Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][

jgoeres writes "June 5th is the 26th Anniversary of my first favorite fruit-flavored computer. In honor of this, the Baltimore Sun is running Part One of a two-part interview with Steve Wozniak. When The Woz speaks, I listen. Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks. Don't forget to give the man props for his mad Tetris sk1llz, too."

Woz is a good man

He gave us the original Apple, the Blue Box, and spends his free time teaching computers to children.

By the way, Apple-History.com [apple-history.com] has tons of data on every computer Apple ever built, including the Apple ][. Definitely an awesome place to get the specs.

Ah the good old days:

CPU: MOStek 6502

CPU Speed: 1 Mhz

FPU: none

Bus Speed: 1 Mhz

Data Path: 8 bit

ROM: 12 k

Re:Woz is a good man

Just for shits and giggles, I installed win 3.11 on my 1.6 Ghz K7 and figured I would just watch it fly! The speed increase? Unimpressive! I love playing with old hardware...right now I have an Amiga A2000 that is my current fascination! 7Mhz 68000 CPU with 8088 bridgeboard and AMAX cartridge with mac 128k Roms...Runs Mac 6.0.8 baby!

At any rate, it's amazing to me how stuff written in DOS just isn't that much quicker on the modern CPUs. But then, I was just playing with interfaces, and haven't yet tried any games under DOS.

I still like playing with my Apple ][ collection as well. One day I hope to code a tcp/ip stack in 6502 assembler for the ][c.

Re:Woz is a good man

Woz was blue boxing (a felony btw), but he did not invent it.

Here's the real story of the blue box [mbay.net].

Re:Woz is a good man

Ah the good old days:

CPU: MOStek 6502

CPU Speed: 1 Mhz

FPU: none

Bus Speed: 1 Mhz

Data Path: 8 bit

ROM: 12 k

Those look like the Apple][+ specs. The ][+ was my very first computer I purchased as a ten year old in 1980 with funds from mowing lawns around our neighborhood for a year. I got it with the disc drive and that funky green Apple monitor III with a 16k language card, a modem card and that Apple dot matrix printer. It's funny but I actually used that computer as my home computer up until 1989 when I purchased my IIci making the ][+ the longest lived computer in constant use in my history of computer ownership. Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant.

Thanks Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Your vision of computers transforming the lives of average citizens has indeed happened.

Re:Woz is a good man

Yeah, 1 MHz, but an efficient megahertz. It felt as fast as a 8 MHz 8088 PC.

Remember when the 8MHz Zip Chip and 10 MHz Rocket Chip came out? Man, that computer FLEW. My senior year in college, my roommate used to play Prince of Persia at top (10x) speed. Then for a further challenge he'd flip it on this weird mirror mode we found and play (and win) with the monitor upside down. Brilliant, but weird.

I threw out my souped-up Apple IIe three years ago before moving cross-country and I've had pangs of regret ever since. How are my kids going to learn computers and programming? Not on Win 2010 with C++; I'd rather give them an Apple II, a machine you can understand completely from hardware to ROM to RAM.

Eyes glazed with nostalgia, Eric

PS. Don't even get me started on The Beagle Brothers....

Apple does not represent Woz's vision

My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much
as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.

Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.

Thank you,
Simonetta

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeauty /f antasy.htm

PacMan

I'm not sure if the Apple2E counts here but...

Am I the only person who still finds himself humming the tune to pacman on the Apple even though it's been like 12 years since I last played it? :-) Ah, the memories!

Re:PacMan

Wizardy and Castle Wolfenstein brings back fond memories of using my Apple IIe...

Woz was a drop out?

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job

Sweet!! Looks like I'm on my way to fame and fortune!!

my first comp

Still have on in my room :-D

Yin - Yang.

Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner [Steve Jobs] lacks.

Some would say that it's precisely this personality contrast that allowed Apple to succeed, and jumpstart the personal computer industry with the Apple II and its descendants.

Based on published accounts, Woz likely would have been happy tinkering away on his projects to satisfy his own personal curiousity- it took Jobs' prodding to convince him to leave his comfortable job at Hewlett-Packard and commercialize his brilliance.

