Wozniak Interview In Failure 155
Plastickiwi writes "The current issue of the online magazine Failure features an interview with Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak. Woz waxes humble about his role in founding the microcomputer revolution, claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs, and weighs in on the Microsoft antitrust trial." Tons of interesting stuff: he also talks about Pirates of the Silicon Valley and other bits. As always, Woz is a joy to read.
Re:why isn't he working? (Score:1)
I e-mailed Woz once (Score:1)
Re: Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
You're not kidding. I don't know how many times I actually left blood from my hands inside my StarMax 5000. Ouch.
Re:Woz, NY Times, and Microsoft (Score:1)
>powerful as Microsoft, that you can buy favorable Op-Ed pieces
Why buy what you can get for free? Major media is constantly giving corporations a pass. If you follow the ownership high enough, they're all one big, happy family anyway (or at least, a few big happy families who happen to be particularly neighborly with each other).
Wrong take on the Vikings actually... (Score:1)
Re:Woz as an engineer (Score:3)
Woz is/was a pioneer. He got there first, and he deserves a ton of credit for it, but no single man or woman could create a complete, modern PC system on their own. The market for PC technology has grown well beyond the hobbyist market, and with it has come competition to drive it much fasster and farther that it did 25 years ago.
Re:Geez, what a name (Score:1)
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Uhm, ever heard of a challenge exam?
And the members of the Open-Source community ..... (Score:3)
The report that the failuremag.com was running Microsoft software prompted several people to quickly comment that the server lag was Microsoft's fault. However, now that it turns out that the server is actually running Redhat 6.1, it's now not an OS problem, but rather a bandwidth problem. I don't disagree that it is INDEED a bandwidth problem, but the Linux community in GENERAL, has a nasty habit of blaming Microsoft for everything that goes wrong with the technology community, instead of first analyzing the problem. The community does not need an anti-hero to succeed. It needs clear-minded, OBJECTIVE, people who are driven to develop useful, user-friendly tools so that people can interact with their chosen CPU.
Moderate this post down if you want (Off-Topic, Flaim-bait, Troll), just take the time to really think about why your doing it. You can't look at the Open-source movement with rose colored glasses, or you'll miss all the important bits.
Riplakish
Woz as an engineer (Score:5)
What makes his work exceptional is that there were no simulators available for modeling computer behavior; he and the other designers of the era had to SIMULATE THE ENTIRE COMPUTER IN THEIR HEADS. That is a very rare talent.
While there are many people today who can do digital designs, the available tools are much better than they were just 25 years ago. To find out how good Woz was you would have to use the same tools he had - with the same low level TTL chips, a 'hock your calculator' R & D budget to work with, and do your work in a garage.
Great work Steve, thanks.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:4)
Okay, great, you know who Tesla was. We are all happy for you. Now never bother us with his sad story again.
Steering back onto the topic, I would say that Woz has achieved all the wealth and fame that he actually wanted, and if he wanted more he would have had it. On his own terms, he is a total and complete success. That is why he is not a bazillionaire; he never wanted to be anything more or less than a really great engineer and inventor.
(This message brought to you by a fan of Thomas Edison, the Wizard on Menlo Park. Deal with it, pink boy!)
Additional.... (Score:1)
Re:why isn't he working? (Score:1)
No Bad Blood.. (Score:1)
Woz not famous??? (Score:2)
Spruce Goose not blowing it out the window? (Score:1)
yes it is
that's all equivallent to throwing it on a bonfire, in my mind. it's totally useless pursuits of fame.
i've thought the richard branson thing was fairly pathetic, really. rich, bored, old man throws money away on an imbecilic, life-risking, waste of time, energy and money, when he could donate all that cash towards helping victims of corporate politics
but, that's just me..
...dave
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Actually a lot of the original Mac has his fingerprints on it...the most long-lived Woz contribution to Mac survived up until Gossamer (the Beige G3). It's the SWIM chip, which is the floppy drive controller. SWIM stands for Super Woz Integrated Machine.
Woz is a class act. It would be nice if his supreme hardware hacking skillz could still be tapped, but he seems more than happy being a teacher and a dad and a man of leisure.
A wise man said "thou hast no right but to do thy Will" and dammit, Woz is doing exactly that. Rock on, Woz!
