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Woz Talks About His Gaming Past

Posted by Zonk on from the world-of-wozcraft dept.

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."

9 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. SnghxxxzzZZZzzz by keenada · · Score: 3, Informative

    To summarize the interviewer: "That was cool, back in the day, and stuff like that..."

  2. Snood! by MalleusEBHC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:For someone with such a reputation... by j00r0m4nc3r · · Score: 4, Funny

    He'll frighten you with his interestingness
    and giant centipedes

  4. Re:For someone with such a reputation... by hansamurai · · Score: 3, Informative

    Read this article then...

    http://www.woz.org/letters/general/78.html

    --
    Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
  5. Have some coffee or something by us7892 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  6. Is the Woz really that great? by the_arrow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Is the Woz really that great? by greg1104 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They also couldn't handle radio emission according to FCC standards for home use either.

      According to the Apple II History page the FCC issues were related to the RF modulator design used. I don't think anyone has ever claimed Woz was an RF engineer.

      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.

      Then hit that page again and read the part starting with "An interesting bit of trivia about Wozniak's Integer BASIC was that he never had an assembly language source file for it. He wrote it in machine language, assembling it by hand on paper". One of the things Microsoft had going for them when they were working on their BASIC was that they access to much better development tools running on a larger system, and were essentially cross-compiling from there to generate the code for the home PC. Anybody can write a BASIC interpreter, fitting one into a tiny space in the era before there were even good assemblers available was a different thing altogether.

  7. Is the interviewer 12 years old? by dannycim · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Tradeoffs by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.