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."

Comments

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[windows]

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.

Yin - Yang.

[marcsiry]

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.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[jericho4.0]

The juxtaposition of Woz and Jobs embigend the synergy that was Apple.

Seriously, you are so right. The perfect geek and the perfect suit.

Comparing Woz and Steve

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks.

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.

*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

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...

WTF??

[Draoi]

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.

How do you explain this then?

26 years?

[TheRaven64]

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.

Sweet memories and random comments

[chia_monkey]

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.

Re:The original open source machine

[cactopus]

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.

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.

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.

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)

Re:Woz is a good man

[usotsuki]

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.