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Apple Businesses

Macworld Interviews Woz 21

Posted by pudge from the here-i-go-again-on-my-own dept.
inkswamp writes "Interviews with Steve Wozniak are always a fun read (mainly because he is one of the few legends in the computing industry with a real personality, IMO) and this online-only Q&A on Macworld is no different. It's pretty exhaustive and seems to cover a lot of topics, including more of the by-now overly examined beginnings of Apple, and Woz's current projects."
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Macworld Interviews Woz More

Macworld Interviews Woz

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  • That's why I love to read these interviews.

    Also, because he was such a ground-breaking pioneer, at a time when a guy with a soldering iron & his brain could come up with something really innovative. The way that he squeezed every last bit of functionality from the circuits that he had to work with at the time is truly an example of Edison's "99% perspiration".

    • That's why I love to read these interviews.

      Me too--I found this to be one of the best interviews on /. in a while. Thanks, guys!

      Also, because he was such a ground-breaking pioneer, at a time when a guy with a soldering iron & his brain could come up with something really innovative. The way that he squeezed every last bit of functionality from the circuits that he had to work with at the time is truly an example of Edison's "99% perspiration".

      I agree. I found how he made the floppy disk work without knowing how floppies themselves interfaced (beyond the most general level) a particularly good example of his genius--he actually cut out over 20 chips! Imagine all the mind numbing trial-and-error.

  • (mainly because he is one of the few legends in the computing industry with a real personality, IMO)

    The legends of the computing industry is the most diverse cadre of odd ducks I can think of. I mean, come on. Larry Ellison? Steve "Monkey Boy" Balmer, anyone? Bill Joy? Richard Stallman!?

    Maybe you meant to say he's one of the few legends who acts like a relatively normal person.

  • Personality? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alan Partridge ( 516639 ) on Saturday September 07, 2002 @11:28AM (#4212444) Journal
    "Interviews with Steve Wozniak are always a fun read (mainly because he is one of the few legends in the computing industry with a real personality"

    hey, that's not fair! Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have personalities too, just unpleasant ones...

  • I had the luxury of meeting Woz once and hearing him speak for about an hour. He would start on one topic and midway through you would see his eyes light up because you know he just thought of something somewhat related but still incredibly fascinating that he wanted to share with you. I think his only problem was that he was mad his mouth couldn't keep up with his brain and all the ideas flowing from it. When he was talking, I think of all the things he was most proud of (and he has a damn long list of accomplishments) was being able to take a computer and do the same thing in less chips. That's what he was always striving for: to create something faster, more efficient, and thus incredibly more cool from a geek standpoint. My hat goes off to you Woz.
    • Yeah, after reading the article, he definitely comes off as one who is prone to stream of consciousness. I couldn't help but laugh periodically while I was reading the article because he'll start on a topic, but never finish because it made him think of something else, so the entire thing is mostly transitional. =)
  • As a kid in Silicon Valley I remember dailing 867-1111 to hear jokes or was 741-1111.
    Anyone from the Bay Area should recognize those numbers.
    My memory is fuzzy, but I recall reading or hearing somewhere that Steve operated a joke line.
    I would also like to thank the Steve's for giving 12 or 16 Apple computers to Redwood Middle School in 1981 or 82.
    My friends and I had great fun programing in BASIC during Junoir High School. I wish I had stuck with it :-(
    • I recognize the first number as being something over in Saratoga probably, but I've never heard of a joke line. (Of course considering that I wasn't even born when you were in middle school maybe that has something to do with it.) But you touched on something that can't be overlooked about Woz. He donates more computers to schools than anyone else I have ever heard of. Anyone who has gone to public school in the south bay probably has used a computer either he personally or Apple donated, especially anyone from the Los Gatos school district.

    • Re:Did Woz operate a joke line????? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Captain Nitpick ( 16515 ) on Saturday September 07, 2002 @12:51PM (#4212729)
      Yes [woz.org]
      Q From e-mail: I just had to laugh at the part in the movie where someone called Dial-A-Joke. I remember calling that number to hear the joke of the day. Was it really you who did this?

      WOZ:Yes. It was in the days before you could buy a phone or answering machine. I had to rent the same one as theaters rented, a very costly one. I was "The Crazy Pollok". This was the first Dial-A-Joke in the San Francisco Bay Area, back in 1973 or so. I used a heavy Russian accent and used the name "Stanley Zebrezuskinitski" when I took live calls. I met my first wife this way, she was a caller.

  • What a shame Apple let dominance of the computer world slip through their fingers. Happily Apple continues to innovate at a rate that should embarrass the competition. Thanks for everything Woz!
  • So, did Steve Jobs do any "real" work, or was he mainly the visionairy/leader type? What code or hardware piece did he hack out, any?
  • From the mouth of Woz himself regarding OS X

    "I love OS X from a feeling point of view. But from capability and readiness, I still don't rate it ready for me, I'm sorry to say. The experimental side of me is losing out because I don't have as much time with my startup company."

    OS X is very nice OS, but it's not Apple's silver bullet.
  • Seeing this made me think of a recent crazyapplerumors story -
    http://www.crazyapplerumors.com/#85411314 [crazyapplerumors.com]:

    "Woz Finally Gets Around To Installing OS 9.

    As Mac users everywhere begin to enjoy the recently released Jaguar update to Mac OS X, sources close to Steve Wozniak indicate the Apple co-founder has finally broken down and installed OS 9. ..."

  • I was totally blown away by the design of the apple II wehn it came out. I used to design my own computers and sell other computers (like the SOL ) mentioned in the story.

    The dynamic memeory trick was the key to the future of computing. At the time all computers used static ram. You could buy memory cards with dynamic ram but the refresh on all of these things was unstable. The main problem was that you had to periocally stop the cpu and raste through part or all of the memory to induce a refresh. With the intel CPU's this was rough. their timeing cycles varried form instruction to instruction, plus you had to deal with unfreindly I/O devices holding down the WAIT line on the s-100 bus where the memory was.

    Woz finessed this with two beautiful tricks. first they used the 6502 cpu which had a steady instruction rhythm compared to the intel. You could always count on the memory bus being unused on the back side of every clock cycle. This eliminated the uncertainty of when you could reach the memory to refresh it. second they used the video scan as the refresh it self. since the video memory was in main memory, any access to the video also refresed all of the memory locations with the same upper address byte. beautiful, gaurentted refresh and no extra circuitry to do it. zen like perfection.

    Other cool features were memory mapping not only the I/O but also mapping the plug-in cards to pre-decoded memory. The floppy disks were soft sectored rather than hardware timed. the net effect of the memeory mapping and soft sectoring was that the software could replace hardware. At the time this made for inexpensive yet flexible computers that could do things you would not have been able to think of in hardware. For example, game "sprites" which where like icons that move. think Mario bros and you got it. since the video was memory mapped you could just move these little tile icons around. CGI type devices had a huge handshaking hardware driven overhead and you could not just do a DMA meemory move of one section of screen memory to another.

    apple has been at the center of civilizing innovative products that were not being perceived for their true nature. Often new products are seen as just a new way of doing something old. But apple has consistently seen the radicallizing nature of things. dynamic memeory was just one example. Another was the use of a switching powersupply. these were tiny power supplies. but until the apple computers were either tiny (like the trs-80) and had no upgradability or had huge cards like the S-100 bus intel machines and so having a HUGE conventional transformer power supply dominated the interior of the box. The aple II was svelt yet had lots of power for it's cards. The memory mapped cards meant fewer hardware hancshing chips on the cards and thus they could be smaller too.

    Adoption Post script for laser printers was another. At the time laser printers like the HP laerprinter worked just like impact printers or screen graphics. you could only print in a slected hardwired font and pitch. You could print individual pixels but there was no way to really do creative high level graphics. post script changed all that and now we take it for granted. When NeXT came out they percieved how massive disks were needed for software distrubution as well as for images and sound. at the time a 10 Megabyte hard drive seemed unfillable. But NeXT shipped with optical drives which could hold as much as a CD. Of course this turned out to be a bad decision because the need for large drives lagged and the optical drives were very slow comared to harddrives. They were too far ahead of us in realizing how we were going to be using out computers.

    and of course one could wax rasphodically about the macintosh

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