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Apple Businesses

Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][ 379

Posted by CowboyNeal from the up-and-down-arrows-are-unnecessary dept.
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."
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Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][ More

Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][

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  • Woz is a good man (Score:5, Informative)

    by CptChipJew ( 301983 ) * <{michaelmiller} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday June 06, 2003 @05:59AM (#6130458) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by CausticWindow ( 632215 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:39AM (#6130559)

      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:30AM (#6131176) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by EricHsu ( 578881 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:41AM (#6131229)
      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....

      • Re:Woz is a good man (Score:3, Insightful)

        by usotsuki ( 530037 )
        Oh yeah, Beagle Bros. *g* Lots of stuff my foster brother pirated off 'em, and I pirated off him :)

        The ROM isn't that hard to grok anyway. The ][+ has 12K of ROM - 2K monitor and 10K M$ (!) BASIC. I'm trying to replace the monitor with some C code, which is called by special illegal opcodes stuffed into the monitor ROM, and allow the use of the emulator with only a 10K chunk of code from SimSystem IIe's free distro (again, M$ BASIC).

        -uso.

    • Apple does not represent Woz's vision (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Simonetta ( 207550 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:40AM (#6131728)
      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 (Score:3, Funny)

    by traskjd ( 580657 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:03AM (#6130472) Homepage
    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!

  • Woz was a drop out? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ProfessionalCookie ( 673314 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:05AM (#6130478) Journal
    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!!
  • Still have on in my room :-D
    • I've got Zork II running in the vacant desk at my office, though it's not my original computer. (This is an Enhanced //e from the neighbors moving-day trash)
      I was one of those Franklin scum, since my folks didn't know the shame it would bring on my head.

      --

  • Yin - Yang. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by marcsiry ( 38594 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:12AM (#6130493) Homepage
    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. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jericho4.0 ( 565125 )
      The juxtaposition of Woz and Jobs embigend the synergy that was Apple.

      Seriously, you are so right. The perfect geek and the perfect suit.

      • Re:Yin - Yang. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Surak ( 18578 ) * <surakNO@SPAMmailblocks.com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:48AM (#6130731) Homepage Journal
        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.

    • 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

      I don't think so. At best, marketing is a necessary evil, that can provide a means to do more fun stuff...

      Marketing seems to be what makes it possible to play full-time, without having to go flip burgers 40-hours/week. Marketing also helps provide for much better toys to play with!

      However, I don't mean to make it sound tolerable. M

    • Who's the Woz now, then? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @08:11AM (#6130797)
      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?

  • 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...

  • Great interwiew. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:12AM (#6130496)
    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 (Score:2, Funny)

    by exspecto ( 513607 )
    I tried giving my teacher a 26 year old apple to celebrate and she flunked me...

  • Comparing Woz and Steve (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:29AM (#6130529)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Surak ( 18578 ) * <surakNO@SPAMmailblocks.com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:35AM (#6130702) Homepage Journal
      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. ;)

    • Comparing Linus and Bill (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tony ( 765 )
      Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that.

      It's a valid and important comparison. The poster is stating that they choose to admire technical talent and scrupulous behaviour, and not ruthless business acumen.

      In this world, there is a surplus of ruthless, greedy, and selfish behaviour. That, we've got coming out of our collective ass. Note how we measure success.

      Not enough people even know who Wozniak *is*, let alone what he stands represents to

  • *sigh* memories... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blackcoot ( 124938 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:32AM (#6130538)
    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...

    • Tradeoffs (Score:2, Insightful)

      by grape jelly ( 193168 )
      Tradeoffs have always been made regarding efficiency, among the most important in recent years being the necessity for affordably maintainable code, combined with the decreasing importance of having super efficient code. IMO, this discourages most who are currently learning how to program from mastering the art of designing and analyzing the runtime of code. I personally had many many arguments with someone I worked with who kept insisting that runtime didn't matter anymore on current machines. In the meant
  • 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...

  • WOZ Speech at NC State (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smelroy ( 40796 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @06:54AM (#6130595) Homepage
    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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:00AM (#6130608)
    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?? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Draoi ( 99421 ) <draiocht&mac,com> on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:23AM (#6130673)
      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?

    • "The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. "

      Which you can still do today. First thing I did when I got my PowerMac home was open it and look at what was inside.

      The hardware is still based on standards - standard SCSI & EIDE hard drives and CDROM drives; standard interfaces; standard PCI slots; AGP graphics slots; standard USB & FireWire connectors.

