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I would hope that it would take on more the flavor of the old time passenger cruise lines of the late 19th & early 20th Centuries. Still, once space travel starts to really emerge, it is going to be a very capital intensive business. Almost all of the capital that Wall Street & other exchanges can dig up is going to help fuel this next economic expansion.

I predict that over the next 15-25 years you will see Wall Street (especially once the X-Prize has been won) get into space in a major way. You will see the whole dot Bomb thing happen all over again, unfortunately, with fly-by-night companies that do little but promise the Moon (this time in a more litteral fashion). Some companies are going to emerge and become very successful, but many others are going to take a whole lot of money from people and throw it down the drain.

If the X-Prize team list is an indication with over 26 different teams listed, once it has been proven to be a practical business you will see many others jump into the business. Companies like Boeing, Airbus, and Thiokol (all companies you seemed to miss) are more than likely going to come in and join the party as well. They all have some sort of rocketry/avaition experience, deep pockets, and an aire of respectability when they start producing spacecraft.

In this regard it would be more like the P.C. industry, where it started in a bunch of garages and small industrial parks, where several millionaires arose from relatively modest beginnings. In this case we have a few "modest" millionaires who are perhaps going to turn this into billions.

I don't know about anyone else, but I'd buy a Woz.

Here is another one:

Scroll down to the TV Jammer Q/A

How about this one:

Woz in Vegas

Well looking at his web site, you can see a bunch of mac-related links, if that helps.

Before Woz designed the Apple, he designed blue boxes, and he and Steve Jobs used to go around selling them to people, with Woz even using some of the design tricks he learned from making blue boxes to build the Apple I and II. I seem to recall either him or Jobs once saying that if they never had built blue boxes, they might have never have built the first Apple (which would mean IBM may have never built a PC, and who knows if any of us would be using PC's right now?), but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.

Before Woz designed the Apple, he designed blue boxes, and he and Steve Jobs used to go around selling them to people, with Woz even using some of the design tricks he learned from making blue boxes to build the Apple I and II. I seem to recall either him or Jobs once saying that if they never had built blue boxes, they might have never have built the first Apple (which would mean IBM may have never built a PC, and who knows if any of us would be using PC's right now?), but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.

Before Woz designed the Apple, he designed blue boxes, and he and Steve Jobs used to go around selling them to people, with Woz even using some of the design tricks he learned from making blue boxes to build the Apple I and II. I seem to recall either him or Jobs once saying that if they never had built blue boxes, they might have never have built the first Apple (which would mean IBM may have never built a PC, and who knows if any of us would be using PC's right now?), but I forget which one of them said that, when and where.

It would certainly be consistent of him to be totally cynical about "playing nicely" with the RIAA.

What do you expect from someone who funded his company with the proceeds from a criminal act!

I read that whole page, and how do you get anything about them funding the project from a criminal act? They did build a "blue box" which was probably a little illegal. But they didn't make any money off of it, nor fund the company... The biggest thing I see on that page is that Steve Jobs gave Woz a hard time for coming in to work late... Get a clue, and stop bashing Jobs and Apple for no reason.

That's a classic!

What do you expect from someone who funded his company with the proceeds from a criminal act!

My company was CL9 and we built the CORE universal remote control. This was before the simple idea of preprogramming all the codes used by the common companies was done. My device looked at the IR signal and analyzed it and recreated it. It also had to determine if certain codes needed to be emitted more than once to work. My device had 16 user buttons and a few more control buttons. They were all large and finger sized. You could put the CORE into one of 16 keyboards, so you really had 256 total keys to use. Any key could have a sequence of any of the other keys and any IR codes that you read in. So a single key could turn on the TV, then turn on the VCR, then select channel 4, etc. More than that, the 'sequence' attached to a key could access all the control buttons. The lessor used control buttons were covered by a slider to keep things looking simpler. This remote control kept it's own time and could emit IR signals at certain times. You could hit "AT-5-PM-6" (4 buttons total) to execute button 6 at 5 PM. Even the buttons that programmed the main user buttons could be included in a program. Thus button 1 could reprogram button 2, etc. This allowed a simple level of programming without normal program loops. You could program the remote control to skip daylight savings time with a sequence like "AT-2-AM-Set-Hour up" (5 buttons). I was able to create a program that would keep daylight savings time going up and down on the right days forever, including leap years, but it was quite an effort and required a lot of keys to hold current states.

Yes, they do. You can even buy uncut sheets of them from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Steve Wozniak has an interesting story about how he uses sheets of $2 bills on his site. I got a kick out of reading this a few weeks ago:

You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.

I take the sheets of 4 bills and have a printer, located through friends, gum them into pads, like stationery pads. The printer then perforates them between the bills, so that I can tear a bill or two away.

