A half century later Steve Wozniak reunited with nine members of the "Homebrew Computer Club" for a special YouTube event (hosted by John "Captain Crunch" Draper).
And Woz remembers that it was that club that inspired him to rig his own continent-spanning connection to ARPAnet. Later the club passed around a datasheet for an upcoming 8-bit microprocessor, Woz did some tinkering, and "You can hear the excitement in Wozniak's voice as he remembers what happened next..."
HP had a single computer that 40 people were sharing. But now, "I had this little tiny computer with my own TV set, sitting on my desk at Hewlett-Packard, and I could type in my own programs and come up with solutions ... I was just having the time of my life!" Wozniak, of course, would go on to build Apple's first personal computers, which helped Apple become the most profitable company on earth. But Wozniak closes by saying the Homebrew Computer Club "was the heart of it all. It's what turned me on to the fact that people were interested in things like computers we could afford."
Woz also says he even gave tens of millions of his Apple stock to early Apple employees who'd come from the Homebrew Computer Club, because "I just felt they deserved it as much as I did. Because that was really where all my inspiration came from." And he would also fly into computer clubs around the U.S., "because I wanted to tell them where Apple came from, where I came from: It was the Homebrew Computer Club."
(Score: 5, Touché) by Mykl on Monday September 09, @11:55PM (2 children)
If IT were a religion, Steve Wozniak would be one of the first to be canonised.
Plenty of other people would make good candidates for the Devil.
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 10, @07:55AM
Hey, now, while it might be true that Bill might not be the devil himself [cornell.edu], they are certainly acquainted on a first name basis.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday September 10, @02:22PM
We've already got that one covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_Daemon [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday September 10, @08:51AM (5 children)
The generation for whom computers were hope, progress, the promise of universal education and culture, the key to defeating religion and obscurantism, equality and so much more.
Fast-forward to today: we're careening towards a corporate-fueled dystopia worse than George Orwell could have ever imagined in his worst nightmare, the mainframe is back and it's called "the cloud", cars and televisions spy on you and AI is consuming ever-dwindling fossil fuel reserves and wrecking whatever's left of a a human-compatible climate to turbocharge unemployment.
Yeah, happy reunion Steve and John. I wish I went back in time too before the promises the future were stolen from us.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 10, @11:39AM (1 child)
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Woz had not scrambled his brains in that plane crash [cultofmac.com]. For a while it was popular for people to demonstrate new wealth by flying very, very badly designed 'experimental' models of planes. More than a few died that way, so Woz came out of that luckier than some. However, overall we lost most of the creative and positive influence he could have continued to have had on the industry. I think things would have turned out quite different if he had retained the capability to remain active in Apple, for example, or if he had retained a more active role over the years in the EFF [eff.org] and maybe he could have kept it from takeover or whatever caused it to drop its ideals.
That the Apple II series came with both schematics and some source code launched something which was so big yet so beneficial that we're still hearing echoes of the good parts today.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Wednesday September 11, @02:53PM
That's a very interesting question. However, his incredible output
- Apple I
- Monitor with Mini-Assembler/Disassembler
- Integer Basic
- Sweet 16 Interpreter
- Floating Point Routines
- Apple II
- Disk II
between late 1975 (6502 release) and mid 1978 (Disk II shipping) already ceased flowing that strong from 1979 on.
It'd really be interesting to assemble a "Silicon Valley Person" timeline of who worked on what project in what period.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 10, @02:43PM
Ironically perhaps we're in the era of Soviet-style, top-down infrastructure projects dominated by Leadership. Whereas plainly, and as documented by this story, innovation and creativity come from hands-on people doing what they love unhindered by directives from visionaries. See e.g. the Cyber truck for an example of the latter.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Freeman on Tuesday September 10, @02:52PM (1 child)
Computers are a tool. Assuming that you could "defeat religion" because "on a computer" is pretty crazy. It's entirely possible to be extremely intelligent and believe in something otherworldly.
The USA successfully exported it's culture to the world via TV, computers have been more or less optional in that regard. One could argue that computers have been a large part of it and you would probably be right.
