Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

It's crazier that Dennis Richie passed right around the same time as Jobs, and didn't get any of the fanfare, despite having far more meaningful contributions to the field (to say the least), while being a humble, decent, human being.

huytersd• 3 years ago

Even being in tech I only somewhat know about him. Jobs was a larger than life figure that average people knew.

benatkin2• 3 years ago

The age gap explains a lot of difference for me. I expected it with Douglas Adams. They should make a big deal about it when someone passes at such a young age. (And 70 is also young)

However, it was still too much. If Jobs' passing got 100x the attention, maybe it should have only been 10x.

globular-toast• 3 years ago

Oddly, John McCarthy died within the same few days too, if I recall correctly.

jasoneckert• 3 years ago

Because he is intelligent, wacky, and genuinely a good human being, the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like.

I hope he sticks around for many more years to come.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

Me too. For me it's because he didn't seem to lose, or trade, his soul. He just seems to stay true to the person he always was. So often people loose, or trade that.

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

He's one of very few, most that make it big end up amplifying their negative sides, Woz came out amplifying his good sides. He's exactly what we need, but unfortunately the tech bros seek other kinds of role models.

Let's hope he pulls through and in good health.

happytiger• 3 years ago

I’d throw a few others in there like Brewster Kahle.

Recovery quickly Woz!

coderjames• 3 years ago

the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like.

Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and recalled the history that knocked my report out of the park <3. That left a lasting impression on me that you don't have to be scared to reach out to "famous" people. They're people too and appreciate hearing from polite/civil fans.

jetrink• 3 years ago

That's wonderful. Do you happen to remember the true version of the science fair story?

johnnyanmac• 3 years ago

cool sentiment, but becoming increasingly harder to do. So many people an too many to not discount that some crazies will pop in. Few public/semi-public figures can just keep their contact info around freely.

Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.

kumarvvr• 3 years ago

I absolutely loved his 2 Dollar Bills story. Never have I ever not laughed out loud reading it, every time !

https://web.archive.org/web/20111122202554/http://archive.wo...

jacquesm2• 3 years ago

Thanks for that link. 'You only live once' :)

user_7832• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how dangerous a stroke is at his age? Side note, but why do older people have strokes so more often? Young people have blood clots too.

cdolan• 3 years ago

Not a doctor but plenty of stroke-suffering family members

Strokes at any age are incredibly dangerous

Most strokes occur at advanced age because circulation decreases (at least that’s my understanding)

hm-nah• 3 years ago

There are also hemorrhagic strokes aka: brain bleeds. I had a non-traumatic hemorrhagic stroke at 40. That fuckin sucked. It still sucks 2 years later, but I’m so grateful for where I’m at. Losing one’s ability to speak coherently, at midlife, is a stark reminder…everyone is only temporarily abled.

cdibona• 3 years ago

Aside from the risk of age, he had documented memory issues after his airplane crash in 1981, i don't know if that makes him more or less vulnerable during a stroke, but I'd be worried for sure.

Andoryuuta• 3 years ago

I had a TIA(mini-stroke) a few years ago in my early 20s.

From what I understand: strokes are not more dangerous with age, but are much more likely to happen as you age.

I was told that the the risk factor is a matter of how quickly the stroke is identified and how quickly you are able to receive medical care after the onset. Faster response == less time for brain matter to die due lack of blood.

aag• 3 years ago

If someone you know is showing signs of a stroke (see https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/signs_symptoms.htm), get them to the hospital right away. Time is of the essence. Once you're there, don't let overworked personnel ignore them. My mother recently had a stroke. She had absolutely clear, textbook symptoms. She got to the hospital by ambulance right away, but busy doctors and nurses sent her home after two days, saying that she hadn't had a stroke because it didn't show up on an MRI. That night, she fell, broke her pelvis, and returned to the hospital. She waited over twenty hours to see a neurologist, who immediately recognized the signs, and declared that she had had a stroke. True treatment only began then. A second MRI confirmed that diagnosis.

Triage isn't always accurate, especially in overworked emergency rooms.

nomel• 3 years ago

I think cause is a big predictor.

If he hit his head/had trauma to his kneck, that's one thing. Clogged arteries are another.

mr_toad• 3 years ago

Side note, but why do older people have strokes so more often?

In short, your circulatory system gets old and rusty and either bursts or gets blocked. If you manage to avoid CVD, heart disease, and cancer then a stroke is the next problem.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

As you get older your arteries gradually narrow, a process made even more severe by the buildups of plaque. This is all accelerated by obesity, lack of exercise, and so on. Aging, high blood pressure, and various other factors also causes arteries to weaken, making a rupture even more likely.