Einstein (Score:1)
To draw the thread back to the Woz, who knows? His best effort might yet come. And best efforts aren't (in my limited experience) expressed in silicon.
Fred
Re:Woz (Score:2)
I once emailed Woz, just commenting on the mural on the Apple building on Infinity Loop. The last thing I expected was a reply from him -- I just thought he might get a kick out of what I had to say. But wouldn't you know it -- that same evening, not more than a couple hours later, there was a reply from him. Not a generic "thanks for the email", but an actual thought-out email.
I felt at once grateful that he would care so much about the people that care about him, to take a few minutes out of his life to send along a reply and embarassed for having wasted at least five minutes of his time (which is certainly more valuable than my own).
I hope that people will not take advantage of this and bombard his email account just to get a personal reply. If you have something you really want to tell him, perhaps it would be kind to wait a couple or so weeks before sending it? I hate to imagine him up at 2am, glazed eyed in front of the Woz-Cam trying to fight off wrist-pains pounding out responses to all of his admirers!
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seumas.com
lost edge in the plane crash (Score:3)
However the core Woz- the good guy, the visionary- still remains to inspire us.
Re:And don't forget Edison, the Bill Gates of the (Score:1)
That could be. However, Bell was born and raised in Scotland. Yet another place which is not Canada.
Bell and Edison: Two men who were not Canadian and invented lots of stuff that Nikola Tesla didn't.
Re:why isn't he working? (Score:1)
Re:Failure Looks Promising (Score:1)
Yeah, I just finished reading _Infinite Jest_ for like the third time and my head is all full of Boston argot. But personally, I live in Appalachia.
-carlRe:Woz was cool but... (Score:1)
Many people explored after he did but he is the one who found America.
Just because he isn't still around at Apple pretending he's doing things like Steve Jobs does doesn't mean we should still remember him.
Just my $0.02
The best thing about Gerstner is ... (Score:1)
None of the managers since Tom jr. understood technology either - they were marketing droids. The main advantage Gerstner (the correct spelling of his name) brought to IBM was that he was the first outsider to run IBM. While Asskisser (Akers is the real spelling of his name) was runing the show, it took a week to decide to use the John (the shitter, that is, although John Akers often got confused with one). Getting people to make decisions instead of kissing ass help IBM more than anything else done there in the last 15 years.
I got out of IBM while it was on the decline and I'm glad I did.
Flash! (Score:2)
Failure -- as your name, so your website.
Several naughty words were removed from this post, but no electrons were harmed.
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:4)
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
I think the above quote points out a major flaw in the thinking of many in our Geek community. There's a clear difference between what I call science and engineering ... and by this I do not mean the usual technical definitions. The mis-concept is that something is worth admiring only if it has pushed the frontier ... while in reality, there's a lot of value to activities that take what is at the frontier and make it more readily accessible to the common people.
The glory of Woz is not that he pushed the frontier of knowledge. Rather, he brought much of this knowledge and power to the masses. We often forget that there is a huge divide between what the few, select know and understand compared to the general public. For example, Edison was by no means a great scientist. His methods were crude and unorthodox, based on massive trial and error experiments (not what people today would call rational design). But his brilliance was that he was able to take solid scientific fundamentals and develop a tool (distributed electricity, light bulb) that could be appreciated and utilized by the society as a whole.
Similarly, Woz did not necessary develop the great paradigms or technologies (most of what was in the Apple ][ had already been developed) ... he brought it together in a package that could be exploited by others.
Does Woz get too much credit ... sure, he didn't single handedly build the PC. But should we still respect and hold some reverence for him? Absolutely. Not all of us can be the great frontier researchers, pushing the bounds of what we know and understand. But we can strive to do what Woz did ... which is take what we do know and distribute it better to the general public.
Re:The Major Malfunction (Score:1)
Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Re: Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
A great read (Score:1)
Wozniak knows Woz up :)
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
But, back to my original example, the Apple ][: except for its upgradeability, I consider it an inferior system to the C64. However, you still paid more for an Apple ][, just because it was from Apple. Other examples include the Lisa, and to a lesser degree the Macintosh. Back in the day the Macintosh was pretty innovative, but now its just old, proprietary technology, badly in need of a real OS. The PPC is cool though, and so is MacOS X. I just wish Apple had followed through on Rhapsody, or I might be using that now.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:The Major Malfunction (Score:1)
Just curious, but has the site been down for a while, or is this just the /. effect?
