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Woz Still Misses Homebrew Computer Club and Apple
UtahSaint writes "The Electronic Design site has nabbed a short interview with the Woz, where he waxes poetically about his time growing up as an Engineer and founding Apple. Even to this day, he says, he still misses the Homebrew Computer Club and his days running around Apple leading the technical teams. 'I miss the technical camaraderie ... The whole feeling of being on a revolution, on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies.'"
woz rocks. I miss the old "proprietary architecture and homebrew" days too.\ even though I wasn't alive then.
http://pinopsida.com
Not unusual for most people to remember with inordinate fondness the times past that they have lived through. I doubt that WOz would be waxing poetic if he remembered the jockeying and bickering and the easing out of the scene that happened when Jobs effectively obliterated him from the pantheon. Jobs was arguably better suited to "lead" Apple beyond it's enbryonic days - but still.....
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
Considering that Stave Jobs ripped him off in 1975 when he got the Woz to help him optimize Breakout at Atari, and then paid him 7% of what he made, instead of the 50% they had agreed on.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Watch Woz, wanting what Woz was, wax wistfully.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Is this a sign of Woz wanting to sign up at the Apple doors?
It would be too much like a Mac clone. The reason IBM is outta the game is because OS/2 was originally available for IBM only (makes sense, it WAS developed by IBM), much like Mac OS. When the PC clone market came out, Microsoft (since they didn't make the hardware) felt free to lease out MS-DOS to the clone manufacturers. What killed IBM was that the OS that they used in their computer was also used in other computer systems. Apple nearly died at the hands of the Mac clones in the mid '90s. That's the primary Steve Jobs kicked them all out. If you make both the software and the computer (like IBM did and Apple does), you make much more money off of the computer than you do the OS. By confining the OS to their own software, they prevent a company like Sony from coming in and using Mac OS on their next Mac look-alike.
"I'm glad I'm going to die because, when I do, the world's gonna go to the dogs." -Me on aging and the next generation.
Woz is like a one hit wonder artist who had a single bestselling track back in 70's and continues to milk it without a shame. No one should care what Woz thinks.
Every article about him ends with "He is the co-founder of Apple." Big deal! That was decades ago and he hasn't really accomplished anything since then. He was, at best, a regular hacker who met the right person at the right time.
Normally I wouldn't bother with this, but it gets on my nerves how he has assumed this budhha-like position in pushing malformed opinions every time there is an Apple story. He's like a grandpa who convinced himself he has an authoritative and final take on every subject.
And I miss the days when you could go directly to a webpage. Full text, AC so no whoring:
[Technology Report]
Wizard Of Woz Keeps Casting His Spells
What would you do after founding a technology giant? Steve wozniak Uses those resources to keep innovating and following his creative impulses.
John Arkontaky | ED Online ID #17186 | October 19, 2007
Article Rating: Not Rated
For many, "Vice President in charge of R&D" sounds like a good job - reputable, good pay, and maybe even exciting. But tack the words "at Apple Inc." to the end of that title, and you have, well, a whole different barrel of apples.
Steve Wozniak didn't earn this job with a good resume. He forged it, inventing the first single-circuit motherboard with embedded ROM in 1975. He and Steve Jobs had to sell their most valuable possessions to assemble a product line of Apple Is. Some people can't put a price on fame and fortune, but they can. About $1300 and a few IOUs later, they kinda made their money back.
Follow the Silicon Road
Wozniak didn't want to become an entrepreneur or take the world by storm. He was content with his job at Hewlett-Packard and even more content as a hobbyist. Wozniak worked at a bench from 1973 to 1976, optimizing designs for calculators other EEs developed.
"I wanted to be an engineer in a lab," says Wozniak. "The spirit of engineers was most important. I loved the engineers, loved the project, loved the company!" He spent his days at the plant and his nights batting around design ideas and inventions with the Homebrew Computer Club. "I'd be off in 'computer design world' and Steve [Jobs] would ask where it could go," he says.
This dynamic led to the sale of a wood-cased CPU comprising roughly 30 chips for $500 (then $666.66 after a markup) and the beginning of a revolution. "After Apple I, every computer used a keyboard," Wozniak says. "Before, they used geeky switches. It was a trading transition in history." The Apple I was a quantum leap in the available technology. Before Wozniak threw his hat into the ring, the Altair 8800 was the closest thing to a personal computer.
"You could turn it into a computer, but it was basically an Intel processor," Wozniak says. "A computer to me has to have the ability to program. Altair couldn't. You had to buy extra cards. I was well past that point. Sure, it used ones and zeros, but I wanted a real computer my whole life. I would've sold my house for a computer, but it had to run a program."
He created a motherboard and compatible components, but the product was more for a hobbyist or engineer than a consumer because users would have to add input sources, a keyboard, casing, and a display themselves. He wanted to bring it all together so anybody and everybody could operate an Apple right out of the box.
Playing Games
Born in 1950, he didn't have much technology available to him as a child, but he would stumble onto information about technology here and there. Picking up little scraps wherever he could, these bits of info would be like "little secrets" to him and his young mind - information he would keep that other people would flat-out ignore.
When he was 10, a book about a ham radio operator inspired him to not only earn a ham radio license, but build a transmitter and receiver by hand as well. He also conjured a game where he would experiment with adding and subtracting transistors to his gadgets. "It helped me very much. You sit down, think, plan, and make sure what you build is efficient. It's good practice for what engineering involves," he says.
Wozniak left HP in 1976 and formed Apple Computer with Jobs, asking himself how he could put these things in his head into the smallest number of chips. As a result, he would write his own Basic, even though he never programmed in Basic in his life. But that wasn't the only thing he would have to do on the fly. "Everything was created from scratch," he says. "Everything I did had to be made up for the first time."
hey - you're not Woz!
...If he didn't totally trash it
The homebrew computer club was pretty close to the current Open Hardware movement.
This isn't IRC or Counter-Strike, spare us the "I'm so stoned right now" comments, if you please!
SuperHappyDevHouse is an event in the Bay Area that is trying to "resurrect the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club". I think that we are doing a decent job at that.
