Nolan Bushnell, Steve Wozniak: The next Steve Jobs walks among us

Vicki Thompson

Steve Wozniak, left, with Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.

Nolan Bushnell, who co-founded Atari, says the next Steve Jobs is likely already working in Silicon Valley.

"You've probably already got the next Steve Jobs working for you and all the brilliance is ending up on the cutting-room floor," he said during a panel discussion with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak at the C2SV conference in San Jose.

Bushnell, who also founded Chuck E. Cheese and wrote Finding the Next Steve Jobs, said that Jobs' intensity struck him when he first met him in the 1980s.

"Steve came into my office one day," Bushnell recalled. "He'd probably been working there for a couple of days and he told me, 'Nobody knows how to solder. This stuff is going to fall apart in three weeks. This is s---.'

"He always knew how to impress people way up the totem pole," Bushnell said.

Bushnell and Wozniak took the stage together for the first time in 30 years and discussed the evolution of Silicon Valley from its roots in the semiconductor industry in the 1950s to the present.

They identified three factors that made Silicon Valley the innovation capital it is today: Stanford University, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory and the startup culture pioneered by those who thought they could do it better (referring to the eight Shockley engineers who spun off to create Fairchild Semiconductor).

The two also reminisced about early days of video games at Atari, discussing how Pong was an empowering force for women at a time when females were in very short supply in Silicon Valley.

"Women have better small muscle coordination," Bushnell said. "Pong turned every bar into Ladies' Choice. If you can get women interested in something, the guys followed."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/vertical_44/~3/2lwJboW2fYI/nolan-bushnell-steve-wozniak-discuss.html

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