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Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][
jgoeres writes "June 5th is the 26th Anniversary of my first favorite fruit-flavored computer. In honor of this, the Baltimore Sun is running Part One of a two-part interview with Steve Wozniak. When The Woz speaks, I listen. Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks. Don't forget to give the man props for his mad Tetris sk1llz, too."
He gave us the original Apple, the Blue Box, and spends his free time teaching computers to children.
By the way, Apple-History.com has tons of data on every computer Apple ever built, including the Apple ][. Definitely an awesome place to get the specs.
Ah the good old days:
CPU: MOStek 6502
CPU Speed: 1 Mhz
FPU: none
Bus Speed: 1 Mhz
Data Path: 8 bit
ROM: 12 k
Vonal Declosion
I'm not sure if the Apple2E counts here but...
:-) Ah, the memories!
Am I the only person who still finds himself humming the tune to pacman on the Apple even though it's been like 12 years since I last played it?
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
Sweet!! Looks like I'm on my way to fame and fortune!!
Still have on in my room :-D
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Not really. The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer ever. Commodore died because they produced a better product (the Amiga) but didn't market it well. It's unfortunate, but marketing gives an edge of an inferior product over one that is superior. I'm not referring so much to the Apple ][ so much as to the early Macintosh and the IBM PCs of the time. IBM has always been successful because of their marketing, even before PCs. They won out in the 1960s for the same reason. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics and it cost less than the Apple ][. That was the height of Commodore. You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.
Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner [Steve Jobs] lacks.
Some would say that it's precisely this personality contrast that allowed Apple to succeed, and jumpstart the personal computer industry with the Apple II and its descendants.
Based on published accounts, Woz likely would have been happy tinkering away on his projects to satisfy his own personal curiousity- it took Jobs' prodding to convince him to leave his comfortable job at Hewlett-Packard and commercialize his brilliance.
I'm sure most engineers would be loathe to admit that some marketing or sales sleaze provided them with the inspiration- or desperation- to create something novel or elegant, but Jobs apparently played that role in the genesis of Apple- Woz alludes to his constant questions about extending his technology in this very article.
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple //c.
"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"
"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"
The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted. :-)
Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...
They that would sacrifice their
Woz always gives an interesting interview, the (read more) links in the story get to the interesting stuff. It's too bad this is linked to something so banal as the 26th aniversary of the Apple, 'cause core /. readers would probably find it informative.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Well, even the first Acorn BBC computer was quicker, despite its use of the same chips . :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I tried giving my teacher a 26 year old apple to celebrate and she flunked me...
I've heard murmurs of Acorn. Why not have a slashdot story on that. It'd be interesting at least.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that. It's just like saying that Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has. The fact is that people are different. Thanks to Jobs Apple is still going strong. Sorry to say but IMHO the comparsion is totally irrelevant to this story.
i remember helping to maintain a lab of these things in 8th grade... first machine i started to cut my teeth on programming... basic no less. the irony is that the brains in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory (the vm acts as a dispatch for commands recieved over the serial line via radio modem from a pc, where i'm not constrained to 32k of RAM)... i have to wonder to what degree the power of the machines available to young protogeeks affects their coding skills later in life... i suspect that the less harsh the initial computational conditions in a programmers life, the less inclined those programmers are to be artful and elegant in their solutions. pure speculation, but still something i wonder about...
I think if I had a nickel for every time I read that I could be playing golf with Bill Gates instead of spending 10 hours a day dealing with issues on his stupid little OS.
"When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come?" - Saint Joe
Well, we, former Acorn users, would not like being given the impression we are as much cursed as our Amiga fellows. :-/
Acorn is dead, RiscOS is not that well : seeing the most recent RiscOS computers can be emulated at full speed on a Celeron is just another evidence I had to switch to OSX...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs
Wha..? I just dragged my ass out of bed and I'm still sleepy and I'm expected to understand a sentence like that?
I need another coffee...
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
That's fair. Most Mac people have the same sentiment about Wintel boxes these days.
...Goodnight!
Mainly because I think its inferiorness clogged up the market for the Commodore 64.
Yes -- you're right. Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior. The glacial speed of the C64's disk drive was a design feature. It let you do Zen or something while things were loading.
In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][. But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).
a world in progress...
Hear and watch the story Woz's life from the man himself. He spoke at NC State University on April 26, 2003. http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/woz.html
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior.
;-)
The disk subsystem did lack refinement. But it could act as a second audio channel.
In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][.
It could speak English with the right software!!
It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.
But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).
That was the detail I was missing.
The Apple ][ must break down less or something though, because the Apple:Commodore ratio I see seems to tilt towards Apple over time.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I just remember...
the whole machine was designed around being open. The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. The excitement of adding an 80-column card!
I was a TRS-80 guy, but played with the C64s, the Pets, the 99/4s and everything in between. We always marveled early on at the Apple's color display and selection of games (Choplifter!)
Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.
26 years later, has the company leaned? OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it. You'd think they would have learned something in all these years but they still seem to be innovative to a point, then shut everything down and try to make it as proprietary as possible.
My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you. This only adds value to your products and your company. Have you not learned anything in all these years? Don't simply private label FreeBSD as an "Apple Innovation". That will not work. Champion the marketplace and have faith that you will be rewarded for not being selfish. It really sounds stupid in today's economic age, but what has made Apple survive (aside from Microsoft needing it to shunt monopoly arguments) has been the loyalty of its users. Give them freedom and you gain even more loyalty.
Be open.
That should be Apple's new mantra.
Actually I rather thought that commodore's failure was an attempt to produce PC clones in a market already flooded with cheeper asian varities. I guess this is subject to some debate.
o rtcommodore.htm] I personly prefer to remember the Amgia as being a spliter project by rebels who wanted to defy the industry and actually come out with something inovative.
Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore. I'd have to pull out an amiga 1000 case, inside the cover are the signatures of all the people who worked on the project. a little history is on this site [http://commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_p
I *agree* though on the lack of marketing, with the exception of the guru meditation crashes my local cable provider sometimes shows. {newtek video toaster no doubt)
Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of. I guess I was somewhat prejusticed tward the Atari. ICD's MIO board with SCSI, 15meg HD, and Sparta dos was where it was at. Ok fine, the commodore had better 80column support and everything supported 64k unlike, superior game library. You just had to put up with disk drives from hell. I've been recently doing a compair and contrast with emulation, and ya know I still hate the "load "$",8" followed by "list". Both atari and apples at the very least offered boot disk support.
The Apple though, another system i'm not very much a fan of, is worthy of note because of it's early entry in the market place. Freaky graphics, tape drive controler for the floppy, but this was one of the first systems you saw in schools, that and TI-99/4a but no one could afford the software fore. But it had a massive following in education applications that I really remember, that whole comes equiped with a floppy drive and authors who permited open license for education really helped out.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Well, even the first Acorn BBC computer was quicker
And cost around a fifth of the price. An Apple II sold for about a grand, whereas my BBC model A cost me £200.
I'd rather have had the Apple though.
It could speak English with the right software!!
I assume you are talking about SAM (Software Automated Mouth). There was an Apple ][ version as well, but I agree that the C64 version sounded better.
It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.
Well, the graphics literally were a hack. Woz basically invented color computer graphics. I rather liked them though. As for ports, the Apple ][ actually had slots, just like a modern PC -- it was much more expandable than the C64.
I'd rather have had the Apple though.
Well, I bought mine when I saw that iBook had become as functional as NeXT computers...
It was in December 2002: when Jaguar came.
So, the unobvious choice has become the right one.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
How do you explain this then?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore.
;)
Ermmm...it was the Commodore Amiga. It had a Commie logo on it. Amiga Corp. came later after Commodore went under.
And I can't remember if it was that Atari ripped off Commodore or Commodore ripped off Atari, but SOMEONE ripped off SOMEONE.
My journal has hot
emulator:
radiovibrations.com/software/apple252.zip
game:4 17.shtml
classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiroms.Taipan33
Steve Jobs is bad and unstable?
Pirates of Sillicon Valley all over again.
Ciryon
The first digital computer was a berry: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
Not to forget the The Banana Computer.
I guess they say you always remember your first. :)
Thanks Dad!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Woz brought us the first personally affordable hardware and helped to break the consolidation of power in the mainframe.
Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.
They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.
Every major innovation has its saviors and its demons. Where do you want to go today?
"You have liberated me from thought."
Tradeoffs have always been made regarding efficiency, among the most important in recent years being the necessity for affordably maintainable code, combined with the decreasing importance of having super efficient code. IMO, this discourages most who are currently learning how to program from mastering the art of designing and analyzing the runtime of code. I personally had many many arguments with someone I worked with who kept insisting that runtime didn't matter anymore on current machines. In the meantime, his awful code (by and large) kept system load on our development server above 2 for most of the development day. I shudder what would have happened if we'd moved that over to our production server....
My dad used to play a lot of Microsoft's Tetris. So I had to play too just to keep my initials on the top spot. I once had a really good game going. I was in the zone. I was playing comfortably on the fastest level. I had way over 32k points.
And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals... I eventually took it as a quest to get the top score as close to 32767 as possible. IIRC I got it within 28 points. My dad never beat that score.
This doesn't have anything to do with Wozniak or Apple. But hey, they mentioned Tetris.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Is it just me, or is /. celebrating n years of everything recently? Conventionally years that are a multiple of 10 are celebrated, as perhaps are multiples of 5. This being a geek site, powers of 2 could perhaps be celebrated as well (which might be better, since they happen less frequently as the event becomes older). celebrating 26 years of something just seems strange though, unless every day is going to have a 'look at all of the things that happened on this day in history' article.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually, the Amiga 1000 was designed by a company originally called Hi-Toro, that became Amiga Inc. in 1984-ish. Hi-Toro approached Atari for funding, and got some, but Atari just wanted a games console and wanted to eat Amiga wholesale, dissolving it.
Commodore swooped in and bought Amiga from under Atari's nose, and Amiga became a division of CBM (that was profit-making right until the end - CBM kept funnelling the profits into their solid, but overpriced and unsuccessful IBM-PC clones).
The Amiga, which by then was a general-purpose computer outclassing both the contemporary Macintosh and PC (this was 1985, remember - the Amiga had incredibly powerful hardware for the time). Commodore/Amiga took another 6 months to "finish" the Amiga OS (itself a dramatic tale- the core kernel, exec.library was written by one man (Carl Sassenrath) locked in a darkened room, and the entire disk subsystem (AmigaDOS) was lifted over a period of weeks from a completely different OS (TriPOS) when the developers of the intended disk subsystem (CAOS) failed to deliver).
During that 6 months, Atari took a load of off-the-shelf chips, and flung together the inferior Atari ST to try to beat amiga to market (which they did).
And thus, the 16-bit wars began, with the Amiga emerging a pyrrhic victor as the no-longer-so-sucky PC started to take off in the 90s.
Then CBM died, but not before spinning off Amiga (UK) Inc. as a separate company.
Ahhhh, the random memories. I remember playing on the IIe. One assignment we had was to generate a quiz, so I wrote a program to ask who all the US Presidents were. I was already a geek in 6th grade. Three years later we still had IIe computers (different school...different state actually). We had to "draw" something, so my monochrome monitor ended up with a top view of an F-15.
Then the IIc came out and I thought that was the bomb.
Back to Woz...he's the man. Jobs is the man. Together, they rock. Wox has that childlike curiousity that keeps him working on things and coming up with new ideas and inventions. Unfortunately it's not always the "best idea" that gets there. Luckily Jobs was his buddy and took the business reigns.