All of this is part of the reason I think the 'search for the pill/shot of immortality' in modern times is little different than the search for the pool of immortality in ancient times. Everything breaks down over time and so to solve this, we'd need to fix everything, when we yet struggle to truly fix even a single thing.

throwaway914• 3 years ago

He's like, the nicest guy :(

alekseiprokopev• 3 years ago

Get better soon, Woz. We need you.

liquidgecka• 3 years ago

Woz still holds a special place in my heart. He was the first to sign my laptop at Twitter (right on the Apple logo even). Talking with him was super interesting even though he was mostly a sales figure for hardware storage. He was super curious about the problem Twitter was facing at the time.

hackernewds• 3 years ago

a sales figure for hardware storage.

what does that mean?

nso• 3 years ago

He had a position at Fusion-io, a storage company

agildehaus• 3 years ago

A bit over a decade ago Woz was chief scientist for Fusion-io, a startup that made various flash storage solutions.

cdchn2• 3 years ago

YOU.

Those fusion cards were ahead of their time. Shame they didn't take off.

KwisatzHaderack• 3 years ago

Sending Woz good vibes.

gizajob• 3 years ago

Same here. Bless ya Woz. Get well soon.

kbos87• 3 years ago

Strokes suck to say the least. All the best wishes to someone so kind and smart, I’m glad it sounds like it was only minor.

Something I really wish I knew immediately after my mom had a stroke is that the recovery that often happens over the days and weeks following a stroke as the brain adapts to its new normal is nothing short of amazing. My mom was nearly blind, unable to control her eyes, and mostly unable to speak. It was very, very bad, and we both thought her life was effectively over though neither of us said that to each other. A couple weeks later she walked out of the hospital and today she has almost no lasting effects.

The only treatment she ended up receiving was time and monitoring because she got to the hospital so late (it happened on an island, hours from a hospital.) That’s not to undermine the importance of urgent treatment obviously. She was very fortunate.

padolsey• 3 years ago

The biggest grudge I have against 'stroke' is that it's such an amorphous diagnosis. A heart attack, a similarly ischemic (or hemorhagic) event, often produces, say, one of a couple dozen lasting distinct symptoms. Some can be extremely severe and disabling, but it's still a narrow enough concept that people know how serious it usually is. Conversely, strokes present in literally thousands of ways, from mild eye twitches to complete paralysis. My stroke's effects will last for decades, and many aspects will never be 'fixed', but some of the immediate effects have waned significantly due to quick medical intervention.

I wish Woz the very very best and that his stroke doesn't produce too many lingering disabilities. Taking time for yourself in the aftermath is crucial. Sending thoughts to him, in spirit, from a fellow survivor.

Bluecobra• 3 years ago

I’m sorry you had to suffer through that. My mother was a victim of amorphous diagnosis. She had sudden stroke symptoms and was immediately taken to the emergency room. She had the usual symptoms including blurred vision in her left eye and numbness on the whole left side of her body. Despite this, the hospital insisted she had glaucoma and dragged an ophthalmologist to come in on a late Sunday night only to diagnose her with a stroke. She needed an MRI and the hospital didn’t have anyone available to operate it at the time. She was transferred to another hospital 45 minutes away despite there being an excellent Level 1 trauma hospital 15 minutes away. (They were not affiliated with them so she couldn’t go there.)

I lost a lot of faith in the healthcare system and doctors that night. This wasn’t a hospital in the middle of nowhere either, it was in an upper middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago. It was amazing she recovered fully from the stroke, though sadly passed away several years later of unrelated causes.

I hope the best for Mr. Wozniak, this isn’t something I would wish on anyone.

bittercynic• 3 years ago

Best wishes to Woz and his loved ones.

Seems like an exceptional figure. Technical genius. Strong sense of justice, and willing to to make personal sacrifice to help others get a more just outcome. All-around positive figure who delights in bringing happiness to others.

I don't have any personal connection to him, but I'm a fan.

elromulous2• 3 years ago

You don't have to be an apple fan-child to love Woz. He's an engineer's engineer and a wonderful human. Wishing him many more healthy years on this earth.

robswc• 3 years ago

Heartbreaking, honestly.