I've talked to someone who used to attend Homebrew Computer Club. He says that SuperHappyDevHouse has a similar feel. Among differences: There was only one electrical outlet in the space used for Homebrew Computer Club - Woz supposedly monopolized that outlet. And people couldn't bring computers to Homebrew like they can (and are encouraged to) at SuperHappyDevHouse.
Because he doesn't work at Apple anymore.
This might look like atangent to some, but bear with me for a moment: how did the world change in just a few short decades. The 70s and 80s were years when a skilled individual, perhaps with the help of a peer, would be able to project and implement his/her idea of a computer. You had a flurry of various hardware and software architectures, most richly in the "home computer" market, but not only.
For an example, the S-100 based computers definitely were in the professional segment, and yet a lot of hardware accessories existed, designed and produced by small workshops.
Fast forward to today: what can an individual do, today? Electronic components are integrated to the point that you can't even assemble them without special and very expensive equipment, not to talk about the motherboards. Not to talk about the difficulties of prototyping. The bar to entry has been set incredibly high. So high, in fact, that the world of microprocessor architectures has significantly shrunk, and basically the only computer designed, produced and sold is based on an intel processor.
It's a word where only multimillion dollar corporations can implement visionary ideas - but them being corporations, it's an idea that usually doesn't excite the developers, only the product managers. It has to be profitable, that's the only relevant angle. In this world, the ideals Wozniak is after, are dead.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Or, rather, by IBM and a certain other company, the fact that they've obliterated it (and Xenix) from their annoyingly Flash-ridden history (unless I missed it) nonwithstanding.
No, Apple just about went under because of poor management and horrible/confusing product lines/design. If they opened up OS X they'd increase their market share (possibly quite dramatically) and could still stay in the hardware game as there are plenty of people who would rather have Apple designed hardware on their desk than just a beige^H^H^H^H^Hblack box. Plus, half of their business is non-Mac related anyways (iPod, iPhone, etc).
Good or bad, right or wrong, the reason Apple doesn't want to allow OS X to be installed on any old x86 hardware is the same reason the iPhone launched without third party app support or an SDK: Steve Jobs is a control freak.
And before the mac zealots mark this as flamebait or something, I'm not saying Steve Jobs hasn't done great things for Apple, especially since he came back. Streamlining the product lines, giving Apple better focus on where they needed to go and managing to make cool looking design a big part of Apple's success (which is why I think they could still do fine in the hardware business with an open OS X). Nonetheless, he's still a control freak and in this case it means wanting to control the whole "experience", from the hardware to the software. Somehow, Apple has managed to succeed prtty well all this time where others have failed in regards to building their computer business off of proprietary hardware.
In the timeline you linked, the first several items titled "Big Picture" come up with the description "undefined".
Their trivia advertisement claims they came up with the terms "dead tree edition" and "drink from the fire hose".
Finally, in their quiz, most of the questions were cut off halfway, resulting in:
Is that really the case? Like Woz is a high profile technical multimillionaire, an inspiration to an entire generation of geeks, and he misses the thrill of being on a revolution and can't figure out how to recreate it?
If that's really the case. I mean, if he really and truly misses it, why not just contact pretty much anyone over the age of 30 in any field he wants:
"Hi, my name is Steve Wozniak" //e! How's it going?!?"
"Holy shit! I know you! I learned assembly language on an Apple
"Not bad, I really like the stuff you do. Do you mind if I come to work and hang out and be a technical comrade?"
"Shit no! Christ, it would be an honor."
"You don't have to pay me, I mean, I'm a multimillionaire."
"No, that's cool, come on over."
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I personally am not a multimillionaire, and I know a lot of people, and I have literally done jobs for $0 just to hang out at places and work with cool people.
Make the world what you want. It seems that this is especially easy advice to give to someone who is financially independent.
1) FPGAs,
:) ), you go the first one, you can become the next Apple (no, they did not start with replicating MOS Technologies fab line and taping out their own chips). If you have good ideas about processor architecture, prototyping them on $200-$1000 FPGA demoboard might be an interesting option nowadays.(Here I should probably quote the not necessarily reality supported, but popular meme how modern algorithms on ancient hardware run faster than ancient algorithms on modern hardware). Sky is the limit! :)
and
2) Software (on network-connected rather powerful boxes).
You go second route, you can become the next Google (well, become => become part of
Paul B.
One hit wonder, my ass. He did what he did because he understood electrons and logic at a level that one in a hundred-thousand people could not match. He did not just "co-invent the Apple" - he is a shining example of what a true HP engineer could do. He basically invented modern input/output routines. The degree of raw brainpower required to design the graphics card and RF modulation on the original Apple is astounding. He did not just assemble off-the-shelf parts in a new way; he invented totally new ways of doing anything, and he created things that both worked and were cost effective.
There are engineers, mechanics, designers, inventors and scientists. And then there are those who have such a deep understanding of how the world around us works, who combine multiple disciplines in such a way that they can see things that normal people can't. Richard Feynmann was one of these people. So is Steve Wozniak.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak changed the world. The computer revolution would have taken much, much longer without those two. Steve Jobs, in addition to his marketing skills, was truly a technician and scientist in his own right. Not nearly in the same league as Woz, but he knew enough to help do what had to be done from a physical design and assembly standpoint. Woz couldn't sell ideas very well, back then. The teamup of Wozniak and Jobs created something unique, a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts, but that shouldn't take away from the brilliance of both of these men.
Wozniak has also been a teacher, a concert promoter (!) and Lord knows what else since leaving Apple. He prefers to work a lot with children now, trying to teach them how to solve logical problems. There's no way to know now, but I would not be surprised a bit if in the distant future some great inventor / engineer / scientist or even politician is going to say that once upon a time they started to learn how to truly think logically because they had the gift of listening to Woz lecture at his school.
Saying that Woz is a "one-hit wonder" does nothing but display total ignorance of what the man has truly accomplished. Creating Apple the way he did was great, and would not have happened nearly as soon if he hadn't existed, but perhaps the this brillian yet simple man's ultimate legacy has yet to be written, for we may never know the true benefits of the work he has done with children.
Whoa harsh words from Anonymous Coward!