And kudos to Woz for teaching, being a philanthropist, and giving his time to the people. In a time when so many executives just don't give a flyin' F about the "little people" and would rather build a nice big golden parachute for themselves, or worse yet, just suck the money from the company and the people and start half a dozen scandals, The Woz is truly a wonder to behold.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.
Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
not to mention run the shit out of starfleet II.
I haven't thought of that in years. Thanks for taking me back.
I never started on an Apple ][, I started with the //e, but before that, the Vic 20 and a whopping 3k of RAM. At school, we had //e's to play with, and being the geek I was, I quickly began to learn to program them. Soon enough, I had ripped the intro sound from Castle Smurfenstein and had it playing every time I turned on the computer with one of my disks. The days of fun, and computing and the emergence of software piracy. Ahhhh....the elite days of computing when all you had was some....err....what were those black square things called? Oh yeah...floppies....what ever happened to them? Do computers still USE those?
.sig: It's what's for dinner.
I actually saw this in stores.
-BbT
Don't forget emulation overhead. You're emulating an entirely different architecture, so it takes dozens of x86 instructions to emulate a single 6502 instruction. Not to mention you're doing the address decoding and register handling entirely in software.
Well, frankly, yes you can.
Microsoft has published ads belittle Linux, continually spread FUD about Linux, an more recently, sent a boat-load of money to SCO, which is currently in the process of constanly, and repeatedly slandering Linux.
If Apple published ads that said "The Commodore will eat your childern", then they would bare the blame...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Why, when I was your age, I ran a BBS on an abacus hooked up to two tin cans and a piece of string! And we liked it that way!
"Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
The C64? You may be thinking of the C128. The C64 needed a special program which I can't recall the name to do 80 column mode; C128 had it in hardware (and required a RGB monitor to display it on).You're right that the C64 didn't boot, but a C128 would seek for a disk when powered on, and you could also boot the disk by entering "BOOT" in basic.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Me first computer was an Apple ][
My favorite game was Breakout.
Reading now that Wozniak had written that himself, and that some of the features of the Apple ][ were invented specifically for that game is just... well... soooo c00l!!!
But even better: that Breakout implementation has a bug that AFAIR did not allow the paddle (or the ball??) to move to the very top position (Yes, the game ws played left-to-right), causing situations were you where either cought in an endless loop or would loose your ball. Anybody remember that one?
Being rather anoyed with that bug, I went ahead and fixed it. That was revelation! You could just walk right into a program and change it! how cool!
Now, some 15 jears later, i am a pretty decent programmer and just finishing my informatics dipoma... thanks, steve, for that sloppy coding!
P.S.: Breackout ist still my favorite arcade-type game.
(man, i need to change that sig. it's been there forever)
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
The first computer I used when I was in my 3rd year of school. What a sweet computer. USed to play some garfield game and a crossword maker. Sweet as.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
I am 22. I used the apple 2 in the 3rd year of school. I was 8. That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
he's a modest fellow isn't he? has he ever said to God, "you're in my seat?"
of course he wasn't buttoned down. jobs wears turtlenecks.
I know they arn't fruits but still its edible. Incase you don't know they are these british late 80s early 90s RISC computers.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
The Apple ][ was my first computer and I still have it. It's kind of sad to see them on ebay now for a lousy $26 bucks.
My parents didn't take out any loa(n)s though. I was fortunate to be the child of well off parents (until the mid 80's).
//e 1983) I probably wouldn't be in the position I am today. We go to lunch and my dad says "That was the best investment I ever made." That is a pretty strong statement in my opinion.
Without my first computer (Apple
Ah, it's like the Cat's in the Cradle all over again! lol... (tear in my eye)
Ah ok, I stand corrected... my memory is kinda fuzzy. The atari-8 bit had one program that i'm aware that supported 80col mode, and that was a vt-100 terminal emulator. Actually it wasn't all that bad, but a touch hard to read.
Actually come to think about it, the commodore did have that spiffy color text support, something that atari didn't really have. While I prefered the graphics on the atari, the commodore did have a couple of spiffy features.
I just enjoyed 3rd party hardware support on the atari.
I'm not honestly sure if you needed an RGB monitor to display the commodore in 80 column mode. Chroma/luma video aka svhs should have been more then adquate. I don't remember the model numbers of the sparticular monitors off the top of my head, but something like an amiga monitor i'd imagine would do quite nicely.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Oh I bought one a little bit earlier than that.
My first was a MacIIgi, and I've had one ever since - right up to my current 667 TiBook.
I bet if my first machine had been a Sinclair rather than a BBC, I'd have been a PC person though.
"Inferiorness?" I think the word you want is "inferiority."
If you EVER get a chance to hear Woz speak, GO! He has some hilarious stories.
For example, when he was in college, he designed and built a small device that would cause interference on a TV. Woz loves pranks, so he would take his little device to frat houses when the guys were watching the tube. He would sit in back & make the interference fade in & out. Meanwhile, some poor guy would try to adjust the antennae while everyone was yelling at him to move it here or there. In the end, Woz would finally stop the interference when the guy was in some bizarre contorted position.
He told one story after another. It was great!
got us invested in some fruit company. He said we didn't have to worry about money no more, and that's good! One less thing."
It still gives me shivers to think that these guys, working in a garage, started something big that went on to change the whole world.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I don't know about the Cxxx series, but the Apple II can display 80-cols on a TV (the monitors for the IIs ARE TVs).
I've still got my original ][ out there somewhere. Not a +, just a ][... we didn't need no fancy floating point math back in my day. Well okay, I got an Applesoft card and a 64K memory card for it. (God, I can't believe I paid more for that memory card then I did for this whole computer I've got right here)
Anyway, I fired it up a couple of years ago... it still beeps, the floppy drives still spin.. maybe I'll go bring it in the house and check it out.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
The most ironic thing about my years on the Apple ][ is that now I have more apple software than I had when I owned one. And it doesn't even fill half a cd :) I still start up the emulator once in a while and play some of the old classic games from my mis-spent youth.
