apple's Steve Jobs: Visionary, dreamweaver...

Indeed. Now there was an Authors' Author.

[Claverhouse]

Slightly Foxed

Despite its age, the form appears to be in solid condition, with its owner only noting the existence of a few blemishes: "overall creasing, light staining, and old clear tape to the top edge. It is accompanied by letters and certificates of authenticity," the auction page adds

Sounds like old-fashioned Booksellers' catalogues.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Slightly Foxed

The book was recorded as being slightly foxed, but severely dragoned...

[Anonymous Coward]

“Hi dear I have been here for about two weeks now and this week has been so hectic lately and we need some time to get some help with my family and we will see how much you need me for this weekend.”

Random words from the iPad’s word suggestion bar. Just seemed appropriate.

I could probably do an article.

[Dabooka]

$175k?

The world has gone mad.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: $175k?

You just noticed this now?