Steve Wozniak On Education, Engineering and Apple | Hacker News Reader

Steve Wozniak On Education, Engineering and Apple

i-programmer.info

31 pointsarcanus14 comments

Yet another example of the generosity of Woz. He gave a 30-minute video interview to a grade-school kid, just because he's a nice guy. There are a lot of tech journalists who would give anything for that interview.

Not sure this comes as a surprise; wasn't he basically just the business and promotion side of it until sometime after those models?

Jobs worked for Atari and designed video games. He was friends with Woz in college and Woz built blue boxes to make free long distance calls and they both sold them to raise money.

Woz worked for HP making calculators and Jobs worked for Atari making video games. Jobs got the idea for Breakout to be the first video game in color, and made a deal with Woz to make the Breakout game for him and share the money.

Jobs was always the visionary the one who saw how things should be, Woz was the engineer that made things happen for Jobs.

Jobs did the business end of things, marketing, public relations, promotion, giving speeches, while Woz tinkered with stuff and got the stuff to work.

The early Apple, the plan was to make a personal computer as cheap as they could with the best quality for that price. Which meant using the MOS 6502 instead of the Motorola 6800 because the 6502 was cheaper. Woz would test the cheaper chips from electronic catalogs to see which ones were best for the money. Woz made the Apple I and it was so cheap at $666.66 that it undercut the other personal computers on the market. Woz later made the Apple II and invented a floppy disk drive for it and Applesoft BASIC and other things.

When Jobs started the Lisa and joined the Macintosh project later on, he didn't involve Woz and had other engineers and wanted to make the opposite of the Apple II series, a more powerful, expensive computer based on the Motorola 68000 that had a GUI to make it easier to use. The Macintosh project was to be an easy to use $600 8 bit computer, but when Jobs joined it and took over he used things from the Lisa project to make it based on the 68000 instead. It didn't sell very well and Jobs got fired in 1985 from Apple.

Jobs made his Next company and instead of starting from scratch used Unix instead to base his system on. When Apple bought out Next, and brought Jobs back it merged MacOS with NextOS to make Mac OSX.

But in the early Apple the Apple I and II were done by Woz. Without those there would be no Apple and thus no Macintosh and other stuff.

I was in the audience when Woz spoke to engineering students at Michigan State. He was on campus to receive an honorary degree.

He said that he was on the Macintosh team before Jobs. Apparently they were working on something completely different, but they were both on the project at the same time when Jobs pivoted it.

Woz participated in an interesting discussion recently on Facebook about the early days of Apple:

https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/1015356891824965...

That seems to jive well with the impression i have gotten of Jobs as an outsider.

The guy never seemed to have a real interest in the innards of tech, only how it looked and acted on the outside.

Still, i find the lines about how the Mac was pretty much immune to vulnerabilities because it was mostly a ROM with a fancy UI interesting. It brings to mind what Google is doing with ChromeOS. And how you could abuse older systems like C64 to hell and back, because one power cycle was all that was needed to bring it back to a pristine state.

The C64 had the KERNAL OS that loaded from ROM, only had like 49K free in BASIC. The C64 DOS was on the 1541 drive which had its own CPU and memory and the DOS was on a ROM.

Both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga had Mac emulators with a serial port or printer port dongle that loaded a Mac 128K ROM onto it to boot up Mac System floppy disks. Atari ST had Magic Sack, Amiga had AMax. Both had the same 68000 CPU as the Mac but had better graphics and sound chips so things ran faster.

As I recall there were viruses for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Macintosh even if most of their stuff was on ROM. Just not as many viruses as DOS had on PC Clones.

I think the major difference was that by booting from ROM it was harder for a virus to stick around, as there was no boot sector or equivalent to latch on to.

iWoz by Gina Smith and Wozniak is a fascinating read. BTW, does anyone know if Woz is still an Apple employee? He was until recently, representing Apple at computer shows and whatnot.

He is not.

Isn't he a perpetual "employee," drawing a $120k-ish salary every year? Even though he doesn't technically "work" at Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

Yes indeed he still gets a salary, owns stock, and is listed as a co-founder of Apple.

> He is not.

He very much is. He's still listed in the employee directory*

*...throwaway account for obvious reasons.

He says he is, for a token salary.

Please do not use the titles of HN submissions to editorialize. (Submitted title was 'Wozniak: “Steve Jobs Played No Role in My Designs for the Apple I and II”'.)

If you want to explain what you think is important about a submission, you can always add a comment to the thread, on the same level as everyone else.

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