Woz Up!

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It looks like Steve Wozniak - aka 'Woz' or 'The Other Steve', co-founder of Apple and its original magister of tech and programming - remains on the side of the angels, committing a new space company of his making "...unlike the others...", 'Privateer Space' to 'clear up' space junk from near Earth orbit. As always, Woz sees the ultimate point in tech - to benefit mankind, rather than simply extract as much money as possible from it by selling 'lifestyle'.

In the middle years of his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, as the company's revenue and stock increased, he was often at odds with Jobs over the company's direction, and he left Apple behind in 1985, the year after the Macintosh computer which he, Jobs and Jef Raskin, among many others, had developed, had been launched with the legendary Super Bowl advert in 1984. Where he and Jobs differed was on user expandability and programmability of the machine. Jobs wanted a closed system along the lines of a white-goods utility, whereas Woz, being the techie geek genius that he was, wanted people to be able to be as hands-on in customising and programming the Mac as possible, as they had been with the Apple II computer earlier, in the late seventies/early eighties.

The corporates then managing Apple eventually shoved Jobs out of the company too, and he cashed out to form his own Next venture, which he would eventually bring into Apple in the late nineties, on his more than triumphant return. Jobs is no longer with us and Apple has become the commodity company he dreamed of, and enormously successful to boot, achieving a level of ubiquity with the iPhone that I think even he might not have second-guessed.

However, both he and Wozniak started out as outsiders and mavericks, in those far-off forgotten days of the frontier years of the personal computer revolution; and I wonder whether Woz's choice of name for his new, maverick venture - Privateer -  is maybe more than a little nod to Jobs' hoisting of a pirate flag over the Mac development building in the mid-eighties as he was being pressured to get out of the company. Still 'crazy' after all these years...

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