I don't care what he did in the past.... after reading his web site I've come to the conclusion he's a knob.... a skilled one? yes.. but basically he's still a knob!
I'm so excited to announce that it's been exactly 26 years and 1 day TODAY! Can you believe it?
Hey, I loved the Apple ][ as much as anyone, but 26 years just isn't an important anniversary. Why are we talking about this? It's as if we forgot to celebrate this last year and we need to make up for it....
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
Jobs ate the Green Acid ! (-;
(source) stage announcement at Woodstock by Wavy Gravy
Note the date... April 26th, 1977 was, as far as I can remember, the introduction date of the Apple ][. What exactly are we celebrating on June 5th?
I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.
In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing
hlin 0,30 at 3
It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.
Thank you, wedge-shaped beige computer.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of.
No, but Yoda a fan of are you.
Ah...the good ol' days...making your name appear incessantly line after line using BASIC built into the OS (when using GOTO was acceptable, not shunned upon)...showing off to your friends by typing "CATALOG" and bringing up the file directory...and who can forget, kicking all your friends' asses in Lemonade Stand back in grade school.
Yeah, all we need now is to have the Super Mario Bros. Super Show come back onto the air.
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
The Amiga was designed and a prototype built by a separate company. They didn't have the expertise to mass-produce it, and so they sold it off to Commodore, who owned MOS and was able to reduce the chip count by building custom chips for it. I'm not sure what the name of the original company was, but the grandparent post definitely has the idea right and the parent post should be moderated "mis-informative" instead of "Informative."
To me, today, in the age of gigahertz, this little memory of my commodore still brings a smile to my face.
Boot the C-128, and the clock speed was 1 mHz.
From a command prompt, you type;
FAST
And it goes to a whopping 2 mHz. Overclock that baby!!! Of course, most of the time I was using my C-128 for anything besides BBS's, the first thing I did upon turning it on was to hold down the C= (commodore) key to get it to boot into C-64 mode so I could play the bevy of illegal software I had downloaded from the BBS's.
Good old days. When the owners manual actually taught you how to write programs.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
My first program was written on the Apple ][ in the summer before my senior year in high school. Too bad I have no evidence of it. I couldn't afford the $500 floppy drive and the damn audio tape deck was unreliable. You could hear the screeching on the tape but you couldn't tell if it saved correctly. It sure did make you program more efficiently because you didn't want to write a lot and lose it when you turned off the power. Man, those were the days.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
I don't know about the Cxxx series, but the Apple II can display 80-cols on a TV (the monitors for the IIs ARE TVs).
/white].
I don't know enough about the apple to know if they used an RF modulator or not, but according to the artical, Woz wasn't a fan of using them because of his prior ham experence, it was just not something you did, protecting the air waves and all that. It makes a fair amount of sence. Besides, RF modulators are subject to external interfearance.
Now... I did own and give away one green screen apple monitor that took composite video input, same as a television would use. This *could* be what you are talking about, but that was the norm actually. In fact, I gave it to someone in the 1990's, basicly saying it was the perfect thing to put on your VCR to watch Erasure videos.
Commodore, among one of the more popular systems, released a monitor for their computers. It took composite video input on the front, and chroma / luma video on the back. These monitors were very popular because of their crisp clear quality, and a number of people continued to use them on their TVrs, nintendos, whatever what have you. They also supported SVHS, as SVHS's cable standard is just seperate Chroma [color] and Luma [black
A few RGB monitors like that used on the Amiga had a much better dotpitch, and quite a few supported the older standards in video as well. It made a fair amount of sence, make this product useful as many people as possible. Commodores, ataris were still popular, and hell they made kick ass video editing monitors at a fraction of the cost of studeo monitors.
You'll have to get in an apple geek in there to differ with me on the subject. While I think there were color monitors for the apple, I think they were monitors rather then TVs, lacking the under. I know atleast one monochrome monitor I saw took standard composite video, no need for seperate chroma luma lines with monochrome after all.
Now... this is something i've always thought about. why the hell did it become out of fasion for computer monitors to support the sync rates of telivision? Why do we have to put up with lame scan line converters when at one time it was the norm for computer monitors to support video. This is one feature that blew away people about ye old amiga though technicaly not an amiga specific feature, flipping the switch on the back can watching telivision.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
some people bought the Apple ][e and ][ GS monitors for their Apple ][c, they didnt pop up on that little ET looking stand, but they totally worked. They would have matched too i guess? the Apple ][gs had more of a white case than the beige ][e and ][+. My school had one hooked up to a 19" TV so the whole room could see you could use Logo in color....
For the record my Apple ][e has the 12" monochrome, which might explain why i still make my telnet windows green and black. Personally, i spent countless hours playing on my 2400 baud modem or battling my brother on Spy vs Spy or Beach Head or Castle Wolfenstein or Choplifter. Life was better with the Mach 2 or Mach 3 joystick.
i guess i show my age when i refer to a Mac's "command key" as the "open apple" key?
In college, I worked part time in the computer lab supporting Macs and Apple ][s. In those days no one used the PC lab for writing papers because WordStar sucked in comparison to MacWrite. No one used the Apple ][s either but I one day taught a girl to use the Apple ][ to write a paper since there was a waiting list for the Macs. She loved not having to wait, so I sold her the one sitting in my closet for the previous 4 years. I had to hold her check ($250 USD) for about 6 months before she had enough money for it clear but what perfect timing. I got rid of that thing as the Mac Plus was becoming popular.
If only I can do this timing thing with the stock market...
