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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."
Woz always gives an interesting interview, the (read more) links in the story get to the interesting stuff. It's too bad this is linked to something so banal as the 26th aniversary of the Apple, 'cause core /. readers would probably find it informative.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I've heard murmurs of Acorn. Why not have a slashdot story on that. It'd be interesting at least.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Well, we, former Acorn users, would not like being given the impression we are as much cursed as our Amiga fellows. :-/
Acorn is dead, RiscOS is not that well : seeing the most recent RiscOS computers can be emulated at full speed on a Celeron is just another evidence I had to switch to OSX...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Maybe the monochrome was 9", but I'm fairly sure that the color monitor we had was 12". That's why it was $2000 -- Dad sprang for the big ol' color monitor (and the guy at the BX threw in our ImageWriter ][ for free).
They that would sacrifice their
Hear and watch the story Woz's life from the man himself. He spoke at NC State University on April 26, 2003. http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/woz.html
Switching to Linux can be an adventure!
Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior.
;-)
The disk subsystem did lack refinement. But it could act as a second audio channel.
In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][.
It could speak English with the right software!!
It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.
But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).
That was the detail I was missing.
The Apple ][ must break down less or something though, because the Apple:Commodore ratio I see seems to tilt towards Apple over time.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Actually I rather thought that commodore's failure was an attempt to produce PC clones in a market already flooded with cheeper asian varities. I guess this is subject to some debate.
o rtcommodore.htm] I personly prefer to remember the Amgia as being a spliter project by rebels who wanted to defy the industry and actually come out with something inovative.
Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore. I'd have to pull out an amiga 1000 case, inside the cover are the signatures of all the people who worked on the project. a little history is on this site [http://commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_p
I *agree* though on the lack of marketing, with the exception of the guru meditation crashes my local cable provider sometimes shows. {newtek video toaster no doubt)
Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of. I guess I was somewhat prejusticed tward the Atari. ICD's MIO board with SCSI, 15meg HD, and Sparta dos was where it was at. Ok fine, the commodore had better 80column support and everything supported 64k unlike, superior game library. You just had to put up with disk drives from hell. I've been recently doing a compair and contrast with emulation, and ya know I still hate the "load "$",8" followed by "list". Both atari and apples at the very least offered boot disk support.
The Apple though, another system i'm not very much a fan of, is worthy of note because of it's early entry in the market place. Freaky graphics, tape drive controler for the floppy, but this was one of the first systems you saw in schools, that and TI-99/4a but no one could afford the software fore. But it had a massive following in education applications that I really remember, that whole comes equiped with a floppy drive and authors who permited open license for education really helped out.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Exactly. Apple couldn't have ever existed without both of them. Woz lacked the vision and business saavy that Jobs had, and Jobs lacked the patience and engineering skills that Woz had. But put the two together and you have a company that went from some guys garage to multibillion dollar international corporation. That's pretty impressive in and of itself, really. ;)
My journal has hot
I guess they say you always remember your first. :)
Thanks Dad!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Woz brought us the first personally affordable hardware and helped to break the consolidation of power in the mainframe.
Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.
They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.
Every major innovation has its saviors and its demons. Where do you want to go today?
"You have liberated me from thought."
Calling Jobs a suit isn't exactly correct. As I stated elsewhere, Woz had all the engineering talent, but Jobs was more than a suit. First off, Jobs was quite tech savvy in his own right. And his business accumen was sharp. But Jobs was a *visionary* not a suit. He was never a "buttoned down" guy. One thing Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews point out in their unauthorized biography of Bill Gates is the stark contrast that the Microsoft people noticed between IBM, which was all button-down pinstripe suits, and Apple, which was a bunch of Berkley grads with long hair and Birkenstocks.
Microsoft was *never* very innovative (they acquired everything they have achieved either through outright purchasing it or through theft), but Apple was quite the innovator. And a lot of that innovation can be directly attributed to Jobs and his 'reality distortion field' that would make people honestly believe they could do things that were impossible -- and they did.
My journal has hot
Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.
Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I actually saw this in stores.
-BbT
Wizardy and Castle Wolfenstein brings back fond memories of using my Apple IIe...
Me first computer was an Apple ][
My favorite game was Breakout.
Reading now that Wozniak had written that himself, and that some of the features of the Apple ][ were invented specifically for that game is just... well... soooo c00l!!!
But even better: that Breakout implementation has a bug that AFAIR did not allow the paddle (or the ball??) to move to the very top position (Yes, the game ws played left-to-right), causing situations were you where either cought in an endless loop or would loose your ball. Anybody remember that one?
Being rather anoyed with that bug, I went ahead and fixed it. That was revelation! You could just walk right into a program and change it! how cool!
Now, some 15 jears later, i am a pretty decent programmer and just finishing my informatics dipoma... thanks, steve, for that sloppy coding!
P.S.: Breackout ist still my favorite arcade-type game.
(man, i need to change that sig. it's been there forever)
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
The most ironic thing about my years on the Apple ][ is that now I have more apple software than I had when I owned one. And it doesn't even fill half a cd :) I still start up the emulator once in a while and play some of the old classic games from my mis-spent youth.
