Seth Rogen had some questions, and Woz had some answers. The actor and the engineer, Steve (Woz) Wozniak, got acquainted during the making of the new film “Steve Jobs,” in which Rogen plays Woz, who founded Apple Computer with Jobs. They recently met again for an advance look at “Silicon City,” an exhibition, at the New-York Historical Society, about innovations in technology.

Rogen, who arrived late and a bit glassy-eyed, examined a conference table covered with gizmos and homed in on the Picturephone Model 2, from 1969, a “Jetsons”-style precursor to Facetime. “How did it work?” he asked.

Woz, eager to explain the mechanics of everything, stroked his salt-and-pepper beard and admitted, “This size screen, over the phones of that day—I do not know the answer myself.”

Rogen uttered his distinctive cartoon-dog chuckle. He bent over “Theseus Mouse,” a rudimentary fifties rodent with a tail, and said, “And is this the first mouse? Ha-ha, got you!”

“Actually, it is,” Woz replied. His explanation of how the magnetized mouse could run a maze led him, eventually, to the emergence of artificial intelligence. After nodding along for a while, Rogen said, “They won’t just kill us all, right?”

“No,” Woz reassured him. “If computers get smarter than humans, they’re going to realize, ‘Nature’s important, and humans are a part of nature, and we should work on solving the problems of the world.’ Some of them will even be movie directors—”

“Uh-oh.”

Woz noted that the difficulty in emulating human consciousness lay in replicating memory: “It seems to be everywhere in the brain, like a hologram.”

“Could there be inherited memories?” Rogen wondered. “My dog, whenever she eats, she wipes her face off like there’s blood on it. And she’s lived on a couch her whole life.” The men regarded each other curiously.

In the film, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle, we see Jobs, the master showman, preparing to introduce three new computers, across a span of fourteen years, and sparring each time with his workplace family. Rogen’s Woz repeatedly tries to get Jobs to publicly acknowledge the team behind the Apple II, the company’s only profit center. No dice. At last, Woz, who built the first Apple II himself, calls Jobs an asshole and declares, “I am tired of being Ringo when I know I was John!”

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Woz said, “I was so glad with the way Seth portrayed me. If I’d had the nerve to say those things in real life, to say the truth—which is that Steve couldn’t execute, and all his products, from Apple III to the Lisa to the Macintosh, failed—that’s how I would have wanted to say them. Politely and respectfully.”

“Well, it was fun to seem smart,” Rogen said. “The movie is very confrontational, because drama is all about conflict. But you’re maybe the least confrontational person I’ve ever met. You’re easygoing, you’re happy—”

“I could tell you a story I may never have told in public,” Woz said.

“O.K.!”

“I left Apple—though I was still officially Employee 1—to make a universal remote control. We hired the design company Steve used, Frog Design—”

“You did tell me this!”

“—for our remote-control casing. Steve came by on his bicycle and saw they were doing work for me. He threw the parts against the wall and said, ‘Put them in a box and ship them to me. I own everything you do.’ ”

“And did you confront him after that?”

Woz shook his head. “Because we were always friends, you know, even when he thought we weren’t.” Wistfully, he added, “In the movie, Steve Jobs says to me, ‘I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician, you sit right there, you’re the best in your row.’ I would have preferred me to have said, ‘But I’m the best in my row and every row.’ ” Then, brightening, he said that Jobs deserved enormous credit, later, for introducing the iPod and understanding the importance of the Cloud.

“I don’t keep my photos on the Cloud,” Rogen said. “I have hacking issues”—a reference to the Sony Entertainment hack apparently provoked by Rogen’s film “The Interview.”

Woz frowned and said, “I use Siri more than anything else in my life.”

“Really?” Rogen asked. “For what?”

Woz shot his sleeve and addressed his Apple Watch in a presentational manner: “Hey, Siri—‘What is the tallest mountain in New York?’ ” Long pause. “It says, ‘Use your phone to search.’ O.K., let me see if Siri knows some really weird words. ‘Hey Siri—‘What is eiπ?’ ” He frowned. “It thought I said ‘iPod.’ But I’m sticking with it!”

“Because you think it’ll get better?” Rogen said, indicating the march of progress behind them.

“Because it’s family.” ♦