I'm sure most engineers would be loathe to admit that some marketing or sales sleaze provided them with the inspiration- or desperation- to create something novel or elegant, but Jobs apparently played that role in the genesis of Apple- Woz alludes to his constant questions about extending his technology in this very article.

Re:Yin - Yang.

Calling Jobs a suit isn't exactly correct. As I stated elsewhere, Woz had all the engineering talent, but Jobs was more than a suit. First off, Jobs was quite tech savvy in his own right. And his business accumen was sharp. But Jobs was a *visionary* not a suit. He was never a "buttoned down" guy. One thing Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews point out in their unauthorized biography of Bill Gates is the stark contrast that the Microsoft people noticed between IBM, which was all button-down pinstripe suits, and Apple, which was a bunch of Berkley grads with long hair and Birkenstocks.

Microsoft was *never* very innovative (they acquired everything they have achieved either through outright purchasing it or through theft), but Apple was quite the innovator. And a lot of that innovation can be directly attributed to Jobs and his 'reality distortion field' that would make people honestly believe they could do things that were impossible -- and they did.

Who's the Woz now, then?

Wozniak does seem to be the low pressure to Jobs's high pressure zone. Talking about the first prototype:

I used the smallest, cheapest chips I could in my design. Most of the chips I got for free from our lab stock at Hewlett Packard. I kept my supervisor informed about my hobby and HP had a policy of allowing engineers to have chips to build things of their own design with a supervisor's approval. It was a very good and excellent policy for those, like myself, who wanted to design things, and therefore better themselves.

Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.

Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?

Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple //c.

"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"

"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"

The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted. :-)

Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

Hey, Macintosh has a lot of good games! Like Warcraft 3 and umm.....photoshop!

Great interwiew.

This is a really interesting interview, but the interviewer doesn't seem to have his early Apple history down, suggesting that Jobs help build the first Apple, Bah!

Woz always gives an interesting interview, the (read more) links in the story get to the interesting stuff. It's too bad this is linked to something so banal as the 26th aniversary of the Apple, 'cause core /. readers would probably find it informative.

Doh

I tried giving my teacher a 26 year old apple to celebrate and she flunked me...

Comparing Woz and Steve

Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks.

Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that. It's just like saying that Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has. The fact is that people are different. Thanks to Jobs Apple is still going strong. Sorry to say but IMHO the comparsion is totally irrelevant to this story.

Re:Comparing Woz and Steve

Exactly. Apple couldn't have ever existed without both of them. Woz lacked the vision and business saavy that Jobs had, and Jobs lacked the patience and engineering skills that Woz had. But put the two together and you have a company that went from some guys garage to multibillion dollar international corporation. That's pretty impressive in and of itself, really. ;)

Re:Comparing Linus and Bill

Plus, Tove could kick Melinda Gates' ass.

Now THERE is a matchup we'd all like to see on Celebrity boxing!

*sigh* memories...

i remember helping to maintain a lab of these things in 8th grade... first machine i started to cut my teeth on programming... basic no less. the irony is that the brains [handyboard.org] in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory (the vm acts as a dispatch for commands recieved over the serial line via radio modem from a pc, where i'm not constrained to 32k of RAM)... i have to wonder to what degree the power of the machines available to young protogeeks affects their coding skills later in life... i suspect that the less harsh the initial computational conditions in a programmers life, the less inclined those programmers are to be artful and elegant in their solutions. pure speculation, but still something i wonder about...

From the article

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs

Wha..? I just dragged my ass out of bed and I'm still sleepy and I'm expected to understand a sentence like that?

I need another coffee...

Re:From the article

Wozniak...was five years older than Jobs

Has this changed????

WOZ Speech at NC State

Hear and watch the story Woz's life from the man himself. He spoke at NC State University on April 26, 2003. http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/woz.html [ncsu.edu]

The original open source machine

I just remember...

the whole machine was designed around being open. The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. The excitement of adding an 80-column card!

I was a TRS-80 guy, but played with the C64s, the Pets, the 99/4s and everything in between. We always marveled early on at the Apple's color display and selection of games (Choplifter!)

Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.

26 years later, has the company leaned? OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it. You'd think they would have learned something in all these years but they still seem to be innovative to a point, then shut everything down and try to make it as proprietary as possible.

My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you. This only adds value to your products and your company. Have you not learned anything in all these years? Don't simply private label FreeBSD as an "Apple Innovation". That will not work. Champion the marketplace and have faith that you will be rewarded for not being selfish. It really sounds stupid in today's economic age, but what has made Apple survive (aside from Microsoft needing it to shunt monopoly arguments) has been the loyalty of its users. Give them freedom and you gain even more loyalty.

Be open.

That should be Apple's new mantra.

WTF??

26 years later, has the company leaned? OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it. You'd think they would have learned something in all these years but they still seem to be innovative to a point, then shut everything down and try to make it as proprietary as possible.

How do you explain this [apple.com] then?

Re:The original open source machine

My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you. This only adds value to your products and your company. Have you not learned anything in all these years? Don't simply private label FreeBSD as an "Apple Innovation". That will not work. Champion the marketplace and have faith that you will be rewarded for not being selfish. It really sounds stupid in today's economic age, but what has made Apple survive (aside from Microsoft needing it to shunt monopoly arguments) has been the loyalty of its users. Give them freedom and you gain even more loyalty.

They don't private label FreeBSD. OS X is based on their own work which includes some of BSD 4.4 in user-space. It was called OPENSTEP... and before that NEXTSTEP. Everything about the graphical environment and programming environment belonged to NeXT and was designed there. WebObjects came from NeXT. OS X has ported newer BSD utilities from FreeBSD as opposed to the older OPENSTEP versions, but it isn't FreeBSD. It's OPENSTEP 6.3 Mach for PPC if you will.

Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.

This implies that they were the only ones writing software or manufacturing drivers and devices for their machines. No hardware company operates that way completely anymore. Apple was no more proprietary than IBM or Sun when it came to non x86 machines. A proper balance between controlling the architecture in question and completely opening it is required to maintain good profit for a single vendor as well as uniform compatibility and direction. IBM blew it by giving away the PC spec and allowing Compaq and others to copy it. Maybe if they hadn't, we might have a real x86 machine with a firmware instead of a crappy IBM kludgy BIOS that was designed to last a year tops... and is still in use today.

Someone else mentioned the early macs being proprietary with all these special things... Apple Bus?.. um Nubus is an IEEE standard... there were many 3rd party Nubus cards and only a few Apple ones. The only thing that people can really actually complain about was the fact that it was hard to open the original Mac and you weren't expected to... well the original Mac was "not designed to be expandable internally" It was a consumer box. If you wanted expandable you bought the Mac II series... these were some of the most expandable Macs on the market for several years including some of the Quadra years. Many Nubus slots... lots of space for RAM... lots of space (relatively) for hard disks. I used to run OpenBSD on a IIx with a 1GB FH 5.25" drive that was in a PC XT case with the ribbon run out the slot holes and into the Mac IIx via slot holes... that was certainly a sight.

I don't think people understand the many shades of what "proprietary" means. It's an incredible misnomer for what is actually going on in the computer industry.... True the "Steve" doesn't like clones... but what decent hardware (i.e. real computer manufacturer) vendor would? Clones cause incompatiblity, bite into your bottom line, increase support costs, and generally lower the quality of your product over time as well as its impact as an "innovative and elegant" architecture. Maybe a Sun model would have been better since the Sun clones never really took down Sun, but that's an entirely different market dynamic... Apple markets to consumers, and consumers see $ figures...irrationally so at times... heck they buy eMachines boxen (blech)

OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

I found a free emulator and I also found my favorite game of all time "Taipan." The game site has just about every game known for the apple][:

emulator:
radiovibrations.com/software/apple252.zip

game:
classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiroms.Taipan334 17.shtml

So this means that

Steve Jobs is bad and unstable?

Pirates of Sillicon Valley all over again.

Ciryon

Fruitcakes

Apple isn't the only fruit company:

The first digital computer was a berry: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) [iastate.edu]

Not to forget the The Banana Computer [toastytech.com].