Tbh, hate macs and macOS but I like iPhone (just because I only use a phone to call, text and youtube, and it just works (tm)) but I've been a fan of Woz for as long as I knew about him... and he hasn't changed at all with age. Dude is just awesome and you can tell he loves the tech aspect so much.

spacecadet• 3 years ago

In 2009 he played a demo of my iphone game at a WWDC party and gave me a business card because I asked. What a human.

atleastoptimal2• 3 years ago

I wonder sometimes how Steve Jobs would have ended up had he not met Woz. Would he have started a company within even an order of magnitude of Apple?

heatmiser• 3 years ago

Steve would have always had the vision and the drive to see it through. My guess is that yes, Jobs would have started a company pretty similar in success to Apple but it probably would have taken him longer.

atleastoptimal2• 3 years ago

After Jobs left Apple, he had the ideal conditions to move on with another venture. Next did ok but only survived because Apple bought it. Could Jobs have done even as good as he did with Next without the Apple II/Apple IPO reputational boost Woz gave him?

upwardbound7• 3 years ago

I think that without Woz to develop the first two product versions (at exactly the right place & time in history, in a field that Woz had been studying obsessively since childhood), Jobs would have achieved minor success at best.

Perhaps Jobs would become a well-regarded author, or a city council member, or own a franchise of restaurants. Alternatively, his drug use, lack of a useful college degree, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and his many other bad decisions could have led Jobs to end up homeless on the Berkeley streets like so many other hippies from his social circle. He might have died sunburnt and unwashed at age 45 from a heroin overdose, just as much as he might have been successful.

Even if he avoided the catastrophic homelessness and destitution which befell the believers of the "turn on, tune in, drop out" movement that Jobs immersed himself in, I think his success would be no greater than any other successful person whose career takes them to the upper-middle class. Charisma and design sense can only take you so far, and the real lotto ticket was the "right place right time" factor which came from Woz, who was practically born to invent computers at a time when the inventors of computers could change the world.

It was Woz who had dreamt of designing a computer since he was a boy, and who even in middle school taught himself computer architecture and circuit design at the Ph.D. level, and whose technical creativity was once-in-a-generation.

Woz was super lucky that his passion was about something that history had ordained would become the next technology revolution (rather than e.g. having his boyhood passion be in ornithology & birdwatching). For every Woz, there are probably 10 or 20 equally brilliant kids whose passions unfortunately, through luck of the draw and no fault of their own, have very little societal or financial value.

Jobs worked with Woz to get to the point where they had a computer company which Jobs could then grow by 1,000x.

But without Woz, Jobs would probably instead be spending the years in which Apple grew big in a "turn on, tune in, drop out" lifestyle of crashing on friends' couches and doing nothing useful, until eventually there are no more friends' couches to crash on, and he becomes a shaggy and dirty person on the street, trying to get money for drugs.

captainkrtek• 3 years ago

Get well soon Woz!

orionblastar• 3 years ago

Best wishes to Woz and family. He is one of my heroes who started the personal computer industry.

I quote him "Never trust a computer that you can't throw out a window."

blindriver• 3 years ago

Woz is the almost-forgotten heart of Silicon Valley of days gone by, that has gotten stepped on and almost ruthlessly thrown out.

But we need him. I hope he recovers fully.

superduty• 3 years ago

Thrown out? You are clearly unfamiliar with how revered and loved and embraced and honored and respected he is in the Valley. He is one of the actual and proverbial giants upon who’s shoulders most know they stand (except little shitheads like Zuck or Thiel).

cdchn2• 3 years ago

Thrown out by who? Steve Jobs?

You're totally right about Woz's legendary status. He is essentially the living embodiment of the hacker ethos.

upwardbound7• 3 years ago

Woz is one of the most selfless people I've ever met. At a conference he keynoted for (SynBioBeta), he said that even if immortality were available to him, he wouldn't want to live forever, because he'd be taking up a spot in the Earth's population carrying capacity, and even if that's just one spot of many billions, he wouldn't feel right taking up that spot, when he's already lived his life and now it's time for someone new to get the chance to enjoy the adventure that is living.

kome• 3 years ago

It's surprising to me that such an obviously common-sense viewpoint is being treated as if it's extraordinary. Nonetheless, it's commendable that he hasn't succumbed to the delusions of grandeur and immortality.

tourist2d• 3 years ago

If you asked the population if they would want immortality, the common answer wouldn't be "no".

TeMPOraL5• 3 years ago

What's so common-sense about it? Or even commendable?

Earth's carrying capacity is a problem to be solved, there are many viable solutions that can be executed in parallel, and it doesn't really sound like a big challenge relative to getting life extension working in the first place.