Re:The Major Malfunction (Score:2)
No wonder it's slashdotted
When will they ever learn?
Your Working Boy,
Re:Woz as an engineer (Score:1)
Hmm.. you tried Cypress' Warp lately? 'Nuf said.
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Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Re:Woz a better writer than Jobs... (Score:2)
Christopher A. Bohn
Re: Yay, Woz! (Score:3)
Re:Woz a better writer than Jobs... (Score:1)
This may be the exception that proves the rule, but Lou Gerstner, not a high-tech guru by any means, apparently has done a pretty reasonable job running IBM.
Michael S. Malone Interview (Score:2)
As cool as seeing a Woz interview is, I actually found the follow up interview to be more interesting. Need to go shopping around for this guy's book.
Anyhow I felt I just had to repeat this paragraph from that second interview here. This is singuarly the finest analysis of the whole MS monopoly issue I have seen to date.
Any thoughts about the Microsoft case?
I don't think the whole story was about Microsoft as a monopoly. The Justice department coming in had to do with power. Orrin Hatch let the cat out of the bag when he said, "Microsoft should have thought about working in Washington a lot sooner." Spend more money on campaigns, spend more money on lobbyists, get back here and schmooze us. Tug on your forelock and show respect. Look what happened after the Justice department announced its case. Microsoft gave away millions to campaigns, got a whole army of lobbyists back there, and Bill Gates went around from door to door to all the congressmen. That's why Intel did such a better job. Intel, the moment they announced the Justice department case, the whole executive team flew back there and said, "How can we settle this in an amicable way?" No one even remembers there was an antitrust case against Intel. They got out of that sucker in a week and a half. Microsoft was too arrogant. They said we don't need a federal government. They should have remembered Al Capone; he said the same thing. Federal judges and the United States Army, they'll get you. Gates' mistake was he didn't immediately apologize, settle, and say, "How can we make this thing better?" and by the way, we're donating a million dollars to the Democratic national committee and 2 million dollars to the Republican national committee. He's paying for being Bill Gates. Part of Gates' personality is to never, ever give up an inch of ground. But I think what they're scared of now is that they've now been categorized as evil. Everybody knew that in the industry anyway. Where it's going to hurt them is recruiting. The key to all these companies is what kind of talent they can recruit for the next generation of products. Do you really want to go work for the Evil Empire? People are embarrassed to say they work for Microsoft now. In the long run that's what kills you because the quality of your talent starts falling and you can't fix it. And so your products don't get out on time and they're not as good as they used to be. They should have just caved the first day. Big mistake.
RANT :ON:
Nobody, and I mean not a single soul, in congress gives a squat about whether or not Microsoft bruised other companies around them. Fact is, they didn't pay their "protection" money like Intel, IBM, Netscape, Sun, Apple, Oracle, and the rest of the industry testifying against Microsoft has done. MS has not been fighting a battle to innovate, but rather to not have to pay the "protection" money.
When all this plays out, no court ruling is going to replace the desktop OS's of the world. Only a better product will do that.
- High ease of use
- Low consumer cost
- Heavy support by developers
At this point, Linux is perhaps the best bet for actually going after the MS market share. The point is, nobody in the open source world should be looking to this monkey trial as any kind of victory no matter how it plays out. Instead, it should be waking folks up to the cold hard fact of the payola system that's really on trial here.RANT :OFF:
The rest of the interview was definitely worth a read as well.
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Also, the RISC vs. CISC doesn't really hold water anymore--the PPC has some pretty complicated instructions nowadays, and all the x86 chips these days translate CISC into RISC in hardware (except for Transmeta--they do it in software, with a RISC-y VLIW core) and make the RISC vs. CISC argument obsolete. The reason I never liked RISC was that it tended to bloat the binaries at least on some platforms, which required more memory...
Ooo, ooo, unprovable argument: Windows has BASIC in it? Do you mean like GW-BASIC or Visual BASIC? I think they use C/C++ for that stuff, or else VB wouldn't need those extra DLL's. But if we're going to resort to pointless name-calling here, I could argue that MacOS has a significant amount of PASCAL in it.