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
I remember when the two Steves would bring their Apple prototypes to the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium to demonstrate them. At a time when hackers where programming blinking light patterns on PDPs and Altair consoles, the two Steves figured out how to hook up a monitor and keyboard (disks came much later). Some of this is captured in the Revenge of the Nerds, part I.
For date of birth I trust my motherboard more than
my fathersbeard.
asdf asdf
I'm talking about modern TVs here... They have the A/V inputs that are 100% compatible with the old style computers (esp. Apple IIs). Older TVs need an RF modulator. The old version is the Sup-r-Mod.
My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
y /f antasy.htm
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much
as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.
Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeaut
Woz also has a good reason to get a Segway.
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
I'm talking about modern TVs here... They have the A/V inputs that are 100% compatible with the old style computers (esp. Apple IIs). Older TVs need an RF modulator. The old version is the Sup-r-Mod.
Hmmmm, this was the norm, not the exception. The TI/99-4a monitor had A/V inputs, Atari used A/v inputs Tandy monochrome monitors I also remember as having a V input as well. There is not an early 8-bit or 16bit system i'm aware, with the notable exception of the Mac and the typical PC that didn't use A/V inputs, oh and AtariST no clue what the hell it used. The only exception I can think of in the PC world were come CGA cards had a composite video output, though it was pretty piss poor for color, not so bad for monochrome monitors.
But yea, you can hook up an apple to a modern TV or VCR no worries. Same with the TI 99/4a if you had the right cable. Atari and Commodores "might" actually hook up to the svideo port with the right cable, though i'm unsure which models supported that. CGA card no problem if you still have one laying about in case you want to use a dos based mp3 player and have it display track info in your TV.
But they were not TVs, they were monitors. Monitors don't have RF turning ability, TVs do.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Or are you just going off at the mouth?
First, as another reader pointed out, this has nothing to do with Apple publishing source code.
Second, in order for the music-labels to agree to the iTMS they *had* to implement some form of protection.
Third, RTFA--read the link you posted. Apple's iTMS DRM is *extremely* mild--letting you burn it to an unlimited number of CDs (which can then be reripped to unrestricted AAC files), spread between three computers, and copied to as many iPods as you happen to have. About the only things you can't do with it are a) Share it across a P2P network, b) spread it to every computer in a computer lab.
Further, the AACs and MP3s that you rip yourself are not copy protected.
If anything the page you linked to shows how Apple is *more* open--I thought at first, even, that you meant to indicate this, but your other posts show that evidently not.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
The Apple ][ must break down less or something though, because the Apple:Commodore ratio I see seems to tilt towards Apple over time.
I think a big part of this would be the Apple II's switching power supply in contrast to the C64's marginal, cheap, non-repairable, transformer-based power supply. And Commodore's drive access speed did suck ass. But that could be fixed with an accellerator cartridge or ROM upgrade. Remember that the Apple II cost about 8 times more than the C64.
Ive got an apple IIc sitting around, you want it?
It's yours if you want to pay the shipping (or pick it up in seattle).
email me at IIC.10.remmakjd@spamgourmet.com
and let me know.
-Dave
1) If you want an intelligent reply, you need to give better statistics on your (ancient) machines.
2) You shouldn't judge modern systems by ones that are nearly 10 years old.
3) If you want to debate, log in. I won't go back and forth with an anonymous coward.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Seems like there is some anouncement on the /. homepage about the birthday of some technology. Do we really need this? All of this birthday cake and ice cream is really putting on the pounds.
The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. How the hell did you get all that to run on a //c? I can't even get Quake *1* to play on mine!
i have an emu and a rom a round here somewhere i'm sure this site has it...
the most annoying part was that i had a laser 128k (apple IIe clone) and it was supposed to run both apple and ibm software, but in fact ran neither very well, so i could play the game but after i lost all myl ives i had to cold boot the machine and reload the game because it would glitch at the highscore screen and lock up
it doesn't do that w/ the emulator i have now heh
Soil testing apps? Man, you must be catnip for the ladies...
Dude, it's a troll. Ignore it and let the mods do their work.
Indeed, I still use my 1701 monitor for video games. Wish I had another one.
I'll nestle in right here with this thread and be recored in history. Let us bow our heads and give thanks to the Geeks that make all this possible. Interview with Woz 2 -parts Baltimore sun
My father bought me a c64 because it was cheaper, but I still would make a trip to my public library just to use their Apple ][e. I can't really explain it, but there were little things about it I just appreciated more, like turing on the computer and it booting automatically. I wrote better BASIC programs for the Apple than I did my own computer. Just like Macs compared to PC's today, the Apples then just felt so much cleaner than the competitors. Little things like being able to sit the monitor on top of the computer, or the dual 5.25 drives you could place under the monitor to save desk space. You can see how those little design techniques made their way into Macs today.
:)
Anyway, you can imagine my excitement last year when I finally got a Powermac G4
Some of my favorite games from the IIE: Federation Karateka F15 Strike Eagle (with the Mach III joystick, oh yeah!) Kung Fu Master Super Boulderdash (I wish I could get a port of this working now, it's a great puzzle/manual dexterity game) I also recall attempting to write a role playing type game in Basic in about 5th grade taking place in the world of Dune. It took me two weeks just to program the first couple of graphics and it never went very far... oh well.
Apple II -- 1977
Commodore 64 -- 1982
Nuff said.
It's very fuzzy if you use a TV, though. You need ~14-15 MHz bandwidth for a sharp 80-column display, but your average TV offers only a fraction of that (maybe 4 or 5 MHz). A monochrome monitor (or RGB, if you're using a IIGS) is very much preferred over a TV. Apple also had some color monitors that could be kicked into monochrome mode.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Did anyone else (who bothered to RTFA) get the feeling that the interviewer was more interested in Steve Jobs than he was about Woz?
Kinda like a guy chatting up a girl only in order to find out about her roommate...
