Woz Talks About His Gaming Past 64
Gamasutra has up a rare article with founding Apple visionary Steve Wozniak about his love of games, and his history with the medium. The article discusses Woz's prototype for the title Breakout prior to his involvement with Apple, the gaming habits of Steve Jobs, and the influence that videogames have had on the personal computing industry. " The reason Atari wanted me to design [Breakout] is they were tired of their games taking 150, 200 chips, and they knew I designed things with very few chips, so we had incentives for getting it under 50 or under 40 chips. That was my forte. Now I designed it, but it was... To save parts, I'll make no part go to waste and have tricky little designs that are hard for just a simple engineer to follow. Once you understand it, it's very easy because there's so few parts, it's easier to understand. But they had trouble understanding it."
Snood! (Score:5, Interesting)
And as if Woz wasn't already the idol of longtime Mac users everywhere, he further cemented his status by professing his love for Snood! All hail Woz, we bow down before your puzzle level skills.
Re:Is the Woz really that great? (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the Apple II History [apple2history.org] page the FCC issues were related to the RF modulator design used. I don't think anyone has ever claimed Woz was an RF engineer.
And talking about BASIC, the BASIC language they first created for the Apple II wasn't good either, so they had to buy it from MicroSoft, but at double the price of Commodore.
Then hit that page again and read the part starting with "An interesting bit of trivia about Wozniak's Integer BASIC was that he never had an assembly language source file for it. He wrote it in machine language, assembling it by hand on paper". One of the things Microsoft had going for them when they were working on their BASIC was that they access to much better development tools running on a larger system, and were essentially cross-compiling from there to generate the code for the home PC. Anybody can write a BASIC interpreter, fitting one into a tiny space in the era before there were even good assemblers available was a different thing altogether.
Re:Is the Woz really that great? (Score:2, Interesting)
He also says in there that most of what they talk about in those other books about what went on is wrong. And that he's very unhappy with them.
It's a very interesting book to read, should check it out.
Re:Links: (Score:3, Interesting)
He said he and Steve Jobs were great friends once who talked about music and philosophy; but Jobs regarded himself more as a Shakespeare/Einstein hero type.
He said Jobs was essential to the success of Apple because Steve Jobs had a better grip on simplifying technology for the masses (whereas Woz simplified technology for its own sake).
He said that his own involvement was more important to Steve Jobs than the other way around because Jobs needed talent and Woz was giving it away for free (open source style, I guess).
He said he's happy because by age 20 he realized he would never be poor.
And in undertones you can see that he went out of his way to be "normal" such as pursuing an 8-year teaching career.
Overall it's a great (and long) interview; you can see Charlie Rose working his hardest and enjoying it when he's not frustrated with Woz's fast talking style.