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

WOZ Speech at NC State

[smelroy]

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

Re:Comparing Woz and Steve

[Surak]

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. ;)

I would like to thank my Dad..

[cdtoad]

Back in 1977 my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+ computer. Everyone else had Atari 2600's but he thought that it be better if I get something I could learn with, as it "had a lot of educational software" Yeah. I learned with it. Not school work, but how to program. I was 10 and knew Apple INT Basic and assembly language backwards and forwards. Then in 1983 I got the Modem :)

I guess they say you always remember your first. :)

Thanks Dad!

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Surak]

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.

Who's the Woz now, then?

[ianscot]

Wozniak does seem to be the low pressure to Jobs's high pressure zone. Talking about the first prototype:

I used the smallest, cheapest chips I could in my design. Most of the chips I got for free from our lab stock at Hewlett Packard. I kept my supervisor informed about my hobby and HP had a policy of allowing engineers to have chips to build things of their own design with a supervisor's approval. It was a very good and excellent policy for those, like myself, who wanted to design things, and therefore better themselves.

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?

Don't forget Apricot

[Bigboote66]

I actually saw this in stores.

-BbT

This guy made me a programmer!

[NumbThumb]

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)

Re:Woz is a good man

[BWJones]

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.

Re:Woz is a good man

[EricHsu]

Yeah, 1 MHz, but an efficient megahertz. It felt as fast as a 8 MHz 8088 PC.

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 wasn't one of the cool kids, but

[vizualizr]

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.

Apple does not represent Woz's vision

[Simonetta]

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.
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/virtuebeauty /f antasy.htm