Guy: So, what's your major?
Girl: Philosophy.
Guy: That's cool... So, is your roommate seeing anyone?
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
One of the tunes was "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head".
BTW, I have a QBasic version, should I put it up and make a link? It's 95% accurate. If you don't need full authenticity, an old text-only version of the code for GW-BASIC/QBasic is here but has some bugs in it.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Well, I'm an Apple ][ geek and a Slashbot, so I'll bite.
//e I had came with a color CVS monitor (AppleColor //e). For a long time, it was my TV (together with an amp and speaker set). Now I use either my Linux box, or another CVS monitor with a built-in speaker.
//e had an option card. The //c came standard with 80-column support.
The Apple
Composite was the order of the day for Apple ][ computers.
Also, TVs were common on the old ][ and ][+ but they couldn't do 80-columns normally. The
-uso
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
It could speak English with the right software!!
//e had graphics that could stand up to the C64. 560x192x2 or 140x192x16.
So can the ][ - look for a program called SAM: Software Automated Mouth.
Also, ever hear of the Mockingboard? Gave the ][ two AY-8912 (?) sound chips. And the
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
I heard he was kicked out of Harvard for stealing $30k of computer time from a NSA project he was working on. BTW, is this true or just an urban myth?
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
I started programming the Apple ][ (][+'s and ][e's I believe?) when I was very very young going to a computer camp. I'll never forget it! We started with a LOGO turtle and I guess I haven't looked back since. Part of my initial fascination came from the simple yet at the time amazing experience of pressing a button on a keyboard and watching the letter matching that button pop up in a fuzzy green hue on the monitor. Amazing! My first programs were such groundbreaking achievements as Turtle Draws A Square, or Turtle Draws a Circle (What's the syntax? REPEAT 360 [FORWARD 1 RT 1] something like that???). It really doesn't seem that long ago, and now it all seems so primitive. At the time I was too young to realize the implications of what I was doing, to me it was just a way to partly recreate the awesome experience I had playing video games in the arcade. I loved for the Oregon Trail. Once my little pioneer got arrested somehow and I had to appear at a trial. I think I answered "NO" to "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and it was GAME OVER> Do any of you remember this, or is it just a bizarre artifact of my imagination? Finally, I remember a hot rumor around this time that someone had written a unicorn-drawing program in LOGO and it took an hour to run but drew a fantastic piture of a unicorn. Does ANYONE know what I am talking about? Is this a true story? Anyway, it's great to look back and think about what was, at least it makes us appreciate what we have now more -- even if what we have now crashes 10 times as often as the "primitive" stuff we had back then! Thank you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and may your accomplishments be fondly remembered always.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
What about that "Halo" thingie running on the XBox? Wasn't that originally a Mac game as well, before Microsoft decided to assimilate the company?
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
"everything since AppleDOS is just a bunch of crap"
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
I had a ][+ and I still have my IIGS in a box somewhere. The best feature of all time was the ability to go into the assembly monitor, write code, disassemble, review, modify, patch and tweak the machine on the fly. Beyond any doubt, my ability to code everything from device drivers to applications began there.
//e had a built in assembler, but I only had a ][+ so I wrote my own. Then, using that assembler, I wrote a more powerful one and bootstrapped my way up. It took an entire summer. That was a good summer.
I also learned a lot about writing software quickly without using either an assembler or a compiler. Save often though. The
The IIGS was simply awesome. By the time I put it away, it had a video overlay card, 15MHz processor, 500MB SCSI external hard drive, and a full 8MB of RAM. I had gone through two power supplies and three motherboards over 10 years. Other than the monitor, it probably still works today. Wonder if I could get a proper pin out on the monitor and hook it up.
Ahhh... I don't get nostalgic very often, but damn , that was good stuff. With the exception of Linux, everything after the IIGS has been a real bore. I even considered leaving computer work altogether; there was nothing left to explore. As they say at ubergeek, I'm a "super villian" now so my computer life has become much more exciting.
Fortunately for me, my wife appreciates my enthusiasm for computers. But then, that's why I married her.
-Hope
Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that.
It's a valid and important comparison. The poster is stating that they choose to admire technical talent and scrupulous behaviour, and not ruthless business acumen.
In this world, there is a surplus of ruthless, greedy, and selfish behaviour. That, we've got coming out of our collective ass. Note how we measure success.
Not enough people even know who Wozniak *is*, let alone what he stands represents to most of us geeks who cut our teeth on the original Apple ][, long before the PC ever emerged from the gaping bowels of IBM.
It's just like saying that Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has.
What, like talent at computers? Scruples?
Gates has never been very good at computers. In fact, the early days of Apple and Microsoft are curiously similar. Both were founded by two friends, one of whom was good at business, and the other at technical things. In the case of Apple, Woz was an electronics wiz. For Microsoft, Paul Allen was damned talented at software.
Now, both of the real talent behind the founding of these companies have moved on, while the less-talented (geek-wise) partners milk it for everything it's worth.
Gates could not have written an OS kernel from scratch. Linus did. (Linux was a working kernel when he unleashed it on the world. It just wasn't very complete.)
The evidence indicates that Bill Gates has no sense of humor, and no scruples. Linus has both.
Most importantly, Linus didn't have to become the world's richest man to get a girlfriend. Plus, Tove could kick Melinda Gates' ass.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
The atari-8 bit had one program that i'm aware that supported 80col mode, and that was a vt-100 terminal emulator. Actually it wasn't all that bad, but a touch hard to read.
I used that program in my freshman year of college to access the campus computers via dial-up. Squinty, 80-column terminal display crawling at 300 baud... Wheeee!
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
". If I try that in Windows, I can't boot up and type without worrying about a potential crash, freeze, or reboot that could happen at any time."
Amazing. Go and see a doctor. There must be something vital missing between your ears.
