Woz Still Misses Homebrew Computer Club and Apple 274
UtahSaint writes "The Electronic Design site has nabbed a short interview with the Woz, where he waxes poetically about his time growing up as an Engineer and founding Apple. Even to this day, he says, he still misses the Homebrew Computer Club and his days running around Apple leading the technical teams. 'I miss the technical camaraderie ... The whole feeling of being on a revolution, on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies.'"
Re:Nostalgia isn't what it used to be... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WOZ I want to build my own mac like you can wit (Score:4, Interesting)
One hit wonder (Score:1, Interesting)
Every article about him ends with "He is the co-founder of Apple." Big deal! That was decades ago and he hasn't really accomplished anything since then. He was, at best, a regular hacker who met the right person at the right time.
Normally I wouldn't bother with this, but it gets on my nerves how he has assumed this budhha-like position in pushing malformed opinions every time there is an Apple story. He's like a grandpa who convinced himself he has an authoritative and final take on every subject.
Text without forced ad delay (Score:3, Interesting)
[Technology Report]
Wizard Of Woz Keeps Casting His Spells
What would you do after founding a technology giant? Steve wozniak Uses those resources to keep innovating and following his creative impulses.
John Arkontaky | ED Online ID #17186 | October 19, 2007
Article Rating: Not Rated
For many, "Vice President in charge of R&D" sounds like a good job - reputable, good pay, and maybe even exciting. But tack the words "at Apple Inc." to the end of that title, and you have, well, a whole different barrel of apples.
Steve Wozniak didn't earn this job with a good resume. He forged it, inventing the first single-circuit motherboard with embedded ROM in 1975. He and Steve Jobs had to sell their most valuable possessions to assemble a product line of Apple Is. Some people can't put a price on fame and fortune, but they can. About $1300 and a few IOUs later, they kinda made their money back.
Follow the Silicon Road
Wozniak didn't want to become an entrepreneur or take the world by storm. He was content with his job at Hewlett-Packard and even more content as a hobbyist. Wozniak worked at a bench from 1973 to 1976, optimizing designs for calculators other EEs developed.
"I wanted to be an engineer in a lab," says Wozniak. "The spirit of engineers was most important. I loved the engineers, loved the project, loved the company!" He spent his days at the plant and his nights batting around design ideas and inventions with the Homebrew Computer Club. "I'd be off in 'computer design world' and Steve [Jobs] would ask where it could go," he says.
This dynamic led to the sale of a wood-cased CPU comprising roughly 30 chips for $500 (then $666.66 after a markup) and the beginning of a revolution. "After Apple I, every computer used a keyboard," Wozniak says. "Before, they used geeky switches. It was a trading transition in history." The Apple I was a quantum leap in the available technology. Before Wozniak threw his hat into the ring, the Altair 8800 was the closest thing to a personal computer.
"You could turn it into a computer, but it was basically an Intel processor," Wozniak says. "A computer to me has to have the ability to program. Altair couldn't. You had to buy extra cards. I was well past that point. Sure, it used ones and zeros, but I wanted a real computer my whole life. I would've sold my house for a computer, but it had to run a program."
He created a motherboard and compatible components, but the product was more for a hobbyist or engineer than a consumer because users would have to add input sources, a keyboard, casing, and a display themselves. He wanted to bring it all together so anybody and everybody could operate an Apple right out of the box.
Playing Games
Born in 1950, he didn't have much technology available to him as a child, but he would stumble onto information about technology here and there. Picking up little scraps wherever he could, these bits of info would be like "little secrets" to him and his young mind - information he would keep that other people would flat-out ignore.
When he was 10, a book about a ham radio operator inspired him to not only earn a ham radio license, but build a transmitter and receiver by hand as well. He also conjured a game where he would experiment with adding and subtracting transistors to his gadgets. "It helped me very much. You sit down, think, plan, and make sure what you build is efficient. It's good practice for what engineering involves," he says.
Wozniak left HP in 1976 and formed Apple Computer with Jobs, asking himself how he could put these things in his head into the smallest number of chips. As a result, he would write his own Basic, even though he never programmed in Basic in his life. But that wasn't the only thing he would have to do on the fly. "Everything was created from scratch," he says. "Everything I did had to be made up for the first time."
SuperHappyDevHouse (Score:5, Interesting)
I've talked to someone who used to attend Homebrew Computer Club. He says that SuperHappyDevHouse has a similar feel. Among differences: There was only one electrical outlet in the space used for Homebrew Computer Club - Woz supposedly monopolized that outlet. And people couldn't bring computers to Homebrew like they can (and are encouraged to) at SuperHappyDevHouse.
Re:Nostalgia isn't what it used to be... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you miss it, do it again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that really the case? Like Woz is a high profile technical multimillionaire, an inspiration to an entire generation of geeks, and he misses the thrill of being on a revolution and can't figure out how to recreate it?