I don't know if this is true or not, and I like Pascal, but in reality it's just 0xCODEDBAD, and needs to be reworked. (which is why we now have MacOS X, Windows 2000, BeOS, Linux, etc., etc. (which one don't belong? (Spot the UNIX clone!)))
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Re:Woz, NY Times, and Microsoft (Score:3)
"I wrote 'Microsoft's a monopolist' and the [New York] Times wanted to edit it to say, 'Microsoft is innovative.'"
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. "All the news that's fit to print... except if it challenges the status quo." Not the first time, either.
Bah.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Re:why isn't he working? (Score:1)
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:1)
ARGHHH!!! It is so painful to see historically uninformed opinions like this surface so casually.
What Woz brought to the young field of digital electronics was Art. Anyone with a smidgen of electronics training who ever looked at the schematics for the Apple II Disk Drive controller saw the genius, the elegance of the design. Forget that other disk controllers for minicomputers occupied whole cabinets. Forget that Woz's controller only used a few cheap TTLs on one board. But do remember that Woz was the first real digital designer to realize the importance of integration. The Apple II was a Tight design. He knew he could toss functionality out of the hardware and pick it up in the software. He knew that without hardware support (like onboard color graphics) he could make difficult software hacks easy (like Breakout in 100 or so lines of Apple Basic). Woz had a greater insight into a computer as a single integrated SYSTEM than anyone before him. Woz was the Bobby Fischer of digital electronics and computing. He got underneath the whole field and transformed it into something new: the personal computer.
Would he have brought that to the masses without Jobs, Markula and Co? Probably not. Would he have gotten as much credit for being a computer genius without the business success of Apple Computer? Hard to say. But before you go mouthing off about how we give him too much credit, then go back and get some pre-1980 issues of BYTE Magazine; talk to an old timer or three; ask yourself what company design team could have done what Woz did at his desk in his bedroom at home with damn near no resources but his brain and pencil and paper.
THEN you can talk to me about how much credit we should or shouldn't give Woz for his achievements.
Kids!!!
IV
Who is Woz? (Score:1)
Woz also invented the learning remote control and one or two other useful gadgets, but he's mostly known for not making a pretentious ass out of himself in public the way most of his peers have. He spends most of his time these days as a grade-school teacher.
Re:dude (Score:1)
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Bill Joy. Linus, eventually.
Re:Woz as an engineer (Score:1)
I do remember the video chips of that era, and there was nothing that was a "one chip system" I remember a 16 x 64 display design which used 2102 static ram and about 16 chips total. The company bragged about their low parts count for that.
Your friend must have used static ram for the main memory - the dynamic ram of that era was very tricky to use - super sensitive to timing violations, voltage undershoots, and pattern sensitivity due to ground bounce from the large switching transients. Bypassing it properly was very tricky, as was impedance matching of the line drivers; reflections from transient edges from the drivers were a major cause of memory errors. That was true even of the static chips of that time. I wonder how your friend got the termination of those drivers correct? I am impressed, proper grounding technique for the oscilloscope was critical to keep from getting false signals. I wonder if your friend used series or parallel termination on those drivers.
What sort of power supply did your friend use? There were almost no switchers at reasonable cost available in 1980. Did your friend design his own power supply, or did he use some sort of off the shelf component. Power supplies with adequate current to drive a static ram array and a 6809 cost around 150 (1980) dollars - not a small amount of money back then. If he built it himself I once again am impressed - I wonder how he handled the calculations for sizing the bypass capacitors - too large a value and the ESR of the electrolytics of 1980 would affect the stability of the regulator IC's , too small a value and ripple eats up the noise margin of the regulator. Of course grounding in a power supply is critical; mixing the high current grounds of the bulk filter caps with the low current precision ground of the regulator not only results in a noisy power supply but an unstable one.
I wonder where your friend bought his components?
What did your friend use for the equivalent of a bios, did he write the assembly language for the control program in his onboard EPROM? I didn't know of many machines that could have been used as a cross development system for a 6809 in 1980. I guess he could have used a CP/M machine debugger and produced the byte codes by hand without an assembler. I wonder how he burned that code into the EPROM? Did he go to some place like Hamilton Avnet to burn them, or did he have his own EPROM burner? Back then the only EPROM burners were either stand alone units or S-100 based CP/M units both were rather expensive.