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
Those look like the Apple][+ specs. The ][+ was my very first computer I purchased as a ten year old in 1980 with funds from mowing lawns around our neighborhood for a year. I got it with the disc drive and that funky green Apple monitor III with a 16k language card, a modem card and that Apple dot matrix printer. It's funny but I actually used that computer as my home computer up until 1989 when I purchased my IIci making the ][+ the longest lived computer in constant use in my history of computer ownership. Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant.
Thanks Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Your vision of computers transforming the lives of average citizens has indeed happened.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Remember when the 8MHz Zip Chip and 10 MHz Rocket Chip came out? Man, that computer FLEW. My senior year in college, my roommate used to play Prince of Persia at top (10x) speed. Then for a further challenge he'd flip it on this weird mirror mode we found and play (and win) with the monitor upside down. Brilliant, but weird.
I threw out my souped-up Apple IIe three years ago before moving cross-country and I've had pangs of regret ever since. How are my kids going to learn computers and programming? Not on Win 2010 with C++; I'd rather give them an Apple II, a machine you can understand completely from hardware to ROM to RAM.
Eyes glazed with nostalgia, Eric
PS. Don't even get me started on The Beagle Brothers....
I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.
In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing
hlin 0,30 at 3
It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.
Thank you, wedge-shaped beige computer.
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
y /f antasy.htm
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much
as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.
Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeaut
Some other memories of my Apple ][+
10 REM A PROGRAM TO PRINT RANDOM LINES OF STARS
20 X = RND (1000)
30 Y = RND (80)
40 FOR A = 1 TO X
50 FOR B = 1 TO Y
60 PRINT "*";
70 NEXT B
80 PRINT
90 NEXT A
Of course, you could just make it a one-liner:
10 X = RND (1000): Y = RND (80): FOR A = 1 TO X: FOR B = 1 TO Y: PRINT "*";: NEXT B: PRINT: NEXT A
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Just for shits and giggles, I installed win 3.11 on my 1.6 Ghz K7 and figured I would just watch it fly! The speed increase? Unimpressive! I love playing with old hardware...right now I have an Amiga A2000 that is my current fascination! 7Mhz 68000 CPU with 8088 bridgeboard and AMAX cartridge with mac 128k Roms...Runs Mac 6.0.8 baby!
At any rate, it's amazing to me how stuff written in DOS just isn't that much quicker on the modern CPUs. But then, I was just playing with interfaces, and haven't yet tried any games under DOS.
I still like playing with my Apple ][ collection as well. One day I hope to code a tcp/ip stack in 6502 assembler for the ][c.
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
You may have something there.
Some of the guys I work with got into programming kind of late (during the boom, I guess) and their code is some of the most inefficient, unmaintainable crud I've ever seen.
Maybe Basic forced those of us who grew up on it to be clear and concise about what we were doing -- I certainly recall keeping mental notes of the line numbers parts of my programs started and ended on, not to mention crushing the lines down as much as possible.
(Oh, and then there was always that threat of the power going out when you least expected it -- nothing like that for improving efficiency.)
I started programming the Apple ][ (][+'s and ][e's I believe?) when I was very very young going to a computer camp. I'll never forget it! We started with a LOGO turtle and I guess I haven't looked back since. Part of my initial fascination came from the simple yet at the time amazing experience of pressing a button on a keyboard and watching the letter matching that button pop up in a fuzzy green hue on the monitor. Amazing! My first programs were such groundbreaking achievements as Turtle Draws A Square, or Turtle Draws a Circle (What's the syntax? REPEAT 360 [FORWARD 1 RT 1] something like that???). It really doesn't seem that long ago, and now it all seems so primitive. At the time I was too young to realize the implications of what I was doing, to me it was just a way to partly recreate the awesome experience I had playing video games in the arcade. I loved for the Oregon Trail. Once my little pioneer got arrested somehow and I had to appear at a trial. I think I answered "NO" to "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and it was GAME OVER> Do any of you remember this, or is it just a bizarre artifact of my imagination? Finally, I remember a hot rumor around this time that someone had written a unicorn-drawing program in LOGO and it took an hour to run but drew a fantastic piture of a unicorn. Does ANYONE know what I am talking about? Is this a true story? Anyway, it's great to look back and think about what was, at least it makes us appreciate what we have now more -- even if what we have now crashes 10 times as often as the "primitive" stuff we had back then! Thank you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and may your accomplishments be fondly remembered always.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
don't forget the bottleneck on most things has nothing to do with cpu speed. it will most usually be fsb and memory latency which has not increased as much as the cpu clock.
old 386, 33mhz fsb.. new P4 2.4ghz 133mhz fsb
bite my glorious golden ass.
Prince of Persia...
surely you are having a hallucination induced no doubt by all the endogenous euphoric chemistry that occurs in your body when discussing Apple ][.
I feel certain the program you mention was Karateka, I mean, how many games had the flipped over version thing. BTW: it was on the back of the disk, if you put the disk in upside down the game came up upside down (assuming you did a double sided copy when you pirated it as I assume)
It's a great game to play in emulation still... a bit easy, but very zen like in it's timing requirements.
{passes out from nostalgia}