Woz Talks About His Gaming Past

Gamasutra has up a rare article with founding Apple visionary Steve Wozniak about his love of games, and his history with the medium. The article discusses Woz's prototype for the title Breakout prior to his involvement with Apple, the gaming habits of Steve Jobs, and the influence that videogames have had on the personal computing industry. " The reason Atari wanted me to design [Breakout] is they were tired of their games taking 150, 200 chips, and they knew I designed things with very few chips, so we had incentives for getting it under 50 or under 40 chips. That was my forte. Now I designed it, but it was... To save parts, I'll make no part go to waste and have tricky little designs that are hard for just a simple engineer to follow. Once you understand it, it's very easy because there's so few parts, it's easier to understand. But they had trouble understanding it."

Comments

For someone with such a reputation...

[Eideewt]

For someone with such a reputation you would expect him to be more interesting.

Re:For someone with such a reputation...

[iroll]

Yeah, because having designed the Apple he would have done exactly what with it?

Apple suceeded because more than one person was in the right place at the right time. The story about how Jobs schmoozed investors and suppliers is just as interesting as the elegant design of the early Apples. To say that one is more important is like saying "yeah, my heart is cool, but my brain is the really important part--can't do without my brain."

Have some coffee or something

[us7892]

I read page 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, waiting for the interview to pick up some steam...never really happened.

Maybe it was the interviewer? Woz needs someone to probe his mind for comments and insight. A good autobiographer could ask the questions that get more interesting responses. It might take 10 months of questions to get enough good material to sift through...

Re:Have some coffee or something

[antifoidulus]

A good autobiographer could ask the questions that get more interesting responses.

So you are suggesting that Woz should interview himself?

Is the Woz really that great?

[the_arrow]

According to Chuck Peddle (in the book "On the edge"), Woz didn't really understand how the 6502 or its chipset worked when creating the Apple II, so Apple had to hire an engineer to rework it so it worked properly. They also couldn't handle radio emission according to FCC standards for home use either.
And talking about BASIC, the BASIC language they first created for the Apple II wasn't good either, so they had to buy it from MicroSoft, but at double the price of Commodore.

But then, I know I could never create a computer almost from scratch (apparantly Woz had one of the early 6502 boards from MOS), so he is good deal better than me! But I think I would be able to write a descent BASIC though... ;)