I dunno, I'm not sure VCs would be too keen to fund someone with the characteristics of the 1970s Jobs. Quasi-homeless, just returned from a "spiritual enlightenment" trip to India and now dresses in traditional Indian costume, experiments with LSD...

You can be a cofounder with all those attributes, regardless of VC. You could also create something so compelling that VCs would overlook any concerns like that when it got to that stage of needing further investment.

It's not as easy for startups to create vertically integrated hardware devices these days.

The time was right for the Personal Computer revolution in 1977. In 1997, it was the Internet revolution.

In 2007, it was the Social revolution.

There's always opportunity, you just need to find what is now worldchanging, which would be difficult, expensive, or plain impossible before.

And right now, I think we're going through the human revolution, where we use applications to make humans be better, and do better, and everything is centered around the human experience.

It's a bit naive to think that it was ever particularly easy.

It's hard to imagine Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs working on a custom made device in a garage and selling hundreds of them to a local electronics store today, though.

What about making a custom device in a garage and selling them over the Internet?

They would probably get sued. By Apple ;)

I wanted to make two points in response but e1ven has made one already - that visionaries in another time would probably just have created something different. That restlessness and urge would still exist, they'd likely just react to the different environment.

Secondly, even in hardware, there are opportunities like Kickstarter where anyone bold with a well-presented or confident idea can get some backing. There's a bottle-opening-iPhone-case on there (something that might be presented as a sketch on a comedy show and ridiculed) with $20-30k behind it! I was hoping that was a joke.

For example a mobile photo sharing app.

Meh, that was the time. Today, the equivalent would be quasi-homeless, just got back from a "blogging" trip backpacking through Thailand, wears board shorts and flip flops, experiments with Provigil.