Personally, I think the fact that he was able to roll the score on Defender more impressive... damn that game is hard!
Even more impressive is that he did it on an actual arcade machine with the nasty controls.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
On the C128 you could use the CATALOG command to get a disk listing.
26 years of that "][" typo.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I am sure of not being alone when I say that the Apple II+ helped cement the role of myself and many other kids as future geeks.
Girls could never be as much fun as collecting pirate warez and besting the latest high score on Karateka. Naah.
"One more minute, Mom, then the trash goes out!"
Bob
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
For a time you could get 1701 monitors from goodwill for cheep, as well as other NTSC compatable monitors like magnavox. Basicly people didn't realize or understand they were indeed useful. I never tried svideo input on it, but hey.
.41mm dot pitch.
.31 dot pitch, while that's nothing to scream home about, it was a 14inch and the best resolution it saw was 640*400. 8CM536 I believe was it's model number, but don't quote me, it died a horrible death.
.41mm dot pitch my self, but that's just me.
I must admit, I had one of those. It was pretty spiffy for the time. I eventually picked up an Amiga 1080 some years later though. Quality was so good you could see the wires on "kung fu the legond continues". These are, or rather *were* more often reccomended for editing then the 1701s. I believe the 1701 had something like a
My last monitor of this vintage was a magnavox actually. Stereo, which while all monitor speakers are lame, it what I used when I wanted to pop in a tape at night.
These days, these shops are refusing donations of TVs and monitors due to the high cost of disposal. Major pitty. I understand where they are comming from though. Someone comes in with a big ass monitor and they thing someone will buy it. Alas, not nessicarly useful on your typical PC.
But since you wish you had another one, hit e-bay. while you can't find them for sub $10 at goodwill anymore, it looks like they are fetching $50.00/$60.00. Personaly i'd go for something with lower then
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Uhhh... That's *brown* acid...
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Ya, he's not just a suit - he's a SCUMBALL suit.
He screwed Woz over on their first ever cash deal.
He pushed Woz out of the company.
When he came back out of his ouster for his crap, he pushed out Gil Amelio, killed all of his projects (Newton anyone?), fired all of the people he hired, claimed credit for the financial reform that Amelio had accomplished (Apple was going for bankrupt, Amelio turned it around).
On top of that, as soon as he got in, he made an unnecessary $150 million deal with Microsoft that Amelio had refused because they didn't need the cash, and because Gates wouldn't give him what he wanted (timely ports of MS Office).
Jobs sucks. The fact that Apple has come back is nice and all, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a dumbass piece of shit running it.
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
for calling the Apples IIc portable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"Somone has just told you where to find the most addictive game of all time"
Curse you!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Amazing. Go and see a doctor. There must be something vital missing between your ears
What a poorly worded unrelated response. What you said really explains you.
what are you doing in YOUR garage?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The disk subsystem did lack refinement. But it could act as a second audio channel. ;-)
:)
I actually had a program that would play mary had a little lamb on the 1541 by "knocking the head". I was hard on my equipment
It was techincally 16 colors, but really it was "light" and "dark" versions of 8 colors.
The text mode display of an Apple ][+ is 40x24. The command GR changed it to "low res graphics" which left the bottom 4 lines as text and the top 20 lines had each character split into a top half and bottom half colored square/rectangular blocks.
For text and low-res modes (and hi-res btw, but low-res and text mode used the same memory range, 400H-800H IIRC--that's 0x400 and 0x800 these days) the display was mapped directly from main memory. In text mode each character was represented by its ASCII value. In GR/low-res mode the graphics 'character' was split into a high and low nybble to represent the block colors. No pallete, no RGB.
I was geeky enough then to get into 6502 assembly language (in pre-teen/teen years), so I even did some assembly programming of the display. (But I'm only an amateur programmer today.)
Come to think of it, both 0 and 8 were the color black, so you had 15 visual colors and 16 logical colors.
It was a very valuable learning tool. I doubt I would know as much about computers today if I had started on a 16- or 32-bit machine.
By the way, the ROM image included BASIC and a mini assembler. CALL -151 IIRC put you into a hexdump/memory lister mode, and "!" would start the mini assembler. I may be getting it a little confused with DOS's DEBUG.EXE, but the concept was similar.
HGR was the hi-res command. I don't remember it as well, but it was meory mapped from 0x2000-0x4000 IIRC. It was 2 colors logically, but the display device was a TV and the output was designed so that two lit pixels would look white while alternating lit/unlit pixels would be a color.
If you had a lone pixel or vertical pixel line lit it would be a color whether you wanted it color or not. Two adjacent pixels (left-to-right) were always white. Vertical placement had no effect on color.
That should help explain why things look weird sometimes in Apple II emulators. You can't quite duplicate the effect in modern RGB. Not that you'd want to except to see how the graphics were natively viewed in this color-hack manner. Diagonal colored lines were extraordinarily jaggy.
It's all coming back now. The high bit told whether the color options for this byte should be blue/orange or green/violet. The next 7 bits were memory-mapped on/off pixels. So, for example you were in HGR mode and wrote binary 10101010 to 0x2000 you would get a colored line. (Note to continue the same color in the next byte it would be 11010101, so HGR wasn't totally easy.) 11010101 at 0x2000 would show the complimentary color (blue vs. orange or green vs. violet).
Of course that's for people with no social lives who like to code in 6502 assembly. Normal people would write a basic program:
10 HGR
20 HCOLOR 2
30 HDRAW 0,0 TO 150,150
40 HDRAW TO 250,10
See the grandparent post for a low-res BASIC example.
Then there were some that did the turtle graphics (early vector drawing with a turtle-is-the-pencil metaphor), but that was a separate product.
Who the fuck cares about the 26th birthday of a transistor board?
What a poorly worded, unrelated response. What he said described you rather well.