Don't forget Apricot

I actually saw this [actapricot.org] in stores.

-BbT

I would like to thank my Dad..

Back in 1977 my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+ computer. Everyone else had Atari 2600's but he thought that it be better if I get something I could learn with, as it "had a lot of educational software" Yeah. I learned with it. Not school work, but how to program. I was 10 and knew Apple INT Basic and assembly language backwards and forwards. Then in 1983 I got the Modem :)

I guess they say you always remember your first. :)

Thanks Dad!

Re:I would like to thank my Dad..

in 1977 my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+ computer

Does this mean that your dad became a gay porn star to afford the Apple ][? (j/k)

Re:Same here!

I was fortunate to be the child of well off parents (until the mid 80's).

At which point you switched parents right?

saviors and demons

Woz brought us the first personally affordable hardware and helped to break the consolidation of power in the mainframe.

Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.

They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.

Every major innovation has its saviors and its demons. Where do you want to go today?

Mad Tetris skillz.

My dad used to play a lot of Microsoft's Tetris. So I had to play too just to keep my initials on the top spot. I once had a really good game going. I was in the zone. I was playing comfortably on the fastest level. I had way over 32k points.

And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals... I eventually took it as a quest to get the top score as close to 32767 as possible. IIRC I got it within 28 points. My dad never beat that score.

This doesn't have anything to do with Wozniak or Apple. But hey, they mentioned Tetris.

26 years?

Is it just me, or is /. celebrating n years of everything recently? Conventionally years that are a multiple of 10 are celebrated, as perhaps are multiples of 5. This being a geek site, powers of 2 could perhaps be celebrated as well (which might be better, since they happen less frequently as the event becomes older). celebrating 26 years of something just seems strange though, unless every day is going to have a 'look at all of the things that happened on this day in history' article.

Re:26 years?

I'm sure they were thinking of it being a sum of tens (30) minus a power of 2 (4) aka 26. That's far more geeky.

Matt Fahrenbacher

Sweet memories and random comments

Ahhhh, the random memories. I remember playing on the IIe. One assignment we had was to generate a quiz, so I wrote a program to ask who all the US Presidents were. I was already a geek in 6th grade. Three years later we still had IIe computers (different school...different state actually). We had to "draw" something, so my monochrome monitor ended up with a top view of an F-15.

Then the IIc came out and I thought that was the bomb.

Back to Woz...he's the man. Jobs is the man. Together, they rock. Wox has that childlike curiousity that keeps him working on things and coming up with new ideas and inventions. Unfortunately it's not always the "best idea" that gets there. Luckily Jobs was his buddy and took the business reigns.

And kudos to Woz for teaching, being a philanthropist, and giving his time to the people. In a time when so many executives just don't give a flyin' F about the "little people" and would rather build a nice big golden parachute for themselves, or worse yet, just suck the money from the company and the people and start half a dozen scandals, The Woz is truly a wonder to behold.

You young whippersnappers

...with your fancy-schmancy Apple ][ computers with 4KB of RAM...

Why, when I was your age, I ran a BBS on an abacus hooked up to two tin cans and a piece of string! And we liked it that way!

This guy made me a programmer!

Me first computer was an Apple ][
My favorite game was Breakout.

Reading now that Wozniak had written that himself, and that some of the features of the Apple ][ were invented specifically for that game is just... well... soooo c00l!!!

But even better: that Breakout implementation has a bug that AFAIR did not allow the paddle (or the ball??) to move to the very top position (Yes, the game ws played left-to-right), causing situations were you where either cought in an endless loop or would loose your ball. Anybody remember that one?

Being rather anoyed with that bug, I went ahead and fixed it. That was revelation! You could just walk right into a program and change it! how cool!
Now, some 15 jears later, i am a pretty decent programmer and just finishing my informatics dipoma... thanks, steve, for that sloppy coding!

P.S.: Breackout ist still my favorite arcade-type game.

(man, i need to change that sig. it's been there forever)

Reminiscing....

