Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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.
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."
...If he didn't totally trash it
The homebrew computer club was pretty close to the current Open Hardware movement.
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.
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.
Wonder if he has ever considered recreating it? Something akin to a modern Menlo Park, but with Woz at its head instead of a tyrant like Edison. A place where meetings actually bring results. A place where you can acquire new knowledge and skills while helping others learn as well. Search out and bring together freethinkers and solid engineers. This could be taken lots of directions and many of them at once. He has the money and sounds like he has the desire, plus he has the reputation to acquire more funding. Such a place could help move his interests in space along too. Even if he didn't want the day to day active management, he could assign that to others while keeping himself in overriding control while moving about and being active in discussions. Of course that still might change the feel for him if people looked at him as the boss and not just one of the creative engineers.
Shutup, Steve.
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 - }
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.
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.
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.
...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
I have no great love of Jobs, but let's be serious. If Woz was the boss of Apple, the company wouldn't exist any more.
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
Dozens of people created the PC as we know it.
Steve Wozniac stood on Chuck Peddle's shoulders. The 6502 was cheap enough to make a cheap enough PC.
Although I think the GP was a little critical, I can see where someone might get annoyed enough to post like that. The PC arrived through a large complex evolution of many peoples innovations, and I don't even think Steve, engineering wise, was the most important one of that bunch.
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
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!
Its the same hardware whether you run mac, linux or windows. The same machines.
And those same machines are priced very nearly the same.
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.
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'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.
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