Listen To Woz, And Perhaps Type Madly

Shawn King of The Mac Show Live talked a few days ago with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only (downloadable or streaming), as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now. (The interview starts about 55 minutes into the show, and lasts for nearly an hour.) What's this got to do with typing madly? Well, since Shawn's program is all-audio (no pictures, and only the barest explanitory text), it's a lot less useful to those on text-only or just-plain-slow links than it could be. Read on below for your chance to change that with just a few minutes of your time. Update: 10/20 20:43 GMT by T : Thanks to everyone who's volunteered to transcribe, and to the several alternates who are already in line! No need for more voluneers right now :)

Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together. Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it. No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts. I'll update this story if and when the transcription is complete. (And if anyone can suggest a good Quicktime audio --> .ogg converter, Shawn and I would both appreciate it.)

Speech to text recognition

[Spootnik]

"Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together."

Which bring the question. What are the alternatives for a voice recognition application that sould take a sound sample and convert it to text? Sort of like OCR (Optical Character Recognition) softwares does with a scanned image?

Re:This guy has vision

[onetrueking]

I find it annoying that you think that just because a person is "artsy" that he doesn't know which computer is best for him/her. The reason Apple sells computers to these folks, (the people who write your books and movies, and design your graphics and webpages) is because they know that there time is better spent being creative and not dealing with upgrades and diagnostics and all the things Windows and Linux users have to deal with. Just because people are "artsy" doesn't mean that they're stupid.

Woz is a true 'hacker' in every sense of the word

[Anton Anatopopov]

The fact that he was shafted by Jobs, and doesn't lead a multi-millionaire lifestyle is testament to this. He did it for the love.

He is almost the exact opposite of William Gates III. He is the Anti-Gates! :-)

Its good to see he's still around.

Re:Steve Wozniak's Starting Capital

[_damnit_]

who, in turn, owe a debt to a quirky academic out east for the invention of the "mouse".

The mouse and hypertext was invented by the Englebart team at SRI in Menlo Park, CA (on Ravenswood near a really good bar, coffee shop and book store).

The original 1968 presentation which includes the world's introduction to hypertext and windowing is available on video at: http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html [stanford.edu]. So, it might be safe to say Xerox owes their GUI to someone SRI who owes Turing who owes Grunt for discovering fire.

Re:This guy has vision

[Apreche]

The guy never said that only artsy people buy macs. Nor did he say that that artsy people don't know about computers. You are putting words in his mouth. The truth is that Macintosh comptuers and their operating system are extremely pretty. The one thing that macs do better than every other computer is 2d graphics and audio/video editing. Those are the things that artsy beatnik type people do with their computers. They buy macs not because they are stupid but because they know that this computer excels at the applications they use the most.
And the fact of the matter is that the mac is only still alive because it is really good at 2d graphics and audio/video editing. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be around.

Re:Need more Mice Buttons

[gig]

If you don't like the Apple optical mouse, you can sell it for $40 on eBay, which is more than you paid for it with your system.

When you cross platforms, you realize that there are a lot of inherant assumptions in each platform. If you use your right mouse button all day long, it's hard to imagine a system where it's not needed. The Mac has a pervasive, context-sensitive, "infinitely-deep" menu bar (you can't overshoot it since it's at the edge of the display). It's easy to slam your cursor up there and hit any particular menu in no time at all. If the menu bar were smaller, and sitting between a row of buttons and a window title bar, then there would be more utility in context menus. It's just a different approach. Windows users go "right-click / New Folder" and Mac users go "File > New Folder". The Mac user will be faster, I guarantee it, if they have used a Mac for more than a week. And if you want to work the Windows way, that is available too. Plug the same USB mouse from your Windows machine into a Mac and it works just fine, with scroller and multiple buttons and context menus.

I love the Apple mouse I got with my PowerMac G4, and I just bought an identical mouse for $59 to use with my PowerBook G4. They are great mouses. Good to the hands, easy to use, easy to travel with because there are no pieces to fall off (the only moving part is an internal hinge).

> especially with high prices that Apple is
> already charging them

Check out today's Mac prices ... they are not high. You just have to realize that Apple doesn't have any low-end machines. They all have 802.11 antennaes and slots (the high-end PowerBook has the $99 card included, too), they all have FireWire, they all have Mac OS X (equivalent to Windows XP Pro, not Home), they all have iMovie and iTunes software (best-of-breed software, not LE stuff), they all have TV out (except the PowerMac), they all have the best-quality displays. They all have Software Update, which is system software that checks once a day/week/user's-choice with Apple and updates everything that came with the box automatically, just asking the user for permission and an administrative password, including drivers, security updates, bundled apps. There are 10 other features like that, too, like CD/DVD burning in the Finder (4.5GB to a $6 DVD-R in 20 minutes in the background), or DiskCopy, which images any kind of disc to a file you can mount as if it were still a disk, so you can take game CD's with you on the road as a 300MB compressed file on your monster hard disk ($99 for a Windows software that does this). When you are looking to get all that stuff included and have a complete system that can do a lot of things out of the box, you will pay less in the end and do more with a Mac. If you are looking for a bare-bones system to run Linux, then yes, Macs look expensive. Saying that "Macs are expensive", though ... it doesn't take into account "value" as opposed to just "sticker price".

That's why Apple is opening stores where all the display products are plugged-in, working, even with third-party software installed and ready to use, so you can try it out before buying ... they want people to come in and see what you get for your money, to see that the PowerPC chips are very high performance, even though they are small, low-power, and low-clock-speed. It's a pleasure to buy and work with their stuff.