Woz is an exceptionally knowledgeable and clever hardware electronics engineer. His ability to reduce board size with fewer components made him a name to begin with. He also coded the Apple BASIC interpreter for the early Apple designs -- by hand! In fact, his ability allowed Apple to reduce enough components and create a fully ready-to-use machine which made the original Apple I and Apple II machines at low enough cost and wide functionality to create the first truly viable microcomputer company.
Of course despite his great skillz, in true geek fashion he seems to have little business acumen. It is no accident that Jobs partnered up with him, an neither one of them expected to sell more than a few hundred machines to other hobbyists at the time.
{ - Generic Guy - }
All those things he says he misses, it's all being done in open source now. If Woz wanted to, he could work on the Linux kernel.
One time I homebrewed a bong out of an apple. So stoned!
One hit wonder, my ass. He did what he did because he understood electrons and logic at a level that one in a hundred-thousand people could not match.
One in a hundred thousand means there are approximately 60,000 people on the planet who understand those topics as well or better than him. Hardly unique, which is the point of the original commenter.
Technically he is still an employee.
I think you're missing the point. What Woz did to craft the Personal Computer into what the marketplace exists as today, is so bright a star in his history that anything else you may or may not have heard about since is naturally dim by comparison.
Plus, y'know, he's a shy quiet guy that was totally buggered by his best friend.
Even Steve Jobs can't sell thin air to an Astronaut. Woz made it, Jobs made it happen.
I was a teenager back in the early microcomputer days and built one of first kit machines, an IMSAI 8080. It was great fun and more educational than any number of college course I took thereafter.
Those days are long gone now. But could something similar return? I think that the next tech revolution has already started, and it's the hacker's auto fabrication machine ("fabber").
Example: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Right now these aren't much more than 3-D printers that squeeze out plastic goop under computer control. But if the rate of progress of this field is anything like that seen with microcomputers, then small scale manufacturing will be totally changed in a few years. Who will be the Woz (and the Jobs and the Gates) of this new endeavor? Maybe they're already out there, but we just haven't heard of them yet.
Restrict the domain of discussion to the US and you get a better sense of the uniqueness.
Why restrict the domain to the US?
Nowhere else in the world of that time could this kind of talent have been expressed. (I'm not sure there is _any_ place in the present world where such talent could be expressed.)
Only sixty thousand people like him among six billion may not be unique if you are talking about, say, the Midland, Texas of the same time period. (One city full of truly unique individuals, matched in uniqueness only by its slightly larger neighbor a half-hour to the west, but we aren't talking about engineering genius any more. Wait, the analogy is slipping here.)
Okay, let's try it this way: If you put all sixty thousand people theoretically like Woz into one small city in the southwest US, perhaps none of them would any longer seem so unique. (Maybe?)
But when you spread sixty thousand "similar" people across the world, you really can't say that, because there are sixty-thousand of them, they must not be unique. How often in one day are you going to meet one of those sixty thousand people?
I look back with nostalgia at the time myself, in part because it was a time when a young guy with an engineering bent could still believe he could change the world for the better just be inventing something. You could get your mind around a 64K address space and a character set smaller than 256 encoding points in a way that you can't with 2G+ actual RAM and, erm, well, Unicode. (Bad pronoun transitions, I know. Bad topic transition, too.)
Anyway, Woz is unique. So is Jobs. Gates and Ballmer, however, are a wannabees, still trying for something that six-ty billion _dollars_ can't buy.
joudanzuki
Well, the "features" in the addressing modes were a bit intimidating. Yes.
64K of address is nowhere near as intimidating as 2G+ real RAM.
Character sets with less than 256 code points are nowhere near as intimidating as Unicode.
(I hand-built a kana font once back then, pixel-by-pixel. I'm _not_ going to try to build a Kanji font by hand. If I had to build a Kanji font, I wouldn't want to do it alone, even if I had good tools. That's a lot of time on a single art project.)
Yes, group projects are not evil. But it's a different feeling when you know that going the cowboy route simply doesn't work any more.
joudanzuki
It sounds to me like he loves the idea of open source itself, and just takes issue with a lot of the other ideologies that are lumped in with it these days (anti-capitalism, the "free" software movement, etc)
Lumping things you don't like onto something that treatens you is little more than name calling. The Woz is either misguided or malicious to say things like that. Software Freedom is something he does not understand at all.
Too bad for him because that's where the camaraderie is today. Suck holes, like Apple and M$, are more about denying user freedom than they are about technical progress or excellence. They get to use great free tools like GCC and X but don't get to pass them and other along to their users. Places like that can't be fun to work for.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Perhaps, but at the expense of a competitive market and interoperability. Sure, the shitty architecture won out in the end, and it had the unfortunate side effect of pretty much killing the OS market, both of which I wish didn't happen, but the uniformity of hardware that the IBM clones made allows for us to have several interchangeable vendors in the market and thus levels out the PC playing field. Now OEMs actually have to compete with each other on a level that resembles more of a perfectly competitive market than an oligopoly. In my opinion it's much like how having one standard audio or video format has allowed player manufacturers to focus more on quality and features than having to worry about compatibility. It also helps the more computer illiterate. Grandma doesn't have to worry as much whether or not her new hard drive will work with her particular PC model. The same PCI card can potentially work with a Gateway, a Sony, a Dell, a Toshiba, and now even an Apple. The best part of this near universal support is that people like myself can now build our own PCs instead of settling for an OEM model. My ~$700 Pentium 4 I built back in 2004 was probably worth at least twice as much back then (and is still worth that much to me now). I don't have preinstalled bloatware issues and I have the peace of mind that the hardware inside was personally chosen by me and not by some OEM who most likely threw the parts together haphazardly in some Chinese factory. If IBM compatibles never appeared I would probably have to actually make my own hardware to appreciate this much freedom, a pricey, difficult, and possibly illegal process. If IBM wasn't so lax about their PC design the microcomputer market would be much like the console market, with some programs being exclusively made for certain vendors in an attempt to force the consumer to buy the expensive hardware possibly just to enjoy that one piece of software. Household adoption would never have happened on the scale that it has today because it would just be too costly to have to own two or three different machines to get access to all of the software you would want or need. It could also give software manufacturers de facto monopolies on each respective machine, since their competition might either find it too difficult or expensive to port their software or there might even be legal barriers put in place to make porting impossible. Imagine having to have to own an IBM, an Apple, an Atari, and an Amiga just to get all of your work done. I'd quit before that and settle for a typewriter and a telephone before I'd buy four different machines.