If that's really the case. I mean, if he really and truly misses it, why not just contact pretty much anyone over the age of 30 in any field he wants:
"Hi, my name is Steve Wozniak" //e! How's it going?!?"
"Holy shit! I know you! I learned assembly language on an Apple
"Not bad, I really like the stuff you do. Do you mind if I come to work and hang out and be a technical comrade?"
"Shit no! Christ, it would be an honor."
"You don't have to pay me, I mean, I'm a multimillionaire."
"No, that's cool, come on over."
Maybe I'm oversimplifying. But I personally am not a multimillionaire, and I know a lot of people, and I have literally done jobs for $0 just to hang out at places and work with cool people.
Make the world what you want. It seems that this is especially easy advice to give to someone who is financially independent.
One hit wonder - you're kidding, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are engineers, mechanics, designers, inventors and scientists. And then there are those who have such a deep understanding of how the world around us works, who combine multiple disciplines in such a way that they can see things that normal people can't. Richard Feynmann was one of these people. So is Steve Wozniak.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak changed the world. The computer revolution would have taken much, much longer without those two. Steve Jobs, in addition to his marketing skills, was truly a technician and scientist in his own right. Not nearly in the same league as Woz, but he knew enough to help do what had to be done from a physical design and assembly standpoint. Woz couldn't sell ideas very well, back then. The teamup of Wozniak and Jobs created something unique, a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts, but that shouldn't take away from the brilliance of both of these men.
Wozniak has also been a teacher, a concert promoter (!) and Lord knows what else since leaving Apple. He prefers to work a lot with children now, trying to teach them how to solve logical problems. There's no way to know now, but I would not be surprised a bit if in the distant future some great inventor / engineer / scientist or even politician is going to say that once upon a time they started to learn how to truly think logically because they had the gift of listening to Woz lecture at his school.
Saying that Woz is a "one-hit wonder" does nothing but display total ignorance of what the man has truly accomplished. Creating Apple the way he did was great, and would not have happened nearly as soon if he hadn't existed, but perhaps the this brillian yet simple man's ultimate legacy has yet to be written, for we may never know the true benefits of the work he has done with children.
Re:One hit wonder -- NOT! (Score:2, Interesting)
Whoa harsh words from Anonymous Coward!
Woz is an exceptionally knowledgeable and clever hardware electronics engineer. His ability to reduce board size with fewer components made him a name to begin with. He also coded the Apple BASIC interpreter for the early Apple designs -- by hand! In fact, his ability allowed Apple to reduce enough components and create a fully ready-to-use machine which made the original Apple I and Apple II machines at low enough cost and wide functionality to create the first truly viable microcomputer company.
Of course despite his great skillz, in true geek fashion he seems to have little business acumen. It is no accident that Jobs partnered up with him, an neither one of them expected to sell more than a few hundred machines to other hobbyists at the time.
The next tech revolution (Score:4, Interesting)
I was a teenager back in the early microcomputer days and built one of first kit machines, an IMSAI 8080. It was great fun and more educational than any number of college course I took thereafter.
Those days are long gone now. But could something similar return? I think that the next tech revolution has already started, and it's the hacker's auto fabrication machine ("fabber").
Example: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome [reprap.org]
Right now these aren't much more than 3-D printers that squeeze out plastic goop under computer control. But if the rate of progress of this field is anything like that seen with microcomputers, then small scale manufacturing will be totally changed in a few years. Who will be the Woz (and the Jobs and the Gates) of this new endeavor? Maybe they're already out there, but we just haven't heard of them yet.
Re:I wonder if he waxes poetic about Steve Jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone at Atari told Jobs that he would get a $5000 bonus if they could get optimize the breakout machine to use fewer than X parts. He then went to Wozniak and told him that they would get a $2000 bonus that they could split 50:50. Wozniak did most of the work and took his $1000. 10 years and a company founding later, Wozniak finally found out that Jobs both lied to him and shortchanged him. As he and Jobs hadn't exactly seen eye to eye recently, this finally pushed him over the edge and this is why he left Apple.
See no arbitrary 7%, no rubbish about reneging on an agreement, less "Troll"y.
Re:What Woz... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WOZ I want to build my own mac like you can wit (Score:3, Interesting)
Woz needs... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:One hit wonder - you're kidding, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
History is written by the winners, and marketers, I guess.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to diminish Woz, he was definitely in a class all his own, with that brilliant floppy drive and all the early software he wrote, but it's important not to forget who's processor he used.
Like the television, no single person or company invented the PC.
Re:I wonder if he waxes poetic about Steve Jobs (Score:2, Interesting)
I've never heard Jobs' side of this story. In his writings, Woz seemed bothered more by the fact that allegedly Jobs lied to him, not that he didn't get the money. He said something like, "I had a good job at HP but Jobs was broke, so I can understand the money situation, but I wish he had asked directly instead of played games."
Remembering Homebrew Computer Club (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, as mentioned earlier, the Apple I did tie up the only electrical outlet in the front doorway. If memory serves me correctly, Apple Basic didn't come in until Apple II's. It was a video octal/hex debug tool in the Apple I. Indeed, I remember wooden sides and a plexiglass top panel, so you could see the motherboard.
Many of us were interested in the 8080/Z80 systems of the Altair/Imsai/etc/etc/ systems. Indeed, I was there when the club coined the term S100 bus. My little piece of history. A "big" system had 16K RAM, usually an audio cassette mass storage device, an old RS232 terminal (mine was first a Textronics, later a Lear Sigler ADM3, which I still have in my garage and still has the best keyboard "feel" that I have ever run across). If you were real lucky you had one or more floppy disk drives (8 inch Sugarts were favorites). CP/M was the "big time" operating system of choice. The Apple was more of an "interesting" device, not mainstream for the hobby at that time. The 6502 was certianly cheap enough!
I can still find some of the camaraderie at the local Linux UG (LUG). However, I don't find the "rough edges" and cutting edge technology. Really, it was more of "damn, I wonder if this will work" rather than some "intuitive philosophies". Smoke was not your friend then as it still isn't your friend today, but you sure saw a lot more of it in those days...... Our LUG still has the geeks show up and we have interesting lectures, but even the open source stuff is getting pretty cut and dried, relatively speaking.
The internet is great for technical correspondence and "group" software projects, and althoug h we have worldwide contributers, we can't all go to the meeting, then to pizza and beer afterwards.
So yeah, I agree with Woz. I'm typing with my peep, not chillin' with my peep.
Cheers!
Re:One hit wonder - you're kidding, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
There is an interesting antidote in this book [amazon.com] about Peddle's relationship with Woz and their personal interactions. It's evident that Woz owes a great deal to the man.
I highly recommend that book. It gives you much perspective beyond the Apple I&II centric history of PC's.
I would not say there was stealing. Peddle knew very well what the Apple gang was doing, and he saw the development of a PC as inevitable. These were smart visionary people, and it was no secret that the PC would happen. The whole point of making the 6502 was to put microprocessor power into the hands of the masses, and Peddle envisioned a PC as one of the first applications, perhaps years before the two Steve's. If Woz did steal a few things from Peddle, I would never blame him anyway. Business is ruthless, nice guys finish last, and if this is the only stealing Woz did, he's much better then the rest of them.
Wrong, mr. wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to Lenovo.com and priced out a ThinkPad T61p 15 inch widescreen with the following specs:
Intel® Core(TM) 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz 800MHz 4MBL2)
Genuine Windows Vista Ultimate (discuss: an uncrippled Windows comparable to OS X 10.5)
15.4 WSXGA+ TFT
NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (256MB Open GL)
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory
160GB Hard Disk Drive, 7200rpm
DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer, Ultrabay Slim (MBP has this standard)
PC Card Slot & Smart Card Slot
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG
Integrated Bluetooth PAN
9 cell Li-Ion Battery (standard on MBP)
Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
Total cost: $2,252.00
Macbook Pro specs:
Same RAM.
Same HD.
Standard display is slightly lower rez, but comes in glossy coat optionally.
iWork preinstalled. (equivalent to Office Pro suite more or less... discuss)
Better power connector (MagSafe) standard.
Wireless and bluetooth 2.0+EDR standard.
DVDR drive standard.
ADMITTEDLY- Standard graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics with 128MB SDRAM) has half the RAM of standard graphics card on Lenovo (NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (256MB Open GL)).
Total cost: $2,303.00
Competitive advantages of each machine:
Lenovo: Slightly better standard graphics. UltraNav pointing device (if that's your style... I hate the pencil eraser). Slightly higher-rez screen. Spill-resistant keyboard. Media card reader standard. Swappable drive/battery bays. Can easily configure as a crippled machine in order to justify anti-Macbook Pro pricing policy trolling.
MBP: MagSafe power adapter. Battery indicator on battery. Backlit keyboard standard. Integrated iSight and mic for videoconferencing (!). Firewire, Firewire2, DVI ports standard. Digital audio out standard. And countless intangibles that I cannot list here- here's one- connecting to wireless networks on Windows is always annoying, on OS X never is.
Either machine runs Linux. With the Lenovo, you are stuck with the old, crusty, annoying, virus and spyware infested, administration-time-consuming Windows. With the Apple, you get the hip and fresh OS X that is a joy to use, has low maintenance, is secure, and will go out of its way to not annoy you. And is prettier. Plus, you get to run Windows at full speed... if you must.
With a 50 dollar price difference and some comparable individual features, I challenge anyone to say this isn't a wash. Finally, for the ability to run any operating system it damn well pleases you to run, I think only stubborn idiots won't pick a Macbook Pro.
So STFU and go back in your hole. I'm tired of your type.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)