Video monitors of that era were almost all NTSC - driving the signals for a composite monitor was a bit tricky, H-sync, V-sync, front porch, back porch, and the high frequency dot clock all had to be multiplexed onto a single drive line. To design such a circuit without copying a reference design was a substantial effort; it required an active pullup to the one volt positive rail; a resistor resulted in smearing of the pixels.
Are you sure he didn't use a serial port to talk to a terminal? That would have simplified the design significantly.
As I remember Steve Ciarcia of byte magazine was writing about his 6809 design at about that time. I wonder why he would have written about something that any subgenius high school kid could have done?
Not only that... (Score:1)
The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
That's funny...of the OSen that run on the different computers I have, ProDOS on my Apple IIs has never crashed in the 15 years I've used it. Never. You can't say that for Win9x or NT...hell, you can't even say that for Linux (my Linux server once ate itself in a really weird way when a program I was writing malloc'd way too much memory). The worst that's happened is a date-rollover problem once every seven years with certain hardware combinations (specifically, 8-bit IIs with Thunderclock-compatible clock cards). Apple used to fix that with new releases; now, there are patch programs to deal with it. The IIGS (that's the 16-bit model, for those of you in Rio Linda) was even Y2K-ready, despite the last one having been made about eight years ago and the last OS upgrade having been released not too long after that.
_/_
/ v \
(IIGS( Scott Alfter (remove Voyager's hull # to send mail)
\_^_/
Re:Good Interview (Score:1)
I'd say that he is not willing to sacrifice "pleasure" for "vision", but rather that he makes them one and the same. For almost 20 years now, he's used his money to do nothing but what he wants to do. He made his bundle, and somehow knew what his idea of The Good Life would be, and he continues to live it.
That's such a happy contrast to the horror stories you hear about so many people who come into sudden wealth. I hope if I ever hit it really big, I'll know what to do with it as well as Woz does.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Re:Geez, what a name (Score:1)
Yeah, the editors are headline challenged today. I thought the other story was Attention: Sensitive User Interface. Like it was some kind of kid-gloves interface for users that are easily offended.
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Re:Failure Magazine (Score:1)
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Re:Spruce Goose not blowing it out the window? (Score:1)
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Looks like the Times is using Microsoft's definition of "innovative".
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Re:Spruce Goose not blowing it out the window? (Score:2)
Personally, I'd develop a foundation to boost the space program - get private and public partners together and start working on some big jobs, like manned expeditions to Mars and so on.
Of course, that's after I buy an NHL team and move them to Indianapolis.
Re:it's not your link (Score:1)
I would like to patent this system and become filthy, filthy, rich.
Thanks.
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Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:2)
That's because the PPC clone companies, with the exception of Power, had no R&D budget... at all.
Some of them, like Motorolla, also spent $0 marketing their product. Why bother when a review in Macworld will get you plenty of sales?
Finally, most of them used cheaper hardware than Apple traditionally went with. They were basically selling performas in PC cases.
None of the clone vendors did anything to expand the Macintosh market, contrary to the predictions of those who had been calling for it. All they did was put out a "me too" product for less money and steal customers away from Apple, which would be great except none of them could possibly survive without Apple's ongoing OS development, and none of them wanted to share the cost of that work. (They continually balked at Apple's licensing costs, and were bitching and moaning about that price right up to the day that Jobs pulled the plug.)
Woz a good role model in the capitalist world.... (Score:3)
Why isn't he as big and bad and rich as Bill Gates? Probably because he *really* doesn't care. Some of the posts expressed concern that its not fair or its unfortunate that he hasn't been as financially sucessful as some of the other pioneers - I doubt he wants or needs our pity. He surely has enough money to continue doing the things he wants, and thats really all a person needs when it comes down to it.
One of the horrible side effects of capitalism is that it becomes very easy for people to lose site of (or never even discover) what actually interests them and brings a smile to their face. Its not too surprising if you think about it:
The core of capitalism is the open market. Anyone can compete. So, whats always in everyones faces? Advertising. "Buy our products. YOU WANT OUR PRODUCTS. YOU ARE NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT OUR PRODUCTS." Look no farther than the advertising strategy of the more successful companies - its a brainwash. People are tricked into thinking that having things equates with being successful and happy (aka materialism). Being rich becomes the ultimate goal. Often in rich communities thats exactly the mentality children are raised on (followed by fraternities, sororities, and businesses). Its quite unfortunate - especially now that the execs at MTV have figured out how brainwash all the teenagers. Anyone else notice that MTV is 1 never-ending commercial now? Anyone else feel like we're in a downward spiral?