You cannot possibly be serious. "name calling"? "misguided and malicious"? Are you for real??
Technology work really has changed over the last 30 years. Back in the beginning, it was totally exciting just to get something working. Now it's still fun, but a lot of the tough problems are solved or abstracted away from the end user.
:)
I wonder what it's like for total newcomers now -- there's no easy way to throw someone into modern software development like you could by handing them a BASIC manual or an assembly language guide on the IIe. There just isn't as much "brand new stuff" to explore.
I still like working in the technology field because it is very challenging, and solving problems for a living is a lot more fun than filling out TPS reports.
(If Woz wants a tech job, any geek in their 30s would be more than happy to let him come work, I'm sure.
With Linux, ANY HARDWARE will do.
I can run the latest Compiz thingamajigs with Gutsy on my top of the line desktop or Puppy on my 10 year old laptop.
There is no equivalent on the Mac to this.
And while fanbois like to remind us that they have at least 2 choices in video cards and such, it is a lock-in with limited hardware which makes the Mac what it is.
If Apples had to deal with all the legacy Microsoft carries and the myriads of hardware that Linux supports, it would be a whole different story.
Mac 'hardware' is no different (thank god we dont have to listen anymore about the blathering how the PowerPc was exceptional) than any other hardware except for the finishing touch. But Mac hardware is only a drop in the bucket of what is out there.
And get into the freaking 21 century and stop calling it a PC.
Its the same hardware whether you run mac, linux or windows. The same machines.
...a protegé. Or a dozen. What could be better for an aging tech maverick than mentoring the best and brightest of the next generation?
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Ha. Modded funny, I love it. Here it goes anyway:
I was hoping this was true the last time I needed to buy a new laptop.
I compared top of the line offerings from Apple and IBM/Lenovo. Note that I'm not comparing Apples to cheap ass PCs, that would be all too easy. Thinkpads are the gold standard for x86 laptops.
Here's what I got:
Thinkpad T61
15.4" LCD, 1680x1050
2.2gHz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 gigs of ram
100gb 7200rpm drive
dvd recorder
integrated wireless and bluetooth
That comes to.... $1458.
(Seriously, check it out on lenovo.com)
Now let's go to Apple. Surely this machine is at the level of the MacBook Pro. MBPro STARTS at 2 grand, same processor/ram, though 20GB extra hard drive (at a blazing 5400rpm). And I'm stuck at 1440x900 on the screen, not to mention stuck with a crappy ass keyboard that can't hold a candle to the venerated thinkpad keyboard.
Now, it's true that I could add a 20" LCD with a lightning fast 16ms response time for.. SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?! What the.. I just picked up this Samsung 20 incher, 2ms response, for under two hundred.
The dream that Macs can be price comparable to PCs will probably never come true.
"Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." --Eric Blair
Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example. Everyone coded in assembly or even machine language back then. It was no great trick. People these days think it's some mythical skill. And a BASIC interpreter was definitely not that hard. In fact, it was common back then to write one just for laughs (a floating point package was much trickier, on the other hand). Heck, the first issue of Dr. Dobbs had a tiny basic interpreter.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Woz needs to figure out how to combine epigenetics with peer-to-peer file sharing - and then not only will he have a cure for cancer and a consequent Nobel Prize (which he'll share with me for having given him this idea now), but he'll have that whole cutting edge running-around-the-lab-like-a-turdorken-with-his-head-cut-off thing goin' on.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Dude like the man wants to all like totally stick like videocameras in like, dude, like, the trees, all around my house. Now, like, even when I'm totally baked and like get one of those like "I am so baked and like I think I'm going to take a crap and wipe my ass with a whole roll of toilet paper, dude!" moment there will be the man with his camera on me. Dude! I just want to be feeling nice and clean When I saddle back up the machine.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Lots of fun, in fact. But, coupled with the responsibility of actually having to finish and sell a product instead of just leaving it hanging when you get a "better" idea. A casual look at sourceforge shows how often that happens.
And he also regrets banging Kathy Griffin "That stupid redheaded biatch just wouldn't shut her pie hole, even when I shoved my junk down her throat and talk about nasty unshaved red snatch"
Too bad for him because that's where the camaraderie is today. Suck holes, like Apple and M$, are more about denying user freedom than they are about technical progress or excellence. They get to use great free tools like GCC and X but don't get to pass them and other along to their users. Places like that can't be fun to work for
Oh yeah... please. Open Source really means build systems being closed because they are web based or internal to corporations, as opposed to distributed software. There's nothing in the GPL, according to many posters on \., that would require you to recontribute your changes to an open system if you are just sitting behind a firewall at MegaCorp.
This is my sig.
Despite Wozniak completing the standard 796 rounds of interviews and 14,327 pop quizzes and tedious logic puzzles filched from the back pages of Scientific American, a Google spokeswoman announced that the Internet advertising company had finally rejected him for being "Just this really, really, really ridiculously old geezer, you know?". Taking some time to look up from her playdoh, the spokeswoman added, "And he didn't go to Standford!"
Da Blog
Dear slashdot. Please do not use nicknames like Woz in your abstracts. That makes them difficult to read.
I have firsthand memories of the homebrew computer club. As others have mentioned, Lee usually was the man with the stick (moderator). It was a live crew that showed up at SLAC. In fact, my first engineering mentor would show up from time to time. Most/many of us were "paid hobbiests" that did it both for fun and bucks. I don't believe that I was around Woz as I was a smoker and we seperated the two sides of the meeting to smokers and non smokers (a different era). There were many "famous" folks who regularly showed up at club meetings: Lee, as mentioned developed the first Osborne. Our librarian later developed Dr. Dobbs Journal.
Yeah, as mentioned earlier, the Apple I did tie up the only electrical outlet in the front doorway. If memory serves me correctly, Apple Basic didn't come in until Apple II's. It was a video octal/hex debug tool in the Apple I. Indeed, I remember wooden sides and a plexiglass top panel, so you could see the motherboard.