Universal education is actually reasonably doable, but you have to get people to care about that first. A lot of people are busy just trying to get food into their mouths from day to day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs [wikipedia.org] The cognitive function doesn't even really start until you've got a lot of other things handled. Even then, look at the likes of Harvard and then look at your average community college. A lot of education is "keeping the rich that way and leading along the poor suckers otherwise". Yes, you can "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" in some cases. The average poor person has such a huge disadvantage at life in general though, compared with someone who was born with a silver spoon in their mouths.
Computers are a tool and expecting them to be anything more than that is a bit grandiose.
Having a single education, a single culture, etc. sounds like the start of the plot of multiple dystopian sci-fi adventures. Even in Star Trek where Earth was supposed to be a "United Earth" there was the portrayal of different cultures.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday September 10, @05:54PM
It's not a question of intelligence but knowledge. The more educated you are, the more you know about the world from a scientific standpoint, the less likely you are to believe in supernatural.
Of course, there has been plenty of scientists who believed in God, and ordinay folks who didn't complete high scholl who never believed in anything. But statistically, education tends to defeats godly nonsense. And also, scientists who believe in God tend to have a milder case than ignorant believers.
The point was that computers would help science advance, and it would help spread education. And it's turned out to do both of those things, but it also spread religious garbage and stupid misconceptions orders of magnitude faster thanks to the craptastic world of social media.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Tuesday September 10, @12:54PM (4 children)
Since Crunch was there perhaps they should have talked about all the blueboxes Steve made and other Steve sold. Did that money go to fund early Apple? Is Apple in that regard a company built on BlueBox money? Something something criminal enterprise money.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Tuesday September 10, @02:37PM (3 children)
They did. They mentioned the Blue Box money going into making the PCB for the Apple I. Which was quite an endeavour at the time, without PCBWay and JLCPCB competing on price. Nice data point on the saying “behind every great fortune is an equally great crime” (attributed to Balzac).
I watched all three episodes on Draper's YT channel, I'm mostly curious what Woz knew at which time. I was wondering how much knowledge of Lancaster's TV Typewriter cookbook knowledge he had, and maybe if he knew about state machine floppy controllers for S-100 that had been done before Disk II. Woz says in the series that he had a lot of TV knowledge at the time and only later and only once looked at Lancaster's schematics and that he had this idea that he could use DRAM because he had the video counters anyway. I try to understand thought path which led to the all TTL, yet minimal, Apple II video which all its quirks, like the 7 pixels per 8 bits, and the color carrier tricks both with lores and the half-pixel shift in hires.
But it's also amazing how they carelessly walked the narrow path between being jailed for phreaking (with the option to start a word processing software company in jail...), and becoming industry leaders, how the informal network of engineers at bars and grills worked, or how Draper's buddy got his tour of Xerox.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday September 10, @03:19PM (2 children)
I clearly should have read further down the article as it was mentioned there. I might even watch the youtube things later on. In hindsight it might have been or was a thin line perhaps between crime and success for many people. But it's somewhat interesting that nothing really became of it, a few warnings, investigations going nowhere and now it's ancient history and the statute of limitation is long past.
I don't have fond memories of making PCB:s before all these services opened up. It was a pain. Only made small once. It was better to just get blank breadboard/prototypeboards and lay cable between components. Then to engage in chemical etching and such things. Now you just launch your favorite CAD type program, draw and layout some stuff. Connect the components. Push a few more buttons and then send it to China and a fairly short while later they show up finished and glorious in the mail. I wish it wasn't going to China, but it's a cost thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 10, @03:50PM (1 child)
I wish it wasn't going to China, but it's a cost thing.
There was a pretty good one in Bulgaria for a while, but for whatever reason they stopped. It'd be interesting to know why but I guess they got both undercut and out marketed.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday September 10, @05:28PM
There are a few still in the EU and the UK. But it's a cost thing. Also it's hard to know if they actually do things here, in EU, or if they are just some kind of sales front and everything is sent to China or India or whatnot instead to be made and then shipped back. Most of the time if I order some they are back in no more then a week, that said they have been very small boards so they can just wrap them up and put them in a padded envelope. It's not like there are 1000's of them or they are ridiculously large. Then it might be other issues. Sort of how one can just order components from China, dirt cheap, free shipping etc. You just have to spend a bit of time afterwards to actually test them to see that you got what you actually ordered.