The first computer I used when I was in my 3rd year of school. What a sweet computer. USed to play some garfield game and a crossword maker. Sweet as.

Also

I am 22. I used the apple 2 in the 3rd year of school. I was 8. That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.

Re:Also

I am 22 - I was 8 = That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.

I think your school system is more screwed than you know...

get one now on ebay

The Apple ][ was my first computer and I still have it. It's kind of sad to see them on ebay now for a lousy $26 bucks [ebay.com].

The Woz

If you EVER get a chance to hear Woz speak, GO! He has some hilarious stories.

For example, when he was in college, he designed and built a small device that would cause interference on a TV. Woz loves pranks, so he would take his little device to frat houses when the guys were watching the tube. He would sit in back & make the interference fade in & out. Meanwhile, some poor guy would try to adjust the antennae while everyone was yelling at him to move it here or there. In the end, Woz would finally stop the interference when the guy was in some bizarre contorted position.

He told one story after another. It was great!

"Lieutenant Dan sent me a letter,

got us invested in some fruit company. He said we didn't have to worry about money no more, and that's good! One less thing."

It still gives me shivers to think that these guys, working in a garage, started something big that went on to change the whole world.

Garage trip time

I've still got my original ][ out there somewhere. Not a +, just a ][... we didn't need no fancy floating point math back in my day. Well okay, I got an Applesoft card and a 64K memory card for it. (God, I can't believe I paid more for that memory card then I did for this whole computer I've got right here)

Anyway, I fired it up a couple of years ago... it still beeps, the floppy drives still spin.. maybe I'll go bring it in the house and check it out.

Isn't it ironic ?

The most ironic thing about my years on the Apple ][ is that now I have more apple software than I had when I owned one. And it doesn't even fill half a cd :) I still start up the emulator once in a while and play some of the old classic games from my mis-spent youth.

Congratulations on 26 years, 1 day....

I'm so excited to announce that it's been exactly 26 years and 1 day TODAY! Can you believe it?

Hey, I loved the Apple ][ as much as anyone, but 26 years just isn't an important anniversary. Why are we talking about this? It's as if we forgot to celebrate this last year and we need to make up for it....

I wasn't one of the cool kids, but

I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.

In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing

hlin 0,30 at 3

It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.

Thank you, wedge-shaped beige computer.

Old Skool

Ah...the good ol' days...making your name appear incessantly line after line using BASIC built into the OS (when using GOTO was acceptable, not shunned upon)...showing off to your friends by typing "CATALOG" and bringing up the file directory...and who can forget, kicking all your friends' asses in Lemonade Stand back in grade school.

Yeah, all we need now is to have the Super Mario Bros. Super Show come back onto the air.

Audio Tape Deck Storage

My first program was written on the Apple ][ in the summer before my senior year in high school. Too bad I have no evidence of it. I couldn't afford the $500 floppy drive and the damn audio tape deck was unreliable. You could hear the screeching on the tape but you couldn't tell if it saved correctly. It sure did make you program more efficiently because you didn't want to write a lot and lose it when you turned off the power. Man, those were the days.

Apple ][ as Popular as WordStar

In college, I worked part time in the computer lab supporting Macs and Apple ][s. In those days no one used the PC lab for writing papers because WordStar sucked in comparison to MacWrite. No one used the Apple ][s either but I one day taught a girl to use the Apple ][ to write a paper since there was a waiting list for the Macs. She loved not having to wait, so I sold her the one sitting in my closet for the previous 4 years. I had to hold her check ($250 USD) for about 6 months before she had enough money for it clear but what perfect timing. I got rid of that thing as the Mac Plus was becoming popular.

If only I can do this timing thing with the stock market...

still remember the Apple I introduction

I remember when the two Steves would bring their Apple prototypes to the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium to demonstrate them. At a time when hackers where programming blinking light patterns on PDPs and Altair consoles, the two Steves figured out how to hook up a monitor and keyboard (disks came much later). Some of this is captured in the Revenge of the Nerds, part I.

Woz likes his Segway

Woz also has a good reason [woz.org] to get a Segway.

Great, happy birthday to another obsolete tech.