He ended up raising the suspicions of a casion manager in Las Vegas, who called in the Secret Service because he thought the bills were counterfeit...

did anyone notice that the guy in the background on the picture of woz and steve jobs at woz.org is the same guy from that bogus 9/11 tourist photo that went around the net for a while?!!!!!!

he didnt invent the Mac, Steve Wozniak did, Jobs marketed it, so yes he is innovative at selling computers branded as premium product$

And someone with a bachelor's should not be expected to be able to develop a new language...In general, working Engineers (non-PhD's, software or otherwise) don't contribute to to advancement, i.e. research papers. They work with the tools they're given to solve problems.

I disagree, completely. You shouldn't need a college degree at all if what you want to do is invent your own comiler, language, OS, etc...as if such things were impossible without one. In other words your potential for achievement has more to do with your passions and above all who you are than what Uni you've attended and how far you make it in formalized education. Some people have been known to INVENT circuit boards, elegant interfaces, write compilers and port languages to their newly created hardware...all without having been traditionally "academic" as we understand it. The last time the non-academic intellectual has been in vogue was during the beat generation. But whether that lifestyle is well regarded by the world at large or not does not affect the potential rewards of this approach to life.

Have you heard about Woz and his sheet of $2 bills?. If you like carrying $2 bills, then consider going the whole hog and really getting to know the local law enforcement personel.

The guy you knew in middle school who hated Macs for no apparent reason.

Middle school? Hell, when I was in middle school, the Mac wasn't even a twinkle in Jef Raskin's eye yet. Steve and Steve were still living high on the Apple ][ hog. The ill-fated Apple III and Lisa hadn't even embarrassed the company yet. The Mac finally shipped during my junior year of high school, and the only reason to hate it then was it cost so damn much.

Come to think of it, annoying Apple zealotry aside, price is still the only reason I haven't bought a Mac.

I've got news for you, he didn't do much coding at Atari, either!

I wonder if Steve Wozniak has been keeping up with the phone system like he used to. P)

These days a lot of people class themselves as inventors or techies, but they're just interested in money, or the whole patent game.

This story reaffirms Woz as my favorite techie of the last fifty years. His inventions, while not quite on the level of the wheel or the television, have revolutionized numerous areas of technology.

But what sets him apart from the majority is his openness and friendliness. He doesn't appear to get riled at people asking him questions about his inventions or theories, and he doesn't put himself on a pedestal talking in techie-mumbo-jumbo. How many techies are like that these days? He almost seems to have no ego.

We need more people like this in tech. I will even admit that I have an ego, and a tendancy to 'talk down' to non-technical people sometimes. Woz is inspirational in that you don't need to do this to be respected in the tech community.

His Web site is a reminder of what an open minded, friendly, and unjaded character he is. I am sure he would cringe at reading this post, but I hereby dedicate it to the 'nicest techie of modern times', even if he's not the most famous.

Woz also has a good reason to get a Segway.

Kind of like the Jobs-Wozniak team. One gets the glory while the other languishes in realitive obscurity. Were's the Wozniak reality-distortion field?

Wrong.

see here

Steve Wozniak gets my vote.

Bobby built a bluebox and haxored the phone for free calls!

Then Greg stole all the credit.

Interesting. Why does a alledged techno-visionary like 'Greg' not have a website to share his widsom with the masses?!!

From MacSlash, today's issue:

Compact Flash in Your Apple II

CrazyJoel writes "I found this on woz.org. And it seemed pretty neat. Basically, the guy figured out a way to put mass storage devices like compact flash on an Apple II."

Why would one do such a thing? The geek in question explains:
My reasoning for this project is described in detail in the Background section, but suffice it to say, I wanted to be able to pull out my old Apple II and use it from time to time to reminisce about the early days of personal computers. I wanted a reliable way to store my Apple II programs and data files for many years to come. Due to the long term reliability prospects of floppy drives, and my general laziness, I decided a mass storage device is what I needed.

The GUI pioneered by Xerox (poor sods) lost it to Apple

Q From e-mail: ... I also have one question; did Apple "steal" the GUI from Xerox (at PARC), or did they develop it themselves?

WOZ: Apple worked with Xerox openly to bring their developments to a mass audience. That's what Steve portrayed Apple as being good at. Xerox got a lot of Apple stock for it too, it was an agreement.

Greg Joswiak?

I don't know why, but I keep getting images of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs evil love child...*shudder*

At one time you could write Woz and ask him yourself, but he's a bit swamped at the moment. You might want to read his answers to other letters to see if the answer is there.

At one time you could write Woz and ask him yourself, but he's a bit swamped at the moment. You might want to read his answers to other letters to see if the answer is there.

Q From e-mail: I just had to laugh at the part in the movie where someone called Dial-A-Joke. I remember calling that number to hear the joke of the day. Was it really you who did this?

