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Woz's New Startup

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the stuff-to-read dept.

Several readers noted that Woz has a startup called Wheels of Zeus. He's come out of "Semi Retirement" to work on a new wireless handheld sort of thing. Not a lot of details, but it certainly could shape up to be interesting. Specifically mentions GPS. Supposedly Woz.com will have data eventually, but currently is just really slow and redirecting to Woz's personal page.

2 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. A plea to Woz by Em+Emalb · · Score: 5, Interesting

    For the love of God,

    PLEASE INNOVATE!!! Don't do the standard all in one hand held, do something unique...well hell, something Woz like even

    --
    Sent from your iPad.
  2. Re:best wishes for success by biobogonics · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Woz has done many creative things in life and will continue to do more.

    (former member of the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club)

    Considering some of his outrageous hacks, I would not be surprised. One of his early characteristics was to do outrageous things in hardware or software. Here are a few examples.

    1. The screen memory on the Apple II was not laid out in a linear fashion but in a crazy quilt to lower the chip count on the motherboard. This resulted in headaches in converting a cursor address to a screen location.

    2. Woz's Apple II parallel card didn't use a bit in a PIO to handshake with the printer, instead the handshake line *changed the addressing on a PROM* which toggled the executing code back and forth between active code and a do-nothing loop - talk about self modifying code!!!

    3. One of the earliest cards for the Apple II was a modem with a "blue box" on a card. Obviously this was never produced in quantity.

    4. Woz's binary to decimal conversion routine using the decimal addition mode of the 6502 chip is a classic. Unlike the 8080 and 80x86, which have decimal adjust instructions that are added after an addition or subtraction, on the 6502, the processor is put into and later taken out of decimal math mode. This made the 6502 lovely for controling devices using packed BCD (binary coded decimal), something that the 80xxx family does not do nearly as well.