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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."
He gave us the original Apple, the Blue Box, and spends his free time teaching computers to children.
By the way, Apple-History.com has tons of data on every computer Apple ever built, including the Apple ][. Definitely an awesome place to get the specs.
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
Vonal Declosion
Sweet!! Looks like I'm on my way to fame and fortune!!
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 ||
It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple //c.
"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"
"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"
The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted. :-)
Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...
They that would sacrifice their
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...
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!
Wozniak...was five years older than Jobs
Has this changed????
How do you explain this then?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
I guess they say you always remember your first. :)
Thanks Dad!
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
My dad used to play a lot of Microsoft's Tetris. So I had to play too just to keep my initials on the top spot. I once had a really good game going. I was in the zone. I was playing comfortably on the fastest level. I had way over 32k points.
And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals... I eventually took it as a quest to get the top score as close to 32767 as possible. IIRC I got it within 28 points. My dad never beat that score.
This doesn't have anything to do with Wozniak or Apple. But hey, they mentioned Tetris.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
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
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
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.
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...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
If you EVER get a chance to hear Woz speak, GO! He has some hilarious stories.
For example, when he was in college, he designed and built a small device that would cause interference on a TV. Woz loves pranks, so he would take his little device to frat houses when the guys were watching the tube. He would sit in back & make the interference fade in & out. Meanwhile, some poor guy would try to adjust the antennae while everyone was yelling at him to move it here or there. In the end, Woz would finally stop the interference when the guy was in some bizarre contorted position.
He told one story after another. It was great!
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)
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