WOZ:Yes. It was in the days before you could buy a phone or answering machine. I had to rent the same one as theaters rented, a very costly one. I was "The Crazy Pollok". This was the first Dial-A-Joke in the San Francisco Bay Area, back in 1973 or so. I used a heavy Russian accent and used the name "Stanley Zebrezuskinitski" when I took live calls. I met my first wife this way, she was a caller.

I was listed with high Tetris scores many times in Nintendo Power magazine. I also sent letters showing how I'd given GameBoys to Gorbachev and Bush. The latter was seen playing one shortly thereafter on TV in a hospital after a heart problem. It got to the point that Nintendo Power wouldn't list my name again so I sent in a score photo and used the name "Evets Kainzow" which is both my names backwards. When I got the next issue and flipped to see if anyone had beaten my high score, I saw this name but forgot having sent it in. I was worried that someone was close to me. I noticed that he had a foreign sounding name and that he lived in Saratoga, the next city over. Then I realized that it was my own trick.

Hey, it could've been Steve Wozniak!

-motardo

I'm absolutely amazed that you opened your mouth and this kind of craptacular nonesense flooded out. I noticed that you've got a bit of a high userid and a penchant for buggery, but I'm still simply amazed.

I think it's time you cracked out the old brainbox and did a bit of a grep on your reality. If you'd had a minute tiny little itty-bitty clue, you would know that the company called "Apple Computer" was formed by a whacky couple of teenagers who shared the name "Steve".

Now that you've clued yourself in, I'm sure that you're feeling like a real smart cookie... why don't you go back to your sandbox and grab your toys and go home because no one is interested in listening to your stupid childish ranting.

Comment from E-mail:

I really need your help about who designed the logo, the story behind it, the meaning of the logo, how the logo work with the company and all the employee, and maybe you could help me how to contact the designer.

Woz:

We ran a small partnership 'out of the garage' for a year, selling about 150 Apple I's. The closest thing to a 'logo' that we had was an etching of Newton under an Apple tree. We then developed a great product, the Apple ][. It looked like we could sell thousands of them, but we needed a lot of money. When we secured the money, from Mike Markkula who joined us as a third and equal partner, we hired an agency to help us with public related marketing concerns. On topic was a logo. We had a great company name, Apple, and wanted to leverage our company off the ideas that this healthful word represented.

The Regis McKenna agency came back with some proposals, many based on the Apple shape. One of the most notable things about the Apple ][ was that the display was in color, with patents too. No other low cost computers were near such a feature. So the multicolored logo made sense. The McKenna version had the colors in rainbow order. Steve Jobs rearranged them to get the darker (heavier) colors toward the bottom, and the logo was born.

I have no idea how to contact logo designers.

Who you callin' troll?

Read. Fifth paragraph down.

i have a good friend who is from bulgaria, and there they mass-produced an apple IIe knockoff called the Pravetz. they reverse engineered the apple and started making their own version. He said that they ended up being more powerful than any of the apple II line. People like the Dark Avenger (ever had a real computer virus? he probably wrote it) grew up hacking these things. anyway, they are mentioned in a really good wired article about the Dark Avenger and the Soviet Bloc's more recent computing history, and Woz even has a picture of one on his website.

Also take care not to regard anything in Pirates of Silicon Valley as factual.

SJ - "And the last one being one year at Berkeley that the bluebox here at Steve Jobs. I wouldn't have traded Apple for that whole year"

SK - "Explain to the audience what that Blue Box year is."

SJ - "Blue Boxes, you know, I don't even think they worked the year that I left. But the year I was there, it's like, you could put the right tones into a telephone and just control all the switching circuits of the phone network of the world and make free calls anywhere and talk to operators in other countries and reroute signals back to the phone next to you."

SK - "Completely illegal by the way."

SJ - "Pardon?"

SK - "Completely illegal by the way."

SJ - "Completely Illegal and I kind of thought of myself as an ethical hacker. I won't make these calls. I wouldn't make bluebox calls. Any call I made to like friends, relatives, I paid for. I developed that thinking about it early on. I only used the bluebox to experiment with the system and explore it. But, I have helped other people build blueboxes, redboxes, blackboxes and pass out information to them and doing that - that I feel badly about looking back. Like that was really kind of illegal. I was helping other people cheat the system and, you know, not pay for things they should pay for."

SK - "Well, at that time, that was kind of a, uh, don't you see that as part of the experimentation of youth, that, and granted, we're both probably just justifying our past indiscretions, but isn't it, because nobody really got hurt, isn't it...serve"

SJ - "Well, very close. Young people will often, if they have these abilities to do this - almost nobody has the ability - they make up blueboxes, you know, just their technical and engineering ability and stumbling onto it and being interested in certain articles, but, you know, you mentioned my shyness earlier? This was the first time in my life that, for that one year, I was also out of my shyness because I was master of ceremonies. I could talk for an hour describing the bluebox stories, the technology, how it worked, giving demos, talking about famouse phone phreaks, and wierd stories of strange things they've done and how they beat the system and that basically was the first time in my life I could kind of talk and be the MC."

