What if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had never met?
Today’s Apple may be a company dominated by a single mind, but at the start, there were two geniuses behind it. Steve Wozniak gave the Apple II sexy color graphics, slots for future expansion, and other impressive features; Steve Jobs put it in a case that was anything but clunky, and marketed it like a master. The skills of the two founders were astoundingly complimentary, but they might never have partnered up at all if their mutual buddy Bill Fernandez hadn’t introduced them to each other in 1971. Harry’s guess: It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which Steve Jobs never became a big deal doing something, or in which Steve Wozniak wasn’t a major figure of early personal computing history. But if Apple had lacked either Jobs’s packaging and marketing gifts or Woz’s technical chops, it might not have made it into the 1980s, let along lived on into the next century.