Re: Yay, Woz! (Off Topic) (Score:1)
Bad example. (Score:1)
E=mC^2 is part of the special relativity, but its greatest theory is the generalised relativity (which is less well-know by people because it is MUCH more harder to learn).
There isn't really a problem with the generalised relativity in its domain, but the real problem is that it doesn't mix well with the quantum theory..
So he spends the rest of his life, trying to build an unified theory, which nobody has been able to build yet..
PS: and you could say that its constant opposition to the quantum theory did help in fact to advance the quantum theory!
Re:Woz a better writer than Jobs... (Score:1)
Unfair. Jobs' behaviour left Sculley no choice but to fire his ass. He humiliated the members of the Lisa team. He humiliated the members of the ][ team, despite the fact that the Apple ][ was the only machine Apple was making that was actually selling at the time. He played favourites. Like Jef Raskin put it: `you can't use the words "management" and "Steve Jobs" in the same sentence.'
IMNSHO, it ceases to be your company when you IPO. That was shareholder's money Jobs was burning to fuel his delusions.
And Bushnell? Bushnell was a flake. Chuck E. Cheese? Petsters? Give me a break.
Re:gnarphlager goes to hell (Score:1)
T.
Re:NYT: Wake up & smell the coffee (Score:1)
Why? Not because he "grew up with" Woz and Jobs. This is only true geographically. The only actual Apple personnel he interviewed for his book were all aggrieved in some kind of way. His "insights" about Jobs & Woz & most of the central players are guess-work.
Just because Apple looked like it was going down and a book about THAT looked like it would make a LOT of money. Hence his book deal, hence his book. If you haven't read it, it's kind of mind-boggling. Most reliable journalists, of which there are still a few, would be knocked sideways by the singleminded hatred & envy exuded by it. That comes from the editorial voice - the author.
It's entertaining but....this guy runs Forbes? Hmmm. No wonder all that matters to him re M$'s monopoly is whether or not Gates was smart enough to "get out of trouble".
Whereas it matters to Woz that M$ ARE a monopoly capable of getting _him_ censored.
Failure should have emphasized the NYT's attempt to change an independently commissioned Op-Ed piece. Most people reading this - unless they work at a paper - have little idea HOW rigged all Op-Ed pages are. And let's not even talk about their software reviews!!!
Re: important bit you missed (Score:1)
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:1)
As a side track, didn't Edison want to use DC to distribute electricity, and others (Westinghouse? gee, I don't remember) had to really fight to get AC accepted. Because Edison was so well respected at the time, his opinions on DC were difficult to overcome.
Re:lack of concern w/matters financial? (Score:1)
One crucial difference is that he, unlike so many software celebs, does have an ability to disconnect when he wants to. ALWAYS MORE MONEY is not the only driving force in his life.
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Ah, computers were simpler back then.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
Re:Woz a better writer than Jobs... (Score:1)
Bad Mojo [rps.net]
Hey Woz, publish the M$ article! (Score:2)
If you just joined us without reading the full article, Woz describes how NYT asked him to write an article about the M$ case, but woudn't run it after he was too critical of M$, and he thinks it's beacause of the close ties between M$ and NYT
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Re:Woz as an engineer (Score:1)
(don't know who this is attributed to)
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:2)
And unlike Edison, he wasn't so full of himself so as to think DC was good for long distance electricity transfer.
Back on-topic myself, the damned server is dead as the proverbial doornail.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
You Tesla cultists are worse than the scientologists. Give it a rest.
Re:Yay, Woz! (Score:1)
Yeah, it sucks to have an OS so usable that a certain Redmond software giant couldn't approach it for 11 more years.
Give props where they're due. Sure, lack of memory protection, blah blah, all sucks...but DOS didn't have that either. Yet for some reason the industry stuck with that model rather than the GUI. It's only within the last 5 years that the industry has had a modern "mainstream" OS. Apple isn't so far behind when you think of it that way.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:1)
Re:why isn't he working? (Score:2)
Airplane accident.
