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Woz Expounds On His Hacking Shenanigans and Online Mischief
coondoggie writes "In his keynote address at a security conference today, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak admitted he has enjoyed many adventures in hacking often for the sake of pranks on friends and family, especially back in his college days and the early years of working on computers and the Internet. 'I like to play jokes,' said the Wozniak jovially as he addressed his audience of thousands of security professionals attending the ASIS Conference in Chicago. The famed inventor at Apple admitted he also had some fun with light-hearted forays into hacking computer and telecommunications networks several decades ago back in his college years and while learning about electronics and computers."
Kid's will be kids. Case dismissed!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I think that Woz needed the early marketing genius of Jobs to shine and make a real difference in society with the Apple 2; and it is equally true that Jobs would not have been able to rise to fame back then without the technical genius of Wozniak. Their talents complemented each other very well, and at the right time. Imagine if Woz would have had an early job offer at say HP. He might have become a respected engineer over there, but unlikely with the same recognition today. We wouldn't have heard of Jobs so early on, yet the man had a such a good consumer insight that it is not inconceivable that he would have become notable in other ways.
1) He did some phreaking (phone hacking, back when audible frequencies were used to control the networks).
2) He made a TV jammer and then had friends go try out elaborate steps to "fix" the issue.
3) He snuck into computing facilities and tested out his punch card programs in the middle of the night when they weren't in use.
That's about it from the article. No particularly scintillating details even. Just stuff most of us have already heard.
I wouldn't admit to hacking anything in today's USA.
The Obama administration doesn't like people to be smarter than them.
Life in prison is too god for him. Oh, wait, in those times prosecutors had not heard of the Internet yet and had not started their immoral tactics of piling charges upon charges on people like Woz. I wonder how many great talents we have already lost because they do not dare to learn these things today or are sitting in prison.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Woz was working at HP (in their calculator division) while he was building the Apple I. In fact, HP had a policy that allowed people to take parts home for experimentation (and Woz used it to build the Apple I). The only catch is that if you build anything, you must show it to HP to give them right of first refusal to build and commercialize the product.
In fact, during this time, Woz applied to transfer to HP's computer division, and was rejected, multiple times.
Eventually he built the Apple I, and he showed it to HP management. They liked it, HOWEVER, they rejected the idea that it can connect to an ordinary TV. They felt that doing so violated the HP way - what if the customer has a piss-poor TV? They'll blame HP for making a crap product! No, your device must use an HP display.
So in the end, Woz got his release on the Apple I, HP only made workstations (and nothing for the home computer market). When Jobs went about selling the Apple I, and got an order for 1000 of them, Woz quit HP and they entered into building the Apple I full time.
There was insufficient capital, so Woz sold his HP calculator to pay for the PCBs, and they could only build about 10 or so at a time - they'd build 10 of them, then they'd pay the suppliers for the next batch (whom refused to release the parts until they were prepaid - so the parts sat in a secured locker at the factory). Jobs would take the 10 units and deliver them and take partial payment.
Woz and Jobs complimented each other. It was Jobs' idea to sell the Apple I (Woz was planning on just selling boards and schematics). That was innovation #1, because it meant a computer no longer was the exclusive territory of the big companies nor hardcore hackers - people could *buy* one prebuilt (and many stores threw in the requisite additional parts - power supply, keyboard, case). Until then, even the Altairs were shipped as a kit you had to put together, so limited to the hobbyist market. Of course, even the hobbyist market was big enough to create Microsoft and have Gates port his BASIC to it. Of course, it's also when Gates wrote his famous piracy letter.
Innovation #2 came with the Apple II - in which Jobs packaged it all up in a plastic case so now any mom and dad with no engineering skills can go to the store and buy it completely assembled and for the time, stylish looking.
Somewhere I read an interview of Jobs where he expanded on how he and Woz would cause interference on the dorm TV from a distance. At first they just wanted to get others to leave so that they could watch their favorite show. But then they went further.
When students stood up to adjust the antenna, they'd make the set suddenly work, but go snowy if the student walked toward the set. Thus, the student would have to stand in one spot throughout the show to "get a good signal". They "fine tuned" the people to control where and how they stood, practically making them dance, and training them like dogs.
Sounds like great fun. I remember those days of finicky TV signals, though, and can see how such a trick could grow.
Table-ized A.I.
This is no surprise, he made blue boxes.
Except in the article he seems to imply that he didn't do it for personal gain:
He went out and learned more about the exact frequencies and tried them out on the telephone system. “I wanted to explore the network,” he said. It was all a form of “White Hat hacking” he says he did but never for purposes of stealing or avoiding paying bills.
But Jobs convinced him to start selling the boxes, and they made about $6,000.
That's not exactly "White Hat hacking" at that point...
Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
There certainly are some other gems in terms of just raw elegance in the design that Woz came up with that take somebody digging around the components to fully appreciate. It may seem quirky in terms of somebody developing an emulator with 21st Century technology, but it was utter brilliance at the time. Another chip reducing approach was to use the NTSC frame synch clock used for the display to also trigger the RAM data refresh cycle (thus refreshing the RAM at 60 Hz). Other computers of the era needed separate clock circuity. I could go on, but there were a whole bunch of similar genuine innovations.