Seems like there is some anouncement on the /. homepage about the birthday of some technology. Do we really need this? All of this birthday cake and ice cream is really putting on the pounds.

Favorite games from the IIE era...

Some of my favorite games from the IIE: Federation Karateka F15 Strike Eagle (with the Mach III joystick, oh yeah!) Kung Fu Master Super Boulderdash (I wish I could get a port of this working now, it's a great puzzle/manual dexterity game) I also recall attempting to write a role playing type game in Basic in about 5th grade taking place in the world of Dune. It took me two weeks just to program the first couple of graphics and it never went very far... oh well.

But enough about you...

Did anyone else (who bothered to RTFA) get the feeling that the interviewer was more interested in Steve Jobs than he was about Woz?

Kinda like a guy chatting up a girl only in order to find out about her roommate...

Guy: So, what's your major?
Girl: Philosophy.
Guy: That's cool... So, is your roommate seeing anyone?

Long Live The Apple ][

I started programming the Apple ][ (][+'s and ][e's I believe?) when I was very very young going to a computer camp. I'll never forget it! We started with a LOGO turtle and I guess I haven't looked back since. Part of my initial fascination came from the simple yet at the time amazing experience of pressing a button on a keyboard and watching the letter matching that button pop up in a fuzzy green hue on the monitor. Amazing! My first programs were such groundbreaking achievements as Turtle Draws A Square, or Turtle Draws a Circle (What's the syntax? REPEAT 360 [FORWARD 1 RT 1] something like that???). It really doesn't seem that long ago, and now it all seems so primitive. At the time I was too young to realize the implications of what I was doing, to me it was just a way to partly recreate the awesome experience I had playing video games in the arcade. I loved for the Oregon Trail. Once my little pioneer got arrested somehow and I had to appear at a trial. I think I answered "NO" to "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and it was GAME OVER> Do any of you remember this, or is it just a bizarre artifact of my imagination? Finally, I remember a hot rumor around this time that someone had written a unicorn-drawing program in LOGO and it took an hour to run but drew a fantastic piture of a unicorn. Does ANYONE know what I am talking about? Is this a true story? Anyway, it's great to look back and think about what was, at least it makes us appreciate what we have now more -- even if what we have now crashes 10 times as often as the "primitive" stuff we had back then! Thank you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and may your accomplishments be fondly remembered always.

Somebody's got to say it

Every OS Sucks [mp3s.com]!

"everything since AppleDOS is just a bunch of crap"

My favorite feature was the assembly monitor

I had a ][+ and I still have my IIGS in a box somewhere. The best feature of all time was the ability to go into the assembly monitor, write code, disassemble, review, modify, patch and tweak the machine on the fly. Beyond any doubt, my ability to code everything from device drivers to applications began there.

I also learned a lot about writing software quickly without using either an assembler or a compiler. Save often though. The //e had a built in assembler, but I only had a ][+ so I wrote my own. Then, using that assembler, I wrote a more powerful one and bootstrapped my way up. It took an entire summer. That was a good summer.

The IIGS was simply awesome. By the time I put it away, it had a video overlay card, 15MHz processor, 500MB SCSI external hard drive, and a full 8MB of RAM. I had gone through two power supplies and three motherboards over 10 years. Other than the monitor, it probably still works today. Wonder if I could get a proper pin out on the monitor and hook it up.

Ahhh... I don't get nostalgic very often, but damn , that was good stuff. With the exception of Linux, everything after the IIGS has been a real bore. I even considered leaving computer work altogether; there was nothing left to explore. As they say at ubergeek [ubergeek.tv], I'm a "super villian" now so my computer life has become much more exciting.

Fortunately for me, my wife appreciates my enthusiasm for computers. But then, that's why I married her.

-Hope

26 Years of the][ typo

26 years of that "][" typo.

I'll never forgive apple

for calling the Apples IIc portable.

26th Birthday? Who cares???

Who the fuck cares about the 26th birthday of a transistor board?

still got em

I have 3 Apple IIc laying around my house. I bought the lot for a dollar (including hardware and a Dec Mate and software) for some Elementry school spring cleaning sale. I spent a whole 10 bucks and got a truck load of excellent old stuff. Anyone want some satiite receivers. Apple Talk is fun.