Many of us were interested in the 8080/Z80 systems of the Altair/Imsai/etc/etc/ systems. Indeed, I was there when the club coined the term S100 bus. My little piece of history. A "big" system had 16K RAM, usually an audio cassette mass storage device, an old RS232 terminal (mine was first a Textronics, later a Lear Sigler ADM3, which I still have in my garage and still has the best keyboard "feel" that I have ever run across). If you were real lucky you had one or more floppy disk drives (8 inch Sugarts were favorites). CP/M was the "big time" operating system of choice. The Apple was more of an "interesting" device, not mainstream for the hobby at that time. The 6502 was certianly cheap enough!
I can still find some of the camaraderie at the local Linux UG (LUG). However, I don't find the "rough edges" and cutting edge technology. Really, it was more of "damn, I wonder if this will work" rather than some "intuitive philosophies". Smoke was not your friend then as it still isn't your friend today, but you sure saw a lot more of it in those days...... Our LUG still has the geeks show up and we have interesting lectures, but even the open source stuff is getting pretty cut and dried, relatively speaking.
The internet is great for technical correspondence and "group" software projects, and althoug h we have worldwide contributers, we can't all go to the meeting, then to pizza and beer afterwards.
So yeah, I agree with Woz. I'm typing with my peep, not chillin' with my peep.
Cheers!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's actually possible to do far more with electronics at home today than in the 1970s. But the amount of information you need to do it is much greater.
If you want to play with microcontrollers at the bare machine level, you can get something modern, like an ATMega 128. The entire tool chain, which is gcc plus a rather nice interactive development environment from Atmel, is all free. Development boards with lights, buttons, and a little LCD display are about $55. The only extras you need are a 12VDC power supply and a JTAG to serial converter.
If you want to have PC boards made, it costs about $50 to $75 to have a small one made. Free design software is available. This is all much easier than it used to be; no more mailing transparent films around. You just upload the files. They even drill the holes and plate them through.
Soldering, though, is much harder than it used to be. Soldering fine-pitch surface mount parts requires special tools, which aren't cheap, and much skill. And there are harder parts, like ball grid arrays. Worse, soldering is going lead-free. This is good for health, but means a narrower temperature range between the temperatures for successful soldering and part damage. Soldering is now a temperature and time controlled process. It can be done by hand, and there are hobbyists who do it, but it takes practice, skill, good vision, and good fine motor coordination.
Getting parts is far easier. Everybody serious uses Digi-Key. They have data sheets on line for most of the parts they sell, reliably ship within hours of ordering, and will let you order one each of fifty different small parts. But if you don't know much about electronics, the Digi-Key web site and catalog will be very intimidating.
The real problem with hobbyist electronics today is that expectations are so high. In the 1970s, you could build stuff cooler than other people could buy. Today, consumer electronics is so sophisticated that there's little hope of beating what somebody can buy at Best Buy. The payoff isn't there.
There is a huge number even today of people able to write small compilers or interpreters. It's no big deal. It's actually much better, from a CS point of view, to write a Forth or Scheme compiler and learn how to extend the language than just writing a fucking basic interpreter, even by hand. I feel much more admiration for people like John McCarthy or Don Knuth than i'd ever feel for a one time hacker like woz.
What the fuck? No. Mod parent down as a troll or flamebait. It reads like a veiled threat.
Wouldn't it be an A/C post if it were some sort of threat.
I'm serious, though. I have seen several cases where normal, non-rich people have had their lives trashed by unproven accusations, all because they tried to be nice to kids. Add celebrity to it and it's a recipe for disaster. Look at Michael Jackson! He was ruined long before anything was ever proven - and he was acquitted! Yet ask 100 people, and 99 will probably say "yeah, he did it".
All because he enjoyed enriching kids' lives. (I'm no Michael Jackson fan, but the public is waaaaay too quick to convict, just because someone looks or behaves differently than the norm).
If you have riches or fame and work with kids, paranoia is for your own safety!
He's like a big...really big lost puppy who just wants love (and maybe steve jobs to stop breathing).
They don't make nostalgia like they used to.
i thought the same thing when i first read about him working with kids.
Most of really dislike what the market has become today: "Commodity toasters" operated by the clueless with no appreciation of what they have in front of them ( this includes 90% of current day 'techies' too )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Unless he has learned to play the political game, i would imagine he would have almost zero impact.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Your Pentium 4 setup would be worth even more if it had a return key and a tab key.
I've seen tons and tons of mid 90s Thinkpads still working. In fact, I've had people bring in a Thinkpad with a made for Windows 95 sticker on it that they'd dumped coffee into. The fix? Replace the keyboard, and it was good to go.
Take into account the fairly recent iBooks with the jack problem that Apple refused to honor the warranty on, and I know several people with DEAD Macs that they've had to solder the jack back on themselves, or leave it collecting dust in a closet. My friend Jon, a Mac freak, told me that his friend dropped his new Intel MacBook from waist height, and it landed on a rear hinge corner, and it completely broke apart.
Bah. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Unlike most of you, I've been computing since 1978. Myriad computers were available at the time, very expensive, and just getting started. All ran CP/M, TRS-DOS, or some BIOS monitor for scanning barcodes from the Scelbi-Byte series. There was a sense of ownership; and it belonged to you, and only you. You could really _love_ that little box that came from so far away- it was a canvas on which the future you would write.
I remember writing machine code, wirewrapping until 3AM, using the logic probe and oscilloscope....getting excited to see a single LED flash in the right order, meaning you got it right. It was lonelier than now, but it was both fun and a technical challenge. I used to LONG for overhearing a conversation that mentioned computers- that meant the person was, like me, trying to connect with other hackers (in the original sense of the word). But now when I overhear a conversation at a restaurant on computers, it's just another poor sap with another virus he doesn't understand, getting ripped off by a local service depot and feeling helpless.
In these 'appliance' days, almost every home computer user sees it now as a necessary evil; the box that eats money...the box that collects spam and spends it's time driving you crazy. It's astounding how many people deeply hate their Windows machines. It's much less pronounced on the Mac, btw.
