“While [Steve] Jobs was the public face and showman of [Apple], [Steve] Wozniak was widely perceived as the geek-behind-the-scenes, a persona that was largely backed up by recent movies about the life of Steve Jobs,” Monty Munford reports for Forbes. “But this representation hides many interesting and crazy things about Woz that the so-called public character represents. In many ways, Woz is a more interesting person than Jobs ever was.”
“At the end of last year, Wozniak was invited to the influential BDL tech event in Beirut to share his experience with a highly enthusiastic audience of 10,000 people during his first visit to Lebanon,” Munford reports. “This writer was privileged to interview him in front of that crowd for an hour after an intense briefing backstage when Woz told revealed personal stories that, indeed, showed a deeper and more fascinating personality than is widely acknowledged.”
“The first story surrounds his business card; an object that is made of metal and looks as if it was 3D-printed from Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. While it look’s exactly what a successful geek’s should look like, the reality is somewhat different,” Munford reports. “According to Woz, this card was born of necessity, not pomposity. After the events of 9/11 all jets, be they private or public, were not allowed to carry steel utensils; all knives, spoons and forks had to be made of plastic. This fazed Woz who was very fond of an airborne steak, so he circumvented these cutlery restrictions by creating a metal business card that allowed him to cut his steak in the style to which he was accustomed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: That’s one sharp business card!
It’s a good thing for Woz’s ability to continue to cut steak in-flight that most TSA agents can’t read and those that can certainly aren’t reading Forbes nor are they attending tech events in Beirut.
U.S. TSA screeners = the gorillas in Planet Of The Apes.
I like his thinking on the card! Clever!
(Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.)
Cool thing about Woz’s card case is that when he opens it you can see Marsellus Wallace’s soul glowing.
I have metal business cards also. The problem is people won’t take them. They see the card as expensive and fear losing it. They take the card, walk around showing everyone, then hand it back saying “oh no, I can’t take this. It must cost a fortune.”
My credit card is also black metal. Causes trouble for some card readers. No trouble for chip readers. Then again, I use ApplePay when possible.
Some high end credit cards are now being made with metal. Certainly cutting a streak with a metal card has some sanitary concerns, but beyond that it’s quite cleaver.
Not hard to be “interesting” when your buddy makes you a multi-million by finding investors and monetizing a computer design you were going to give away for free. You can then take all that money and basically spend the rest of your life wandering around being geeky and weird without worrying about accomplishing anything else of significance. So, Woz spent money to buy metal business cards and invents a stupid story about using them to cut steaks? (Last time I flew first class, they gave me a real knife.) And Woz knows some celebrities? And he crashed a plane. Wow, very interesting.
Meanwhile, after Steve Jobs left Apple, the company completely fell apart, even though Woz helped design a new replacement for the Apple II, which didn’t do anything but hasten it’s fall. If Jobs hadn’t come back, Apple would have vanished like Commodore and no one would even be talking about Woz anymore. So, to summarize:
Without meeting Jobs, Woz would have ended up a minor engineer at HP who was kind of famous in the computer hobby world back in the 70’s.
Without Jobs rescuing Apple, Woz would be a guy with a metal business card who once designed a computer for one of those early PC companies that went bankrupt.
Jobs took acid, traveled to India with no money, had sex with famous female rock stars, created one of the most profitable movie companies of all time, gave a commencement speech that people still reference, was the largest shareholder of Disney, etc… oh, and he did a bunch of stuff at Apple too. Like head up the Apple II, Mac, iMac, iPod, iPad, iPhone and build the biggest most successful tech company of all time that is still going strong.
I think Jobs wins on the most interesting character.
PS: Woz was always wrong about the slots on the Apple II. They are one of the biggest reasons it was never successfully upgraded.
This is a really good article on why I carry metal business cards. I have to say they are really cool, and totally worth it but I got them pretty cheap at https://metalkards.com/ and they look great.