Woz: Apple Didn't Need NeXT

Silicon Valley legends should emerge from obscurity more often. Apple co-founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak has been on a tear lately, running a wild media tour in support of his memoir "iWoz" since late this summer and holding forth on every topic under the sun.

And often with a challenge to the way Apple was run after Steve Jobs came back in late 1996.

As Woz tells MacWorld UK, Apple was better off without Jobs's company NeXT and the OPENSTEP operating system, whcih grew up into the Mac OS X we use today. No, Woz, said, Internet Explorer made OS 7 crash, not OS 7 itself.

“There wasn’t an objective engineering type look at the operating system that we had. It was not at fault, although it was implicit a little, it was not the reason Macs were crashing. Apple thought it was and it gave a horrible opinion inside Apple as to what steps we should take to correct it, and these steps were wrong. There was nothing wrong with OS 7.”

Um, sorry Woz, but that isn't true. Speaking as a teenaged user of OS 7 on a Performa 6115 that didn't have Internet Explorer installed on it, OS 7.5 was a dog. A DOG. I remember trying to write in ClarisWorks and watching as the word processor couldn't keep up with my typing, even with no other applications running. I remember CDs skipping while I did nothing more than read text-only email in Eudora Light. Without NeXT and the precursors to OS X, Apple would not be thriving today.

Woz's is an interesting take, but it's ancient history. The classic Mac OS was virtually immune to attacks, because it had a truly unique architecture. It was also buggy and crash-prone, with appalling memory management techniques and multi-tasking. There was no bridge to a robust, modern OS through Classic. Stability would have been one gain; everything else is far more valuable.

Image via OldOS. Via Digg.