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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."
To summarize the interviewer: "That was cool, back in the day, and stuff like that..."
Woz gave a talk to my class a few years back. Just like the references to Breakout in the article, you could always tell that his driving force was making the impossible possible. Using as few chips as possible (I distinctly remember him mentioning this multiple times), making a personal computer that could do $foo and $bar, etc. For him it was all about the challenge.
And as if Woz wasn't already the idol of longtime Mac users everywhere, he further cemented his status by professing his love for Snood! All hail Woz, we bow down before your puzzle level skills.
He'll frighten you with his interestingness
and giant centipedes
Read this article then...
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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...
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...
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
That's cool.
That's cool. [...] like conferences and stuff like that?
Did they have like a sketch of the way it would look on the screen or did you just interpret it yourself?
That's where I stopped reading.
Simplifying the hardware saves you real dollars per device. But tricky, touchy drivers and firmware costs you in support, debugging and developer training.
It's really not fair to evaluate the design using modern standards like that. Back in the era where individual chips cost real money, being able to pull down the hardware costs by cutting them made the difference between a computer that people could afford and fit in their home and one that was priced or sized out of reach.
As far as the complexity introduced, there was a point in my life where I had a good working knowledge of the entire ROM of the Apple II at the source code level. When it's possible to fit the whole software design of the machine in your head, whether the approach used makes for tricky drivers isn't so relevant.
By the way: if you think needing to page align data such that there's no byte rollover makes for difficult to write code, you should take a look at Atari 2600 programming. What you have to do in software to work around the hardware constraints of that clever-so-it-can-be-cheap 6502 design make Woz's Apple design look downright elegant and user-friendly.
And I don't mean a PC inside an updated Apple II enclosure. I think he would be the perfect person to design and sell a new computer targeting the home electronics hobbyist. Something very slow, like ~25Mhz, that could allow one to wire-wrap a daughterboard and just plug it in. Like people used to do in the '70s.
These pretty much already exist. Google "Chumby" (designed by Bunnie Huang of Xbox 1-hacking fame).
Also, the amount of fun you can have with a $20 ATmega128 board and a free copy of AVR-GCC is pretty impressive.
Woz said that he never wanted to be famous or super rich; he wanted to be an "average guy" career-wise who was the best in his field (maybe a bit naivete there :)
He said he and Steve Jobs were great friends once who talked about music and philosophy; but Jobs regarded himself more as a Shakespeare/Einstein hero type.
He said Jobs was essential to the success of Apple because Steve Jobs had a better grip on simplifying technology for the masses (whereas Woz simplified technology for its own sake).
He said that his own involvement was more important to Steve Jobs than the other way around because Jobs needed talent and Woz was giving it away for free (open source style, I guess).
He said he's happy because by age 20 he realized he would never be poor.
And in undertones you can see that he went out of his way to be "normal" such as pursuing an 8-year teaching career.
Overall it's a great (and long) interview; you can see Charlie Rose working his hardest and enjoying it when he's not frustrated with Woz's fast talking style.
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."
Repetition does not transform a lie into the truth. - FDR