SK - "It's sort of a hacker ethic that you're talking about is, and that's obviously still to a certain degree has a great deal of effect in your life at Apple and your life after Apple, correct?"

SJ - "Ummm, I would say just all my life I guess that the way I operate then is probably still, it's still the same now.I'm sure if you had heard some of the things I've done in the recent years you'd say, 'He's still doing it.' But, ummm, the best thing came out the bluebox for Apple was just a chance to experiment, trying to get my designs as tiny as possible with the perfect set of chips, and I did some designs in the bluebox that I never did anything that good, even at Apple. But at least the timing circuits were the exact same chip structure of the synchronous counter chips that I used for the TV counting signals of the Apple 1 and 2."

SK - "Mm hmm"

SJ - "So it's carried over a little."

SK - "That's something we'll definately get into in the next segment we're going to talk about your life at Apple. But in the meantime folks I would go to Woz.org. He's got a very extensive FAQ there that has all kinds of letters, all kinds of answers to questions that you can find out what he's doing now, what he was doing in the past, what his thoughts are about various things including sounds like the much hated A&E Billionaire Biography, right?"

SJ - "Uhh, repeat that?"

SK - "It sounds like you weren't a big fan of the A&E Billionaire biography about you?"

Plenty of other references on Steve's site, as well...

Things change. I don't compile to P-Code from Fortran anymore, and code isn't freely shared anymore.

Oh, wait. I guess things don't change...

Get an emulator or abandonware copy, and play with it for awhile - enjoy yourself. Nostalgia in moderate quantities is fun, and it might spark a few new ideas that apply to today's technology.

--
Evan

> Apple has always been a company of closed software and closed hardware.

No it hasn't been. Steve Wozniak was GIVING away schematics for his (at the time - new) computer!

http://www.woz.org/letters/general/10.html

Back in the early Apple ][ days, you could get the complete assembly ROM listing. Schematics were also widely available. (Hehe, I remember the mod that lets you add multiple 16K language cards, and I maxed my Apple out at 96K. Disk Muncher could almost copy a disk in 1 pass :)

IBM did the same thing with it's early PC.

That's what really started both companies: How easily hackers could hack and expand it. (Of course Apple targeting the schools and business users didn't hurt either. Along with soft good software like Visacalc (the first spreadsheet) and AppleWorks (I believe the first integrated application.)

Bringing this back on topic...

So Apple uses a BSD license. They are NOT under any OBLIGATION to give back. Yes, they are profiteering off other's people work, but guess what: The BSD license is *complete* freedom. Now, I don't want to start a flamewar of GPL vs BSD, but I really don't see what big deal is.

Somewhere along the way, Apple fall into the Not Invented Here Syndrome. Apple "embracing" the BSD license is 180 degree turn around for them. Give them more time and they might reach see the benefit's in GPL software.

Jeff Wozniak is not Woz. Woz is Steve Wozniak.

Full details are available at Woz's website.

Ok, how about both pong and breakout? He wrote both, but my story was about pong. Breakout was him learning about 16 colors on NTSC. =)

Don Negro

Let me quote an article from woz.org:

"
The computer was never the problem. The company's strategy was. Apple saw itself as a hardware company; in order to protect our hardware profits, we didn't license our operating system. We had the most beautiful operating system, but to get it you had to buy our hardware at twice the price. That was a mistake.

"
Steve Wozniak, "Woz" of Apple fame, said this in a 1996 Newsweek article. It's true. Apple could have started off on a different foot by licensing their operating system from the beginning, and possibly built a good revenue base off of that, but the idea of everyone-crufting-together-x86-machines-with-all-m anner-of-different-specs-and-hardware was still a new one when the MacOS came out. It leaves Apple in a bit of a bind.

But come on. This is a *hardware* company. Apple makes freakin'-awesome hardware, and support for these machines is built on the premise that they're all going to be very similar. iMacs are all cranked out in a factory, all with similar hardware and peripherals. Same for G4's, PowerBooks, what have you. They're not kludged together in basements by 16-year-olds (like my k6-2/400 was :), so Apple can offer a kind of reliability in support, drivers, and software in general that the x86 world just can't, due to the diversity.

To license OS X would be dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. First off, yes, we know that there's a Darwin port for Intel. But porting everything else, like the Classic layer, and who-knows-what-else, just to make OS X run on x86--it would just not be a good move for Apple right now.

Sorry, it was a direct cut-n-paste quote from his website, www.woz.org.

#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak