Slashdot Mirror
Woz OK's Apple I Resurrection
A reader wrote to us with a story from Wired about a gentleman who's hand-crafting Apple Is for ordering. He's been unable to get a response from Apple, but Woz has graciously responded.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Wouldn't it be great if it was built on the inside with modern hardware to run OSX?
//e into a full blown box that runs OSX, when some of the iBooks at work are written off.
I plan on converting my Apple
After some time, the whole "cuteness" of aged hardware wears off and you cease to be amazed with how far technology has come. It's only novelty for few days.
..why Woz is so respected and admired by some people. Heck, this guy has what one could call, a following of fans. The more I learn about him, the more I feel he'd be my perfect role model - a talented hardware (actually systems) engineer that is also noble.
Sigged!
I'm sorry if I digress from the topic, but, with all the talk about Linux posing a threat to Microsoft's hegemony -I feel that *this* poses a greater one.
Here we have a company, Apple, whose following is so devoted that they would actually resurrect one of their old products out of sheer love for it. I don't see any followers of Microsoft doing the same; in fact, anybody who uses Microsoft's products are looking for a way out. And that, in the end, shall prove to be Microsoft's undoing.
These days a lot of people class themselves as inventors or techies, but they're just interested in money, or the whole patent game.
This story reaffirms Woz as my favorite techie of the last fifty years. His inventions, while not quite on the level of the wheel or the television, have revolutionized numerous areas of technology.
But what sets him apart from the majority is his openness and friendliness. He doesn't appear to get riled at people asking him questions about his inventions or theories, and he doesn't put himself on a pedestal talking in techie-mumbo-jumbo. How many techies are like that these days? He almost seems to have no ego.
We need more people like this in tech. I will even admit that I have an ego, and a tendancy to 'talk down' to non-technical people sometimes. Woz is inspirational in that you don't need to do this to be respected in the tech community.
His Web site is a reminder of what an open minded, friendly, and unjaded character he is. I am sure he would cringe at reading this post, but I hereby dedicate it to the 'nicest techie of modern times', even if he's not the most famous.
It's nice to see that people will be able to experience and remember what once made the computer field great; a sense of wonder, and good engineering!
No one today does anything innovative, except occasionally Apple...no one takes chances, and when they do, they do it so half-assed that they already seem to think that they are going to fail, and thus become a self-fufilling prophecy.
But people like Woz were willing to take that leap, because their knew their engineering was good and innovative, and because of that we have the systems we have today. Without the Apple computer, we would still be using terminals on smaller, but more powerful mainframes and minis.
So thanks again Woz, for the Apple 1.
ttyl
Farrelll
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
From the article: Besides, Woz continued, he freely distributed the Apple I's schematics and ROM code at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, long before he and Steve Jobs went into partnership and began selling the machines from Jobs' parents' garage.
"The best anyone could say was that it was mine and that I made it public," Woz said to Briel.
Could this be the first implementation of open source? Or at least open design? There wasn't a GPL at the time, but it was open.
So linux geeks can love him too, just like astronomers love Gallileo!
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Ah, the joys of cassettes as a computer storage medium... I remember the time when listening to the programs was key to getting them to work at all. Too bad that joy is lost for the buyers of this baby! Well, the buyers will probably already know those joys from using their original piece!
I say: good luck to you, and don't^W keep on doing things that make me feel old(er)!
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
Part of hobbying around with stuff like this is spending hours keying in your own code, watching it do its thing. But if you can't save the product of your efforts, well, that sucks.
I have an old Sinclair ZX-81 which I found still works, mostly, but I can't get it to load a program from tape anymore, or save it. So other than being a nostalgic piece of technology, its pretty much useless.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
"I've typed on everything from a 2Mhz Z80 system to a 2.8Ghz system. Can you guess how different my typing speed was?"
I can respond:
"I've mixed and edited audio on everything from a 25Mhz 486 system to a 3.2Ghz system. Can you guess how different the production speed was?"
or
"I've rendered 3d on everything from a 16Mhz 386 system to a super computer. Can you guess how different my rendering speed was?"
There are LOTS of applications that need more power than old systems can provide. Audio mixing is one of my favourite. On an Apple I, it is just downright impossible. The system lacks the memory to be able to even handle the GUI needed, much less anything else. On a 486 it was doable, but slow. Everything had to be done in non-realtime. You'd spend hours rendering an effect, more time rendering a mixdown, and then listen to see if it was what you wanted. That or spend tens of thousands of dollars on dedicated audio processing hardware. Today I do it at home with ease on my 1.6Ghz. I can do things in software that used to be impossible even in hardware, and I do them in realtime.
Or speaking of music things, how about MP3s? Back when I had a 486, I had to drop to DOS and run only a decoder program if I wanted to decode a 128k MP3 in stereo. Otherwise I had to do it in mono, and even so my system was sluggish. Now I do it in the background, with only seconds of CPU time spent in hours of play. What used to be a special thing is now something I do in the background while I work or play. On the flip side ripping and encoding, which used to be a 4 hour task, I now do while I'm in the kitchen getting food.
Along the lines of things not using lots of CPU power, how about GUIs? I happen to LIKE GUIs and work more efficiently for them. I still can and do use command line for appropriate things, but the GUI is much better. Well, it's not free. Back in the day there was a non-trivial penalty for running Windows or X. Apps would drag if those were active because they ate up too much system time. Now it just doesn't matter. Window's GUI uses well under 0.1% of system resources on a modern system.
There IS reason for progress in computers. Yes, if all you do is scroll text, then abything works fine. However most of us have larger tastes, and it requires more power to fill them. Also, interestingly enough, it makes things cheaper for all of us, text scrollers included. I remember how amazingly expensive my friend's 286 IBM was which, all said and done, didn't do much better on the text scrolling than my Apple II, however even the Apple II was pricey. Now you can get an all said and done comptuer form a major manufacturer (Dell) for about $430. It'll do more than just scroll text.
Progress: It's a Good Thing(tm).