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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."
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...
How do you explain this then?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
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
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)