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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."
1mhz. wow! image the speed a program would run on todays computers. 2400mhz - if we were running programs from those day's it'd be 2000 times faster at least... but we're not, we're using bloated sloppy programs that are coded inneficiently.
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 ||
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...
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).
Yeah --- how awful of us, running graphic design and photo editing software rather than 2000-times overspeed Horace Goes Skiing. How dumb we are.
How do you explain this then?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
"The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. "
Which you can still do today. First thing I did when I got my PowerMac home was open it and look at what was inside.
The hardware is still based on standards - standard SCSI & EIDE hard drives and CDROM drives; standard interfaces; standard PCI slots; AGP graphics slots; standard USB & FireWire connectors.
"OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it."
OK, I'll bite - explain exactly what you are on about please?
Clue - they release back to the public all modifications they make to all open source they use. Darwin source is all fully available. Safari? All improvements they made to the rendering engine are returned to the public.
They provide full developer material and tools FoC.
Where's your problem?!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
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....
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
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
You couldn't open up a Macintosh though. A single off-beige lump of plastic that required a special tool to get into, and had no room for people to tinker. The ROMS were closed and development tools cost. This was an extremly sharp contrast to the Apple ][
You can open up your Mac today because as the original poster pointed out, Apple has learnt that Open is better than Closed. It was all closed for a long time in the late 80's and early 90's though.
not to mention run the shit out of starfleet II.
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.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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 }'`
They don't private label FreeBSD. OS X is based on their own work which includes some of BSD 4.4 in user-space. It was called OPENSTEP... and before that NEXTSTEP. Everything about the graphical environment and programming environment belonged to NeXT and was designed there. WebObjects came from NeXT. OS X has ported newer BSD utilities from FreeBSD as opposed to the older OPENSTEP versions, but it isn't FreeBSD. It's OPENSTEP 6.3 Mach for PPC if you will.
This implies that they were the only ones writing software or manufacturing drivers and devices for their machines. No hardware company operates that way completely anymore. Apple was no more proprietary than IBM or Sun when it came to non x86 machines. A proper balance between controlling the architecture in question and completely opening it is required to maintain good profit for a single vendor as well as uniform compatibility and direction. IBM blew it by giving away the PC spec and allowing Compaq and others to copy it. Maybe if they hadn't, we might have a real x86 machine with a firmware instead of a crappy IBM kludgy BIOS that was designed to last a year tops... and is still in use today.
Someone else mentioned the early macs being proprietary with all these special things... Apple Bus?.. um Nubus is an IEEE standard... there were many 3rd party Nubus cards and only a few Apple ones. The only thing that people can really actually complain about was the fact that it was hard to open the original Mac and you weren't expected to... well the original Mac was "not designed to be expandable internally" It was a consumer box. If you wanted expandable you bought the Mac II series... these were some of the most expandable Macs on the market for several years including some of the Quadra years. Many Nubus slots... lots of space for RAM... lots of space (relatively) for hard disks. I used to run OpenBSD on a IIx with a 1GB FH 5.25" drive that was in a PC XT case with the ribbon run out the slot holes and into the Mac IIx via slot holes... that was certainly a sight.
I don't think people understand the many shades of what "proprietary" means. It's an incredible misnomer for what is actually going on in the computer industry.... True the "Steve" doesn't like clones... but what decent hardware (i.e. real computer manufacturer) vendor would? Clones cause incompatiblity, bite into your bottom line, increase support costs, and generally lower the quality of your product over time as well as its impact as an "innovative and elegant" architecture. Maybe a Sun model would have been better since the Sun clones never really took down Sun, but that's an entirely different market dynamic... Apple markets to consumers, and consumers see $ figures...irrationally so at times... heck they buy eMachines boxen (blech)
There may have been some LISP Machines with NuBus.
Of course, the use of NuBus was a very defensible decision -- Macs were being sold as mid-range workstations ($3-$10K) in those days, and it would have been a complete joke if it came with crap like ISA.
Also, NuBus cards were more widely available and even cheaper than PC "standards" like MCA and EISA. Sun, HP, Next also had proprietary buses back then.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Oh yeah, Beagle Bros. *g* Lots of stuff my foster brother pirated off 'em, and I pirated off him :)
The ROM isn't that hard to grok anyway. The ][+ has 12K of ROM - 2K monitor and 10K M$ (!) BASIC. I'm trying to replace the monitor with some C code, which is called by special illegal opcodes stuffed into the monitor ROM, and allow the use of the emulator with only a 10K chunk of code from SimSystem IIe's free distro (again, M$ BASIC).
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
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.
Worked so well for IBM, didn't it. [/sarcasm]
Yeah, actually, it did. Look at a long-term IBM stock graph sometime. Today, IBM makes a fortune from PC-based software and services... much more than they'd ever have made as the sole steward of a now-obsolete platform.
Just because they no longer own the PC platform's schematics and BIOS source code doesn't mean they can't build a large portion of their business on it.
Eventually, Microsoft will have to make an analogous adjustment to their thinking.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
i guess that that's the way it is with almost any hardware company nowadays, you fiddle with your purchased hardware and the warranty's void. i mean, apple may not be the squeaky clean people's champion but they've certainly delivered for me.
Open source software predated Linux. The GNU project was launched in 1984, when Linus was just 15. He didn't get his 80386 computer until 1991, and in any case Linux was built on gcc. Linus is also "only" responsible for the kernel of the OS. The Unix utilities mainly came from GNU, X came from MIT, and KDE/Gnome were not created by Linus, either.
This is not to minimize his contributions. Linus Torvalds is a wonderful representative of the OSS movement, but he didn't "bring" you all of those things, all by himself. This sort of misattribution is what makes some people insist on calling it GNU/Linux, if only to make a point.
They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.
That's even more off-track. Linus uses BitKeeper, which isn't open source, and generated some controversy for that. Woz isn't terribly active with "ideological" pursuits, either. In fact, RMS referred to Linus as "just an engineer", specifically because of his neutral stance on politics in technology.
I am 22 - I was 8 = That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.
I think your school system is more screwed than you know...
(Emphasis mine)
Maybe the system is screwed, but at least he uses and recognizes proper pronouns.
Yeah and its amazing how many completely unsuccessful people are dropouts too. An vastly larger number. But still, some people have different ideas of "success"