Really, it's just bewildering to me that having a death wish is considered common-sense, normal viewpoint.

worklaptopacct• 3 years ago

I don't know if it's universally a common sense standpoint with regard to everyone. Some people have a purpose to provide to their family and leave a legacy; this is a goal that can be fulfilled. But what if your life motive is to learn, create and put your skills to a common good?

jojobas5• 3 years ago

delusions of grandeur and immortality

Jobs took over his share of that.

jollofricepeas• 3 years ago

Good point.

We say many altruistic things when we’re happy and healthy.

There’s a great opinion article from a doctor that says people faced with death that come into a hospital usually change their minds about receiving care that would prolong their lives.

I have seen this many times as a caretaker for my own family members.

It’s only at the doorstep of death that we know how we truly feel about death itself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/opinion/advance-directive...

renegade-otter• 3 years ago

It's probably NOT that uncommon, but modern civilization allows so many creature comforts for the ultra-rich that they feel literally in heaven. They get the best of everything, almost instantly. Luxurious cars, an army of help, private planes, the latest technology, privacy and large mansions, beautiful partners, and the non-stop adulation and drooling over by the public.

It's trivial to develop the god complex with that kind of life and the desire to prolong it as much as possible. They know what they have, and they want to keep it forever. Why hedge on the unproven promise of eternal life if you can live in paradise already?

https://theweek.com/science/the-billionaire-led-quest-for-im...

Not surprisingly, it's the kind of people who, if allowed to eternally accumulate wealth and power, will eventually cause catastrophic damage to humanity if they feel not adored enough. Many don't even need multiple lifetimes do get there.

Wozniak's point of view is very uncommon in the rarefied slice of the population that he inhabits.

cracrecry• 3 years ago

why do we have to limit ourselves to earth?

It is like people can't look away and look at billions upon billions of galaxies clusters and could only see the limits of the Earth. The Earth is finite! we can't grow exponentially forever!

Mo3• 3 years ago

You act like we are limiting ourselves to earth on purpose. We're just not there yet.

schiffern2• 3 years ago

we can't grow exponentially forever!

We can't grow exponentially forever in space either. Somehow this gets forgotten.

  O(N^t) > O(t^3), for all N > 1

Here t^3 is the future light-cone of Earth, ie this assumes [trans]humanity expands at the speed of light and instantly colonizes all matter. This is an optimistic upper bound IMO.

gosub1002• 3 years ago

contrast that to Jobs' "use my private jet to get first dibs on a healthy liver so I can try alternative medicine and die anyway"

wholinator2• 3 years ago

I don't know all the specifics of jobs journey but a terminal cancer diagnosis does things to one's mind. My mother took every medical intervention offered her and by the end she was very much wishing she hadn't. Certain techniques the medical field has developed have the effect of really only prolonging the suffering at the very end of life. The whole family including her was begging god to end our suffering, for months.

olifante• 3 years ago

This constant vilification of one of the great figures of tech history is tiresome. Yeah, maybe Steve Jobs was not a great person, but why should constantly overshadow his tremendous successes?

Steve Jobs was a forceful and perhaps disagreeable character, but he is one of the clearest examples of how having relentless drive and taste can change the world. Focus less on the feet of clay and more on the giant.

And not to diminish Wozniak’s tremendous achievements, but Steve Jobs continuously innovated over the course of decades and had a much greater impact on the world.

alphanumeric0• 3 years ago

Love Steve. I had the pleasure of meeting him at a conference once. I wonder if Mexico City's historically bad air pollution had something to do with it. Apparently the oxygen levels are 25% lower in the city, due to its high altitude, making the air pollution worse. Carbon-based fuels also do not combust completely.

jwr• 3 years ago

Best wishes to Woz.

He is one of very few people I genuinely admire and look up to. So much unlike the current crop of leaders-a*holes (like Musk, SBF, and a bunch of other fraudsters not even worth mentioning that were so in vogue just a couple of years ago).

Apart from his impressive technical achievements (and they are impressive, they are his, and they are worth learning about!), his personality and style are something to be admired.

someonehere• 3 years ago

Many years ago, I used to go to his website and he had a live cam of his home. I think he had a couple pointed zoom cameras in his house and outside of his house so he can look around. It was always cool seeing him walk by or doing something in front of the camera. It was almost like Justin TV but in the early 2000s.

zlg_codes• 3 years ago

Hats off to the one guy allowed to call himself The Woz. Without him, Apple Computer wouldn't have made it off the ground. Jobs may have had some business or marketing acumen but the brains was all Wozniak.

May his recovery go well and there be no long term damage.

notadev• 3 years ago

Just want to add to the positive voices wishing for Woz’s speedy recovery.

Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

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