Wake Up Neo.
Knock, Knock.
Follow the White Rabbit.

My Apple Powerbook vs. the Apple II vs. the Mac

The first computer I ever saw, back in 1979 in High School, was an Apple II (or I, I can't remember) I wasn't very much of a talented geek and even though I had an HP41 a couple of years later, I never managed to learn to programme for the thing (perhaps using RPN was a feat in itself ;) ). My first working programmes at university in 1981 were written in Pascal at first on punch cards for an IBM 370, then on an Apple II. The years after that we were using IBM PC's.

I was never really interested in the Mac until I got my first PC job in 1989 selling and supporting Windows 2.11, Corel Draw 1 and some amazingly expensive AT&T Truevision Vista and Targa graphics boards and related software (Topaz, Rio). The company I was working for was a major Mac supplier and by chance in 1990, I got chance to work in Prepress on Macs, Using Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator.

That experience, one of being able to use a computer without having to mess around with dip-switches or address or mindless shit like extended memory drivers, or even having to configure much in any way, was what made me the fan of Macs that I am today.

I own and use an old Lombard Powerbook with OS8.6 and a Titanium Powerbook with Mac OSX. My job is supporting 20 Windows users at a company and the levels of frustration I have to go through to find out how to solve some PC/Windows problem ensure that I remain firmly in the Mac (and Linux) camp at home.

article text

A conversation with Steve Wozniak
In an exclusive two-part interview, Apple Computer's co-founder discusses Steve Jobs and the company's roots
By David Zeiler: The Mac Experience

The Mac Experience
Originally published Jun 5, 2003

The Mac Experience

First of two parts

Though out of the spotlight since leaving Apple Computer Inc. in 1985, Steve Wozniak remains revered for his integral role in helping Steve Jobs establish the company in 1976. He is credited with single-handedly designing the Apple I and Apple II machines.

A native of San Jose, Calif., Wozniak was introduced to Jobs in the mid-1970s by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez.

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs, who was in high school. He later received his degree from Berkeley.

Since leaving Apple, Wozniak has dabbled in several unsuccessful technological ventures, such as a wireless universal TV remote control company called CL-9, while devoting much of his time to educational causes.

In January 2002, Wozniak announced the formation of a startup company, Wheels of Zeus, to design and build "new consumer electronics wireless products to help everyday people track everyday things." The company has yet to announce any products.

Wozniak, 52, was in Baltimore last week for the silver anniversary celebration of the Maryland Apple Corps. He received a standing ovation before beginning his remarks.

In an interview, Wozniak discussed Jobs, the first Apple and the 1999 cable television movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley," which depicted the showdown between his colleague and Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates.

The Mac Experience will feature more excerpts next week.

How did you and Steve Jobs meet?

I think it was my second year of college. I finally got some parts from a company that I had worked for, so I could build a computer of my own design. It was the first computer that I had ever built in my life. It was a minimal one. It couldn't do much, but it had switches and lights and it ran.

We built it down in Bill Fernandez's garage. He lived down the street, a few streets down. And Bill introduced me to Steve. That's my recollection.

Steve thinks we met much earlier, but I don't think so. Bill said: "There's this guy you've got to meet, because he likes electronics and he pulls pranks. You two have so much in common." And we did.

What was Jobs like? Was he like how he was portrayed in "Pirates of Silicon Valley"?

He was very much like he was portrayed there. He was sort of a free-floating hippie who could go a lot of different ways. He ate a lot of nuts -- and walked around barefoot or in sandals. He could get a job at Atari as a technician-engineer who could take designs and finish them. And then he'd go out for a few months and work on spreads in Oregon, or go over to India, bathe in the Ganges River. Then he'd come back.

I was very much the opposite -- just real stable. A settled, middle- type person, feet on the ground, have a normal life and a family and a home.

Has he changed much over the years?

No. Those values are very much unchanged. But his head was always looking toward business. Always. Even in those days. The questions he would ask: "With this design, could you ever put a disk drive on it?" "Could you ever have multiple users on it, sharing it?"

