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 was a drop out?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job

Sweet!! Looks like I'm on my way to fame and fortune!!

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.

[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.

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.

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:From the article

[lyonsden]

Wozniak...was five years older than Jobs

Has this changed????

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!

Mad Tetris skillz.

[asb]

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.

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.

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)

The Woz

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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.