I have 3 Apple IIc laying around my house. I bought the lot for a dollar (including hardware and a Dec Mate and software) for some Elementry school spring cleaning sale. I spent a whole 10 bucks and got a truck load of excellent old stuff. Anyone want some satiite receivers. Apple Talk is fun.
Wake Up Neo.
Knock, Knock.
Follow the White Rabbit.
Looks like it is time to replace your Personality Module. You are a bit to clingy, guess I better replace your fuser to
...at my grade school on our Macs. It was fun.
If you don't count the TI 99/4a, the Apple IIgs was the first computer i ever bought. I paid $1500 for it NEW, about a year or so before Apple pulled the rug out from underneath it.
:)
I still have my IIgs. About five years ago, I installed a hard drive on it and upped its RAM to 8MB. It's still got the factory CPU... It is a ROM01 model.
I'll keep my IIgs, thanks. As long as it runs, I'll enjoy puttering around on it. One day, i'll even get it connected directly to my Ethernet LAN. (in the mean time, i'll have it connected to my Mac LC, which is then connected to my LAN...)
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
The first computer I ever saw, back in 1979 in High School, was an Apple II (or I, I can't remember) I wasn't very much of a talented geek and even though I had an HP41 a couple of years later, I never managed to learn to programme for the thing (perhaps using RPN was a feat in itself ;) ). My first working programmes at university in 1981 were written in Pascal at first on punch cards for an IBM 370, then on an Apple II. The years after that we were using IBM PC's.
I was never really interested in the Mac until I got my first PC job in 1989 selling and supporting Windows 2.11, Corel Draw 1 and some amazingly expensive AT&T Truevision Vista and Targa graphics boards and related software (Topaz, Rio). The company I was working for was a major Mac supplier and by chance in 1990, I got chance to work in Prepress on Macs, Using Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator.
That experience, one of being able to use a computer without having to mess around with dip-switches or address or mindless shit like extended memory drivers, or even having to configure much in any way, was what made me the fan of Macs that I am today.
I own and use an old Lombard Powerbook with OS8.6 and a Titanium Powerbook with Mac OSX. My job is supporting 20 Windows users at a company and the levels of frustration I have to go through to find out how to solve some PC/Windows problem ensure that I remain firmly in the Mac (and Linux) camp at home.
A conversation with Steve Wozniak
In an exclusive two-part interview, Apple Computer's co-founder discusses Steve Jobs and the company's roots
By David Zeiler: The Mac Experience
The Mac Experience
Originally published Jun 5, 2003
The Mac Experience
First of two parts
Though out of the spotlight since leaving Apple Computer Inc. in 1985, Steve Wozniak remains revered for his integral role in helping Steve Jobs establish the company in 1976. He is credited with single-handedly designing the Apple I and Apple II machines.
A native of San Jose, Calif., Wozniak was introduced to Jobs in the mid-1970s by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez.
Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs, who was in high school. He later received his degree from Berkeley.
Since leaving Apple, Wozniak has dabbled in several unsuccessful technological ventures, such as a wireless universal TV remote control company called CL-9, while devoting much of his time to educational causes.
In January 2002, Wozniak announced the formation of a startup company, Wheels of Zeus, to design and build "new consumer electronics wireless products to help everyday people track everyday things." The company has yet to announce any products.
Wozniak, 52, was in Baltimore last week for the silver anniversary celebration of the Maryland Apple Corps. He received a standing ovation before beginning his remarks.
In an interview, Wozniak discussed Jobs, the first Apple and the 1999 cable television movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley," which depicted the showdown between his colleague and Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates.
The Mac Experience will feature more excerpts next week.
How did you and Steve Jobs meet?
I think it was my second year of college. I finally got some parts from a company that I had worked for, so I could build a computer of my own design. It was the first computer that I had ever built in my life. It was a minimal one. It couldn't do much, but it had switches and lights and it ran.
We built it down in Bill Fernandez's garage. He lived down the street, a few streets down. And Bill introduced me to Steve. That's my recollection.
Steve thinks we met much earlier, but I don't think so. Bill said: "There's this guy you've got to meet, because he likes electronics and he pulls pranks. You two have so much in common." And we did.
What was Jobs like? Was he like how he was portrayed in "Pirates of Silicon Valley"?
He was very much like he was portrayed there. He was sort of a free-floating hippie who could go a lot of different ways. He ate a lot of nuts -- and walked around barefoot or in sandals. He could get a job at Atari as a technician-engineer who could take designs and finish them. And then he'd go out for a few months and work on spreads in Oregon, or go over to India, bathe in the Ganges River. Then he'd come back.
I was very much the opposite -- just real stable. A settled, middle- type person, feet on the ground, have a normal life and a family and a home.
Has he changed much over the years?
No. Those values are very much unchanged. But his head was always looking toward business. Always. Even in those days. The questions he would ask: "With this design, could you ever put a disk drive on it?" "Could you ever have multiple users on it, sharing it?"
It's funny that, way back in time, these little questions he was asking, they're things that he keeps making sure Apple does to this day.
What is your relationship now with Apple?
I get a small salary. I want to be an Apple employee forever, if I can. I don't know what the salary is, but it's real small. Whenever I'm in the press, it sorta represents Apple. And I have occasional phone calls to Steve Jobs; sometimes, we'll get together for lunch. He might ask me a few questions about what do I think about that, how are we doing here. I let him know
I used to be a little into chemistry in secondary school, but not so much anymore. The reason I link to the story is that it provides the context for one of my favorite quotes:
.sig doesn't convey that very well, because /. counts the link characters as .sig characters and truncates the .sig... i'd do a tinyurl, but the trolls have conditioned slashdotters not to click on that kind of link for fear of goatse dot cx or similar :-P
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die."
-- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It's so frequently misquoted that I wanted to link to the original article.
Unfortunately, my
.sig: file not found