      "OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "
      • "The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. "

        Which you can still do today. First thing I did when I got my PowerMac home was open it and look at what was inside.

        The hardware is still based on standards - standard SCSI & EIDE hard drives and CDROM drives; standard interfaces; standard PCI slots; AGP graphics slots; standard USB & FireWire connectors.

        Today, yes you can do that. But we old timers (heh)
        • Also, on the 'non-proprietary stuff', Macs used to be virtually 100% proprietary -- proprietary networking (AppleTalk), proprietary slots (Apple Bus), proprietary keyboard and mouse (ADB), even Apple's implementation of SCSI was proprietary at one time.

      • Re:The original open source machine (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You couldn't open up a Macintosh though. A single off-beige lump of plastic that required a special tool to get into, and had no room for people to tinker. The ROMS were closed and development tools cost. This was an extremly sharp contrast to the Apple ][

        You can open up your Mac today because as the original poster pointed out, Apple has learnt that Open is better than Closed. It was all closed for a long time in the late 80's and early 90's though.
    • It's no accident that the Apple ][ led the market in the early 80's precisely due to its open nature. Once they introduced the relatively closed Mac in '84, their market-share steadily dwindled over the next 20ish years.
    • 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.
      Worked so well for IBM, didn't it. [/sarcasm]

      • Worked so well for IBM, didn't it. [/sarcasm]

        Yeah, actually, it did. Look at a long-term IBM stock graph sometime. Today, IBM makes a fortune from PC-based software and services... much more than they'd ever have made as the sole steward of a now-obsolete platform.

        Just because they no longer own the PC platform's schematics and BIOS source code doesn't mean they can't build a large portion of their business on it.

        Eventually, Microsoft will have to make an analogous adjustment to their thinking.

    • Re:The original open source machine (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cactopus ( 166601 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:36AM (#6131204)
      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 (Score:3, Informative)

    by dubbayu_d_40 ( 622643 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:29AM (#6130688)
    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

    • I'll assume that you've got a Windows box if you're using ApplePC 2.52B...

      You might want to try Apple II Oasis [geocities.com] for Windows. It's pretty fast on a 486 or up. It is shareware, but it seems like the Opera of Apple II Emulators. Closed source, pretty small, works with 99.9% of disk images, and is rather powerful (it's the emu of choice for Apple II programmers, because it's got good disk image management and transfer tools).
    • classicgaming.com is actually fairly light on Apple ][ games and software. A better bet is the asimov [asimov.net] archive, which contains not only games but also a lot of other Apple ][ software. And, one occasionally sees Apple ][ stuff posted to usenet [emulators.misc]. Though I suppose the lot of it is a big heaping copyright violation, most of the original companies are defunct - which makes the stuff difficult to buy nowadays.
  • Steve Jobs is bad and unstable?

    Pirates of Sillicon Valley all over again.

    Ciryon

  • Fruitcakes (Score:4, Informative)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:36AM (#6130706)
    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].

  • I would like to thank my Dad.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cdtoad ( 14065 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:39AM (#6130713) Homepage
    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!

  • saviors and demons (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chriscypher ( 409959 ) <{slashdot} {at} {metamedia.us}> on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:44AM (#6130724) Homepage
    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?
    • Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.

      Open source software predated Linux. The GNU project was launched in 1984, when Linus was just 15. He didn't get his 80386 computer until 1991, and in any case Linux was built on gcc. Linus is also "only" responsible for the kernel of the OS. The Unix utilities mainly came from GNU, X came from MIT, and KDE/Gnome were not created by Linus, either.

      This is not to minimize his contributions. Linus Torvalds is a wonderful

  • Mad Tetris skillz. (Score:5, Funny)

    by asb ( 1909 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:45AM (#6130728) Homepage

    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @07:48AM (#6130730) Journal
    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.

  • Sweet memories and random comments (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chia_monkey ( 593501 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @08:02AM (#6130764) Journal
    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.
  • ...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!

  • 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)

  • The Woz (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:12AM (#6131060)
    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!
  • 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 ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Foddrick ( 13702 )
    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.

  • I wasn't one of the cool kids, but (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vizualizr ( 462581 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @09:50AM (#6131284)
    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.

  • Woz likes his Segway (Score:3, Funny)

    by stankyho ( 172180 ) on Friday June 06, 2003 @10:45AM (#6131775) Homepage
    Woz also has a good reason [woz.org] to get a Segway.

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