It's funny that, way back in time, these little questions he was asking, they're things that he keeps making sure Apple does to this day.

What is your relationship now with Apple?

I get a small salary. I want to be an Apple employee forever, if I can. I don't know what the salary is, but it's real small. Whenever I'm in the press, it sorta represents Apple. And I have occasional phone calls to Steve Jobs; sometimes, we'll get together for lunch. He might ask me a few questions about what do I think about that, how are we doing here. I let him know

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

Not really. The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer ever. Commodore died because they produced a better product (the Amiga) but didn't market it well. It's unfortunate, but marketing gives an edge of an inferior product over one that is superior. I'm not referring so much to the Apple ][ so much as to the early Macintosh and the IBM PCs of the time. IBM has always been successful because of their marketing, even before PCs. They won out in the 1960s for the same reason. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics and it cost less than the Apple ][. That was the height of Commodore. You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

Actually I rather thought that commodore's failure was an attempt to produce PC clones in a market already flooded with cheeper asian varities. I guess this is subject to some debate.

Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore. I'd have to pull out an amiga 1000 case, inside the cover are the signatures of all the people who worked on the project. a little history is on this site [http://commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_po rtcommodore.htm] I personly prefer to remember the Amgia as being a spliter project by rebels who wanted to defy the industry and actually come out with something inovative.

I *agree* though on the lack of marketing, with the exception of the guru meditation crashes my local cable provider sometimes shows. {newtek video toaster no doubt)

Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of. I guess I was somewhat prejusticed tward the Atari. ICD's MIO board with SCSI, 15meg HD, and Sparta dos was where it was at. Ok fine, the commodore had better 80column support and everything supported 64k unlike, superior game library. You just had to put up with disk drives from hell. I've been recently doing a compair and contrast with emulation, and ya know I still hate the "load "$",8" followed by "list". Both atari and apples at the very least offered boot disk support.

The Apple though, another system i'm not very much a fan of, is worthy of note because of it's early entry in the market place. Freaky graphics, tape drive controler for the floppy, but this was one of the first systems you saw in schools, that and TI-99/4a but no one could afford the software fore. But it had a massive following in education applications that I really remember, that whole comes equiped with a floppy drive and authors who permited open license for education really helped out.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

I've heard murmurs of Acorn. Why not have a slashdot story on that. It'd be interesting at least.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

That's fair. Most Mac people have the same sentiment about Wintel boxes these days.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

Mainly because I think its inferiorness clogged up the market for the Commodore 64.

Yes -- you're right. Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior. The glacial speed of the C64's disk drive was a design feature. It let you do Zen or something while things were loading.

In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][. But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

It could speak English with the right software!!
I assume you are talking about SAM (Software Automated Mouth). There was an Apple ][ version as well, but I agree that the C64 version sounded better.

It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.

Well, the graphics literally were a hack. Woz basically invented color computer graphics. I rather liked them though. As for ports, the Apple ][ actually had slots, just like a modern PC -- it was much more expandable than the C64.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

Well, even the first Acorn BBC computer was quicker

And cost around a fifth of the price. An Apple II sold for about a grand, whereas my BBC model A cost me £200.

I'd rather have had the Apple though.

Re:I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

yep and I can boot up my IBM PC-XT and run structural analysis, runoff analysis, soils testing apps, wordperfect 5.1, print it all to a modern HP Deskjet or an older parallel plotter, and then send an internet email....

not to mention run the shit out of starfleet II.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

"Inferiorness?" I think the word you want is "inferiority."

Re:APPEL IS TEH SUX!! USE LUNIX

Yes, use Lunix! It's available for the C64 and C128, and it is being ported to the Apple II!

Re:mac problem

1) If you want an intelligent reply, you need to give better statistics on your (ancient) machines.

2) You shouldn't judge modern systems by ones that are nearly 10 years old.

3) If you want to debate, log in. I won't go back and forth with an anonymous coward.

Re:The Difference was (from an inside source)

Uhhh... That's *brown* acid...