But Linux is that freedom all over again, and improved. It's the connection with other users, figuring out how to interface with new gadgets like digital picture frames and sensor networks. And it's easier than ever to get in touch with someone just like you, thousands of miles away, grouping in clusters to have the same kinda fun.
Sure, it kicks ass against the bad guys, it's cheaper and much more reliable. But the keyword here is *fun*. And now, not just by adding hardware, but hacking software with the help of your friends, is commonplace.
For me the key thing that keeps me in Linux is the _fun_. I love all my machines.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Wozniak was a prankster, joker and all round rowdy kid in high school. He was even criminal in making and selling blue boxes. Today he's a billionaire and he is able to get the attention of celebrities due to that money. Consider Kathy Lee from the Larry King Live show. That was pretty bad. Sounds quite decadent. I'm very liberal and I could care less about their actions. What I dislike are the contradictions. Woz does wax nostalgic and I can relate but he's not the same guy that was involved in the start up of the company that put out the 1984 commercial.
I'd venture a guess that Apple's anti-consumer iPhone debacle is 1984 x 10. Imagine how that commercial was supposed to relate the Apple ideology. It was meant to show that big business (big brother) takes to extremes the control of their machines to the point of making those that use them zombie operators. Consider now how Apple has become hostile toward iPhone customers that unlock their phones (which is a right granted by the Library Of Congress as an exemption to the DMCA). Yet Apple still pushes consumers as if they are robots to be controlled and that they have no choice in what they can do with their phones. They are claiming IP yet while they developed the Macintosh they took every idea they could from other places and they hacked every device they could get their hands on.
I just have lost respect for Woz for not standing up and telling Jobs publicly how he feels that Apple's behavior is a violation of everything that the 1984 commercial stood for.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The gp said one in a hundred thousand couldn't match him. That means 99,999 out of 100,000 _could_ match him. :)
If this was his only claim to fame.... I'd be much more sympathetic of your point of view.
But Woz did far more than just hand assemble BASIC. Adding BASIC to the Apple II was not really where the innovation was recognized, nor what was the major accomplishment to developing the Apple II either. A floppy disc controller using just a couple of chips was far more impressive, as was the chip count for the original Apple II motherboard.
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied. Yes, nearly everybody who was a professional software developer or computer engineer (the term really didn't exist then, but there were people who did this) could develop software using an assembler, but it wasn't nearly as pervasive as you seem to indicate. FORTRAN assemblers had been used extensively since the early 1960's, and this was the era of PDP-11's and IBM mainframes running COBOL. Most software developers did their stuff in high level languages and only dabbled in assembly when critical timing issues needed to be dealt with, or for system programming.
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too? Much of what Woz accomplished is dismissed now in part because many have seen his designed and tried to emulate that philosophy in other areas... now that somebody has done it first.
Nothing about computers in general is really that difficult.... if you are dealing with it one piece at a time. The BASIC interpreter is but one piece of a much larger picture. But the real trick is putting together the whole package. And Woz was able to get that accomplished in an era when it simply wasn't really done. Those other individuals like Nolan Bushnell and others who were able to put together whole computers did so, but it was a very small handful, and certainly wasn't "everybody" in the computer industry.
They say they "nabbed a short interview with the Woz" -- as if they'd pulled of a coup of some sort. But I mean, honestly, who won't this guy talk to now?
--
While I appreciate your sentiment, there's no time like today for the electronics hobbyist. Granted, you can't design something on the level of today's PC in your basement on a shoestring budget, but you can build 1970's and 1980's era hardware for song these days. Check out Futurlec for an example. And some places offers PCB fabrication for around $2.50 per square inch.
Times have changed:
So there's no time like the present for the computer tinkerer. Sure, you can't match the performance of today's processors with something you'd put together in your basement, but you don't need to. Even a 100 MHz DSP can encode NTSC video in real time.
What has changed is that the average system of interest to the hobbyist is now 100 or 1000 times cheaper than it was in 1970. In 1970, $50 worth of electronics wasn't even programmable, but today it can run Linux and can hold more code than the average hobbyist could generate in 10 years.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Or perhaps designing a computer motherboard in an era when discrete transistors were still commonplace is something that you think nearly anybody can do too?
I didn't say his other accomplishments weren't impressive, I said, "Woz is a smart guy, no doubt, but a BASIC interpreter is a bad example."
And BTW, not "everyone coded in assembly or machine language" in the 1970's, as you implied.
I have no particular statistics, but while in high school from 1978-1982, programming in assembly was very commonplace. Perhaps on big iron the COBOL specialists never touched assembly, but in the microcomputer world, *everyone* who was serious (i.e., not just a BASIC dabbler) programmed in assembly, because memory was so tight, and BASIC was so slow. C only existed off in the ether somewhere. If you wanted to break out of the BASIC prison, assembly was your only choice on microcomputers.
I took a college class in IBM 370 assembly during high school, and recall specifically that the projects were basically business reports and the like. It wasn't any sort of system programming, so I know, at least from the instructor's point of view, using assembly for business wasn't some bizarre thing.
Assembly just wasn't that big of a deal back then. Really, it's not that big of a deal now. It just has this silly mythology built up around it, and for some reason everyone fears it. Programmers today think only the "hard core" are capable of using it. Assembly is trivially simple.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
...a couple years ago when I wrote VHDL for a simple 4 bit processor. Seeing it run on that FPGA board was almost holy...it was like I had penetrated the mysteries of the universe or something.
Wiring it all together must have been even more transcendent.
Yeah, usually when Woz it asked about Jobs he says straight out that Jobs occasionally screwed him over a little bit, but then waves it off with a "but that's just Steve" remark and adds that he still considers Steve a friend and he enjoys talking to him on rare occasions. He also says he is grateful to Steve because Jobs always makes sure that Woz always has a current Apple Employee badge and he likes knowing that he still has that thread connecting him to Apple.
Frankly, although Jobs has screwed Woz over a few times, I think Jobs has been far more screwed over by some of the people he worked with. Jobs has trusted many people who later turned against him - some with reason, true - but some of the betrayals of Jobs have been on a far greater scale than any of the petty stuff between Jobs and Woz.
