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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 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.
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.
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
The first digital computer was a berry: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
Not to forget the The Banana Computer.
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.
Mac Games = Aspyr
4X4 Evolution 2
Alice
Alien Crossfire
BloodRayne
Bugdom
Colins Classic Cards
Cro-Mag Rally
Deus Ex
Escape Monkey Island
GR: Desert Siege
HP Chamber / Secrets
HP Sorcerer's Stone
Jedi Knight II
Kelly Slater Surfer
Law & Order
MH: Allied Assault
MH: Spearhead
Madden 2000
NASCAR 2002
NASCAR 2003
Otto Matic
Return 2 Wolfenstein
STV EliteForce Combo
SWGB
SWGB Clone Campaigns
SimCity 4
Spider-Man
Spy Hunter
TR Chronicles
TR Last Revalation
The Sims
The Sims Hot Date
The Sims House Party
The Sims Livin Large
The Sims Unleashed
The Sims Vacation
Tiger Woods 2003
Tony Hawk 2
Tony Hawk 3
Tony Hawk 4
Undying
Zoo Tycoon
---
eeww, I'll have a crab juice.
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 CPU emulation isn't the intensive part -- it's getting smooth video and accurate sound.
I used to get 100% emulation speed on a 16Mhz Mac LC, FWIW (except when there was lots of sound).
Dunno. My version of MacOS X already has the usual suspects; gcc, as, ln. The assembler and linker are GNU tools, but are the Mach-O versions. The standard GNU tools won't build straight up, AFAIK, but fortunately, Apple has provided the sources for their changes, so you can download those and build away.
Why do they use an unusual executable format (Mach-O) instead of ELF that was the standard on FreeBSD (and still is, on most other systems as well) before they came along
Because the kernel is based on the Mach kernel? The Mach-O binary format is well documented.
Although OS X claims credibly to be a Unix variant, I recently discovered it is apparently impossible to cross-compile for it.
*shrug* - it's PPC-based, in fairness. gcc should produce say an x86 binary, given the appropriate libs. As the platform is PPC, you need to manually provide them. That's to be expected. Can your x86 machine easily target Alpha?
The way Apple sees it, people who want to develop for their platform can buy it first,
So go download it (and the sources) from opendarwin.org and run it on your x86 box ... I've done it for kicks & it's pretty neat.
and to hell with anyone who wants to take apart the binaries they release for the system
The source for the kernel has been released by Apple, as well as the BSD layer stuff and various other bits (Kerberos, X11, Rendezvous, etc, etc). Who needs to take apart binaries?
(or even to hell with me taking apart the binaries I made myself for the system, for that matter!)
??? Do what you do on Linux - go disassemble it. Dump the symbols, whatever. It's no different.
The parent poster is exactly right, OS X is open to a point, but when you really want to get your hands dirty working with it, it is still closed in a lot of ways.
Sure. I agree - Darwin is wide open, APSL nit-picks aside. MacOS X, being a superset of Darwin, is not so much. Just how much openness do you want?
Just because the source is open does not mean the system is open. I think they are suspicious of allowing people too much freedom with their system. This is evident in more obvious ways, too, like the closedness of Aqua.
Well, yes. Aqua is closed. It's part of Apple's competitive edge. Unlike a certain other OS, Apple has done the good thing and opened up great chunks of the OS. I don't think they're "suspicious" of "allowing people" "freedom" - they're on the right path, they can't release everything.
(Disclosure/disclaimer: yeah, I work there. No, I'm not speaking for them.)
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein