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from the nice-guys-don't-always-finish-last dept.
The Woz speaketh. Gather 'round, Children, and hearken unto him:
More than 40 years after founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak has a lot to say about the early days of the world's richest company, and about technology, learning and being a born engineer.
On stage at the IEEE TechIgnite conference in Burlingame, California, on Wednesday, he gave a glimpse into how a tech legend thinks.
On open source
In the early 1970s, Wozniak read about phone phreaking, in which "phreakers" made free phone calls by using electronics to mimic the tones used for dialing each number. To learn how to do it, he went to the only place he knew that had books and magazines about computers: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He went on a Sunday and walked right in. "The smartest people in the world don't lock doors," Wozniak said.
A similar philosophy led him to give away his design for what later became the Apple 1. After drawing up plans that would let people build their own computers for $300, he handed them out at the Homebrew Computer Club, an early gathering place for tinkerers who helped launched the PC revolution. He didn't even include copyright notices.
"My motivation wasn't to start a company, wasn't to make money, it was actually just to show off my engineering excellence," he said. It was a non-engineer friend, Steve Jobs, who persuaded him to monetize both phreaking and the personal computer.
Read on for further thoughts on resourcefulness, on myths and movies, on robotics, on education, and on his dream job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @11:03AM (8 children)
I wonder what would have happened if Wozniak hadn't met Jobs. Given that there were no restriction on using the design, would we have gotten a competitive market of "Apple" computers (not under that name, of course), similar to the PC clone market? Or would it have become an obscure computer known only to a few people?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday March 24 2017, @11:15AM (5 children)
I believe it would have been the latter:
Mainly because both the Woz and Jobs had a very unique skillset.
Just an observation, but I have seen many amazing things ignored for lack of promotion.
I watched one technology firm which had acquired a lot of people with amazing skills simply evaporate right in front of me. Mainly due to leadership determined to pound the square pegs into round holes. ( Another way of saying they were not chasing the imagination of their men, rather they were trying to do what made the most lucrative financial sense, thinking leadership skills could force someone to be something they were not. ) The end result was dropping the technical synergy of the group below the level needed to foster the kind of creativity we had a reputation for having.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 24 2017, @02:19PM
Need a combination of people and they have to sort of work as a team.
The following might not be 100% applicable all the time there are some truths (I can't find the actual article I'm looking for so this will have to do :) ):
https://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/the-six-types-of-people-that-every-successful-start-up-needs-to-hire [virgin.com]
Apple had the super-geniuses and geniuses (Woz, Raskin, Atkinson etc), the evangelist/reality distorter (Jobs), the suits (Scott , Markkula).
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Uncle_Al on Friday March 24 2017, @04:00PM (3 children)
it's just "Woz"
at least you didn't capitalize "The"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 24 2017, @05:53PM
The tech guru has jumped the shark?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday March 25 2017, @12:13AM
Sometimes it's "the Woz" (bolding is mine):
Affectionately known as the Woz by Apple fans, Steve Wozniak has been a bit of a joke lately.
-- http://www.pcworld.com/article/159079/woz_takes_job.html [pcworld.com]
Yes, despite his years away from the Infinite Loop, the wonder of the Woz's hand has finally come to the modern Macintosh -- the Woz iBook G4 Limited Edition.
-- http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/mac/wozibook/ [floodgap.com]
One of our more educated readers has chimed in on The Woz's Dancing With the Stars elimination.
-- https://gizmodo.com/tag/the-woz [gizmodo.com]
etc.
https://duckduckgo.com/html/?q=%22the%20woz%22 [duckduckgo.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday March 25 2017, @06:24AM
My bad, I guess. I have a lot of respect for The Woz. And I show that respect the way I refer to him. Same as I do for +Fravia or +ORC.
I saw some of his work. And learned a helluva lot just looking at it.
That man is a genius - coming up with unbelievably elegant ways of implementing some pretty complex concepts. Did you see the way he implemented NTSC colors by using a string of simple logic gates as a phase shifter?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday March 24 2017, @04:10PM
I have been reading old BYTE magazines. You can get them from here [archive.org] and here [americanradiohistory.com]. Also Popular Electronics issues are here [americanradiohistory.com] in case you want the Jan 1975 issue.
Starting with the first BYTE, in about Sept 1975, or even the contemporary issues of PE, the first thing I observe is that the technology is shockingly primitive. Absurdly small amounts of memory. Way less than an arduino. Shockingly primitive instruction sets. Not even possible to write relocatable 8080 code. A routine appears in BYTE within the first couple years to relocate 8080 code.
No standardization. Everyone's system has different custom built hardware / software for some kind of keyboard input and CRT or printer output. The most popular software package appears to be BASIC interpreters and only if you have huge amounts of memory like 16 K bytes. But memory rapidly grows. The ads in the magazines are perhaps as much or more interesting than the articles. But be sure to check out the "What's New" section in each BYTE issue.
Lack of hardware standardization makes any kind of software standardization difficult to impossible.
In 1977 the holy trinity appears. The Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore Pet. Off the shelf software begins to appear soon after. Or even just articles with program listings in BASIC that can be expected to run on one of those three systems it is written for.
In answer to the question, if Apple had not been one of the three off the shelf turnkey computers, then it would have become one of the obscure computers like all the rest. By about 1980-81 these systems are disappearing. The BYTE Jan 1982 issue introduces the IBM PC. This brings even more standardization. Through the 80's the TRS-80's disappear or become largely unimportant, as do other systems. Only Apple with a huge amount of R&D, funded on the back of the Apple II, is an ongoing alternative to the IBM PC with advances like the Lisa and Macintosh. From there on, up to about 1997 ish, the PC industry and Microsoft, despite having much larger market share, are continually trying to play catch up to Apple.
Without the Apple II none of this would have happened. Who knows if we would even have GUIs today. Or what they would look like. We might be on MS-DOS 25.0 and think it is great. This month, a review of the new Edlin editor!
Why is Emacs so popular on Linux? Popularity seems to correlate highly with the set of users who once started up Emacs, were unable to figure out how to exit from Emacs, then had no choice but to write Emacs Lisp extensions to accomplish all other necessary tasks.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Saturday March 25 2017, @02:28AM
While the original design had innovations, what really set Apple apart was being already assembled in a nice case. This was suggested by a store owner and it was Jobs who ran with it, dragging Woz along as much as anything.
Other alternate histories include the fact that Woz first offered his design to HP (I think that was the company he worked for) as he designed it partially on company time. They officially (lawyer wrote letter saying so) turned down the opportunity. They also tried to interest Atari in the design. Atari also was not interested.
Either one could have turned out interesting or more likely the suits would have screwed it.