I'll feed the troll. You're full of shit.
I went to Lenovo.com and priced out a ThinkPad T61p 15 inch widescreen with the following specs:
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz 800MHz 4MBL2)
Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate (discuss: an uncrippled Windows comparable to OS X 10.5)
15.4 WSXGA+ TFT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (256MB Open GL)
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory
160GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer, Ultrabay Slim (MBP has this standard)
PC Card Slot & Smart Card Slot
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Integrated Bluetooth PAN
9 cell Li-Ion Battery (standard on MBP)
Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
Total cost: $2,252.00
Macbook Pro specs:
Same RAM.
Same HD.
Standard display is slightly lower rez, but comes in glossy coat optionally.
iWork preinstalled. (equivalent to Office Pro suite more or less... discuss)
Better power connector (MagSafe) standard.
Wireless and bluetooth 2.0+EDR standard.
DVDR drive standard.
ADMITTEDLY- Standard graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 128MB SDRAM) has half the RAM of standard graphics card on Lenovo (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (256MB Open GL)).
Total cost: $2,303.00
Competitive advantages of each machine:
Lenovo: Slightly better standard graphics. UltraNav pointing device (if that's your style... I hate the pencil eraser). Slightly higher-rez screen. Spill-resistant keyboard. Media card reader standard. Swappable drive/battery bays. Can easily configure as a crippled machine in order to justify anti-Macbook Pro pricing policy trolling.
MBP: MagSafe power adapter. Battery indicator on battery. Backlit keyboard standard. Integrated iSight and mic for videoconferencing (!). Firewire, Firewire2, DVI ports standard. Digital audio out standard. And countless intangibles that I cannot list here- here's one- connecting to wireless networks on Windows is always annoying, on OS X never is.
Either machine runs Linux. With the Lenovo, you are stuck with the old, crusty, annoying, virus and spyware infested, administration-time-consuming Windows. With the Apple, you get the hip and fresh OS X that is a joy to use, has low maintenance, is secure, and will go out of its way to not annoy you. And is prettier. Plus, you get to run Windows at full speed... if you must.
With a 50 dollar price difference and some comparable individual features, I challenge anyone to say this isn't a wash. Finally, for the ability to run any operating system it damn well pleases you to run, I think only stubborn idiots won't pick a Macbook Pro.
So STFU and go back in your hole. I'm tired of your type.
Mac's used to represent the resistance against conformity. Now they encourage their own form of conformity with their iMacs and iPods and iPhones and iJustDon'tGiveAHoot.
This is something to think about if you own anything made by Apple after 1998.
Surely there is someone out there that remembers 68k Macs that can cheer up the Woz?
I think what the Woz really is concerned is that there are too many people who play around with all the fancy programs that computers have but no appreciation for how it all works.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
He's banging Kathy Griffin, not Kathy Lee. Give he guy a little bit of credit.
Another key metric for portables is the size and weight.
ThinkPad T61p:
14.1 x 10.0 x 1.4 inches
6.2 pounds
MacBook Pro:
14.1 x 9.6 x 1.0 inches
5.4 pounds
That's around 2/3 the thickness, a little shallower, and nearly a pound lighter. If you can't acknowledge that's worth a premium, explain the pricing of subnotebooks to me.
(No, not the "you" to whom I am replying, but "you" the reader.)
± 29 dB
Typical Jobs senseless worshipping. So it's excusable to screw over someone who thinks you're a friend because you have been screwed over by others. If Jobs decided that all current macs out right now were obsolete and won't run the next OS, would you just trash it, get a new one, and just say "Oh well, Jobs just wants it this way, there are worse people out there"
Get your mac fan boy head out of your ass.
Sounds like you are reading tea leaves. You, nor I, nor anybody else know what would have happened if the "IBM clone" platform had never achieved dominance. There's no reason that something similar (or much better) wouldn't have happened if not for IBM. What reason do you have for thinking that history would have followed this linear path you laid out for it if IBM had've successfully maintained a "closed" platform?
There are so many other possibilities. IBM's closed platform could have led to a different open platform, one that didn't end up dominated by Microsoft. We might be using architectures and software that we haven't even dreamed of.
... and then they built the supercollider.
But I still can only imagine a non-clone PC market as being similar to today's console market, eventually only coming down to two or three competitors while relying on "killer software" to make sales. If you have another prediction I would love to hear it.
Well, "clone" implies a copy of an existing product. I think it's entirely plausible that an original, open hardware platform could have evolved. Much like Open Source Software, only with hardware. It's also possible that some other proprietary system got "cloned" - and instead of IBM-PC clones, the world would be running Amiga clones or somesuch.
Thanks for your reply. I think your speculations are fine - but like you said, they were worded a bit too much like it was the only possible way. I think that's one of the things that bugs me about the near-worship of individuals in tech culture. Sure, there are lots of people who have made historical contributions, but I think in their absence that someone else would have done it instead. There are too many smart people for technology and society to be held back so easily.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Typical anonymous coward senseless hatred. Yup, it's excusable for people to forgive each other, speaking as someone who has both occasionally screwed over and been screwed over my own friends. If Jobs decided that all current macs out there right now were obsolete, he'd be an asshole. Just like Jobs is being a bit of a hypocrite calling for DRM-free music on one hand while trying to keep a stranglelock on the iPhone with the other. However, I think overall Jobs' contribution has been quite positive.
I'm hardly a "mac fan boy", and I think that you are most likely the one with your head firmly inserted up your ass, but hey, if it makes you feel good to jump to ridiculous conclusions it's most likely best that you do it as an anonymous coward.
I attended the Stanford Linear Acceleration Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s where the two Steve's introduced their Apple I computer. Imaging putting a keyboard and monitor on a computer - that takes all the fun out of doing it yourself :-)
There are still user/hobbyist computer clubs galore out there. At any given time one or two of them are of interest to me. Over the years I've attended the Mac Users Group, Amiga, NeXT, Game Designers, local SIGGRAPH chapters, and Java.
