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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.
The first digital computer was a berry: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)
Not to forget the The Banana Computer.