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WordSocket Voice BBS Software
Reason for Failure Server Failure (Score:2)
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:2)
Re:Woz (Score:2)
Send him an email at Woz.org [woz.com]. He answers all received emails.
Whoops! Actually failuremag.com is running (Score:2)
Sorry about that.
dude (Score:4)
Re:Woz as an engineer (Score:2)
With all due respect to The Woz, it wasn't that hard to homebrew your own computer. It wasn't that uncommon in the hardware hacker world. It seems like every issue of Popular Electronics had a "build your own microprocessor!" article. The 6502, Z80 and 6809 made it pretty easy to hook up support chips, and there was lots of documentation available. I had a friend back in 1980 who hacked together a simple 6809 system in a couple of weekends.
Remember, we're talking about 1-2 MHz microprocessors. What makes it a lot harder today are the high clock rates, which makes timing problems really hard to solve without modern test equipment.
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Failure Looks Promising (Score:2)
Sort of like suck in that it busts a hole in the whole dot-com thing.
I recommend it.
-carl
Dead already (Score:5)
"...claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs..."
Probably because neither of them uses blood. Woz is clearly an advanced AI left here by aliens while Jobs probably upgraded from blood to a secret liquid compound that speeds his "boot time" in the morning from 10 minutes to an insanely great 5 seconds.
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... (Score:4)
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DeCSS source code! [metastudios.com]
you must amputate to email me.
Geez, what a name (Score:2)
It's interesting how he keeps claiming that there's no bad blood between him and Jobs - why isn't he working at Apple now, or at least on the board of directors? Does he even hold any apple stoc, for that matter?
If you don't know basic science (Score:2)
Einstein did a *lot* besides the theory of relativity. (Hint, what did he win his Nobel for?) Furthermore his contributions continued for a very long time. For instance he was hardly a youngster when he and some friends came up with the EPR paradox!
Regards,
Ben
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:2)
Woz, NY Times, and Microsoft (Score:3)
Woz seems to think so.
Re:The Major Malfunction (Score:2)
telnet www.failuremag.com returns redhat 6.1 so I would say reports of m$ are overrated
Tackle
Woz was cool but... (Score:4)
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
Many people have contributed greatly to the advancement of computers, and they deserve to be written about in the history books. But Woz was a man, and we give him more credit than he deserves by glorifying him as we do.
Personally, if I did some really cool stuff back in the day, I'd love for people to still be talking about it 20 years later but I would be nervous if I was built into the ultimate computer man, and I think that shows a lot in his writing.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:2)
Success is only for the elite!
Just like Universities won't let you just take the final exam for a course [even if you do pay in full for the course!] and skip all the classes. They won't give you credit because it's not about what you know, but showing that you can navigate through channels and bureaucracy and kiss all the right butts.
Then again some guy wrote a simple app (mosaic) and "revolutionized the computer industry". So I guess it can still be done.
Re:Why isn't Woz a rich bazillionaire? (Score:3)
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DeCSS source code! [metastudios.com]
you must amputate to email me.
Re:Geez, what a name (Score:2)
Re:Woz was cool but... (Score:4)
Lots of people do something stunning in their lives and then nothing really after that. Take Einstein. His great theory (of which e=Mc^2 is part) was developed in his youth. He himself said that the rest of his life was spent trying unsuccessfully to resolve the problems with the theory.
So, by your standards, Einstein wasn't any great shakes because he never came up with any new ideas after the first one.
Sheesh!
Woz a better writer than Jobs... (Score:5)
I had never read any of "The Woz"'s writing before, and it is nice that he does not have the "look at me, I am wonderful" problems of Steve Jobs. To listen to SJ, one would think that he--with some technical assistance from SW--created the microcomputer. SW is a lot more accurate.
Also nice was the mention of Mike Markkula, but like most stories of the founding of Apple no mention is made of the role of Nolan Bushnell.
I was very, very pleased to see mention of Atari engineeer Al Acorn in the article, however. If you know the full story on Atari--which SW does not cover--the complicated reasons for Bushnell's decision were what eventually brought the fall of Atari. Bad management from a ex-Burlington manager ran Atari into the ground, and a ex-Pepsi manager came inches from killing Apple. When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
Woz has his head on a lot straighter than most of the people in SV.
NYT & Microsoft (Score:2)
wish
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