Covered comprehensively by CARS in 2001: http://www.crazyapplerumors.com/?p=341
I am in the process of starting the Seattle Homebrew Computer Club in the spirit of the original Homebrew Computer Club. I am still working on the charter. But I envision the Seattle Homebrew Computer Club to provide a forum for men and women, with a passion for computers and computer technologies, to share and discuss their interests, e.g. old computers, hacking hardware / software / routers / coke machines, networking, security, user interfaces, web technologies, and just about everything in between.
I am still looking for a meeting place. Anyone who knows of an inexpensive meeting hall in the Greater Seattle area or would like to help, please contact me at mike@seattlehomebrew.com.
Michael Yee ...)
(former computers: PDP-11, VAXstation II/GPX, DECstation Pmax, Sinclair ZX80, Atari 400, Amiga 500, Mac Plus w/ 20mb HD, NeXTstation,
It's the fucking internet who cares if they are an anonymous coward or not. It's not like you're going to confront them in the street. Would you assholes PLEASE stop with that "big man, step up and sign in" bullshit. The way it sounds though, you're just being a Jobs apologist. He's right. Make sure to reply back with your home address and phone number.
What do you mean by "get to work"? There's nothing to "get to work" there. Just download any client (use google or go to macupdate.com and search for bittorrent if you can't find one), double-click (you know, click twice with the only button on the mouse) the icon, and, uh... there's no step 3.
Actually, you don't even have to open the app. Just download it and drag it to your folder of choice. The next time you click on a .torrent file, Mac OS X will ask you whether you want to open the file your downloaded app.
if you ask me.
I mean, sure, if you ride the trains in Japan, you do tend to cross paths with about 10,000 different people in a week or two. Or, at least, if there are one such person in 10,000, you've probably ridden the same train as one of them once or twice in the last month.
But the odds against you actually working with any of them are still pretty high. Likewise the odds against having gone to the same elementary, junior high, or high school (or whatever equivalent you attended) as one of them.
Same college? Depends on where you went.
Look again. How many of the people at your companies are members of IEEE? If the number is high, why do you persist in thinking your company is _not_ unique? And how many of those members of the IEEE are actually any better than paper engineers when it comes to designing hardware and writing software without basic tools?
joudanzuki
rambling, sure, but offtopic?
Are people so jeolous of Woz that they have to pretend that what he did was meaningless?
This passage seems strangely appropriate... ... You
could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense
that whatever we were doing was `right', that we were winning ...
And that, I think, was the handle -- the sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we
didn't need that. Our energy would simply `prevail'. There was no
point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum;
we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ....
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost
see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and
rolled back."
"there was madness in any direction, at any hour
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
OK, I won't mark you flamebait (I do have mod access today).
But you're wrong on a something there, and it really does make you flamebait.
First, Apple was never close to going under. There were plenty of "Apple is dying" articles written in the late '90s, but Apple was never really dying. When most of those articles were written, Apple had a billion dollars cash in the bank, and they weren't really blowing through it.
You're right about Jobs being a control freak. I would go so far as to say Apple's success today is in spite of his stupid moves, not because of them. There's a reason the man was fired in the '80s, and he should have stayed fired, or been brought back as a marketing exec, not as CEO. Jonathan Ive already worked for Apple when Jobs came back, the iMac was already in the works. Jobs didn't design the iPod, some engineers whose names we'll never know did, because Jobs killed the credits screens that Apple used to have in every product.
And the retail stores might be good for the home user, but for business users they're a nightmare. Jobs seems to be trying really hard with the Apple Stores and the iPhone to make business use of Apple products really difficult.
And yes, I'm bitter about the iPhone. It's a really nice phone, as long as what you want to do fits into what it already does. And I know it's currently hackable, but Apple will break that again, and I don't know of a hack that will let it do bluetooth tethering, which I need from a phone. And despite Apple calling it a "smartphone", it isn't. Real smartphones will let you install and run software. The iPhone is a really pretty dumb phone. They brag about it running Mac OS X, but it doesn't matter what it's running if I can't install software.
I know I'm rambling, so I'll conclude with this: I'm saying the same thing about Apple now that I was saying in the late '80s/early '90s - I love the computers and the operating system, I hate the company.
with memories. Thats nice. But he was running a computer company, not a political movement. What did he expect? Che Guevara was a revolutionary; Woz aint. Woz got a billion bucks and gets to shag horrible weird actress types - Che got shot by the CIA-backed killers in Bolivia. I think Che got a better deal......
Well, going by THIS description of what happened, I'd say Woz doesn't *really* have a big grudge in the first place....
Fact is, ANY time someone tells me I can do job X for them and they'll pay me "such and such" an amount of money for it, I'm going to decide if it's worth my effort and time or not based on what they quote me.
Sounds to me like Woz was fine with the initial terms of their agreement (he'd receive $375 for the work), or else he would have probably told Jobs "Sorry man, it's just not worth it to me."
The fact that there was more to the agreement than Jobs explained *could* be interpreted as "Jobs is being dishonest", but it's also one of the reasons he makes a better businessman and CEO than someone like Woz. This is the way business gets done -- with a goal of maximizing your profits by leveraging your resources as craftily as possible.
And hey, Jobs had no way of knowing in advance how many chips Woz would manage to remove, right? So the figure he quoted was sort of a "worst case scenario" of what he KNEW he could pay Woz, even if Woz didn't end up reducing the chip count after trying to do it. It wasn't some number fabricated out of thin air.
> This is the way business gets done -- with a goal of maximizing your profits by leveraging your resources as craftily as possible.
Translation: get ahead by screwing the other guy.
It's also the reason I admire people like Woz more than people like Steve.
Sigh. This has nothing to do with Woz but Michael Jackson is a victim of the fact
that he had too much money after "Thriller" (he was rolling in it).
The fact that he had a weird not-normal upbringing and too many yes-men around him
telling him that everything he did was wonderful and not enough supervision by
people who might have been able to stop him from doing questionable things.
What do I know? If I got a huge payday from the record companies I'd probably
do something really boring like invest it rather than blowing it all on exciting
nights out or whatever.
WOZ should take a look at the EFIKA, a small, low-power, 1-chip computer with OpenFirmware. These are popping up in a number of surprising places (we're using them as thin clients at work). There are plenty of opportunities for hacking new applications if you look around.