
Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System - empressplay
https://paleotronic.com/2018/05/19/steve-wozniak-talks-disk/
======
Malic
If I recall correctly, Steven Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer
Revolution" also covered some of this story.

Woz was intimidated by disk controllers because he didn't know much about
them, other than they were big complicated things. So starting with his own
ignorance as a fresh slate, he ended up with something better than his former
employer HP had in their products.

Sometimes (Sometimes! Not always!) not knowing better can be helpful.

~~~
czechdeveloper
Being genius helps with that.

~~~
archagon
I feel like "genius" is almost always an ex post facto label that's doled out
to make us feel better about our own lack of ambition. That person did
something really wild and interesting? Clearly they're a genius, so why even
bother striving for anything quite so good?

Same with the recent Steve Jobs threads. Or any thread featuring prominent
programmers or founders.

I think immediately reaching for the "genius defense" (whether deserved or
not) does far more harm than good.

~~~
newnewpdro
You're right.

Exceptional labels are often used to abdicate responsibility of the mediocre
for their own mediocrity.

It's easier to label someone as special than it is to admit you didn't put in
the time they did, or that your fear of failure prevents you from trying.

This particular Woz story doesn't scream of "genius" to me.

It screams of curiosity and confidence, a fearlessness, of a young and
foolhardy geek swimming in opportunity and it enabled him to discover some
interesting, innovative things.

The part where his (probably senior) hardware dept. colleague trolled him into
completely ripping apart his work and redoing it all for cosmetic reasons with
a single sentence saying "Steve, you mean you’re going to go with less than
perfect?" had me laughing heartily, and caused me to reflect on the times
similar things had been done to me early in my career.

------
nielsbot
People implemented some pretty crazy disk read/write routines on top of this
for copy protection... I find it super interesting.
[https://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/08/27/apple-ii-copy-
prote...](https://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/08/27/apple-ii-copy-protection/)

------
cyphrack
This is explained in detail in woz's autobiography. I read it all in one
sitting. Great book all around, and as an added bonus, I got to meet woz the
next day after reading his bio, completely by chance. Weird.

~~~
tomcam
Note to self: read Scarlett Johanssen’s autobiography all in one day

~~~
daemoncoder
Cargo cult at its finest :-)

------
akshayB
It is always great to read stories about obsolete technologies and how people
put lot of effort, thinking and energy into solving the roadblocks. This
provides a great prospective of history and how things evolved over time which
kids these days might have zero idea about.

~~~
maxxxxx
It's not only historical. Stories like this show how good engineers work
through a problem. There is a lot to learn there.

~~~
puzzle
Well, it's interesting on the human and historical side, especially the part
that it was all self-taught, but on the technical side, it's not clear from
this interview that he's using GCR and how
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_coded_recording#Apple](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_coded_recording#Apple))
and that e.g. Commodore had a more efficient scheme that allowed a whole 170KB
per side, at the same density.

------
wallflower
Since it has not been posted yet, the open sourced Apple ][ source code (the
16-bit read/write) from Paul Laughton and Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton
and some technical design docs can be viewed.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-
cod...](http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-code/)

------
neuromantik8086
Coincidentally, I've been looking into ways to transfer a bunch of data off of
Apple IIe old floppies (assuming there's still data to be transferred on the
media) and I came across this:

[http://adtpro.com/](http://adtpro.com/)

------
martin1b
Woz is always interesting to listen to. He seems really humble and yet not
afraid to try anything. Really inspiring.

------
netsharc
Am I missing the "play audio" link or did people read this and found it easy
to understand. To me, the transcribed rambling makes it a terrible read...

~~~
stelonix
I couldn't disagree more. The raw transcribed text made me feel immersed in
the storytelling.

------
maxxxxx
I love stories like this. True engineering porn.

~~~
wallflower
And if you haven't read jwz's classic, you are in for a treat (text
formatting, possible HN custom diatribe aside)

[https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-
pornography/](https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/)

~~~
js2
JWZ hates HN. Here’s a derefered link:

[http://www.dereferer.org/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejwz%2Eorg%2Fbl...](http://www.dereferer.org/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejwz%2Eorg%2Fblog%2F2002%2F11%2Fengineering%2Dpornography%2F)

~~~
textmode
This (redirect) still sends referrer to www.dereferer.org. The user also has
to lookup and visit two sites instead of one.

Do browsers today not allow users to set the referrer?

Google and countless web businesses prefix urls and act as "dereferers" so
they can collect referers instead of the target websites. There is no shortage
of "derefered" links on the www.

A "dereferer" may be useful for a _website owner_ , but is it useful to a
user? The "defererer" can track the external sites its users visit, creating a
log of users' www browsing, but how does that benefit the user?

For the _user_ , this is sharing far more information with the "dereferer"
than with any individual target site.

Is the "Referer" header truly necessary for the user? It is not even spelled
correctly.

I have been using the www with target url set as referer instead of referring
url for decades with almost zero problems.

The times when a site demands a certain referer are so few and far between
that I cannot remember the last time it happened.

~~~
js2
The link was only to hide the referer header from JWZ because he chooses to
show a very crude image to HN readers. That's all.

~~~
textmode
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer)

about:config network.http.referer.spoofSource

------
agumonkey
remember the thread about silent computers ?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075489](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075489)

very timely with the chapter on floppy tracks and heads.

I never read anything so detailed about woz work. Usually it's all average
apple fan or journalist reverence. But I really love the way he makes that
extra step to use the hardware almost fully.

------
da_chicken
> The important things in life are the ones you remember with emotion and fun
> smiles.

Woz is really special guy.

> I opened up the little box with a screwdriver, and there were some dip
> switches, and I switched them to another position, and didn’t get billed for
> the movie.

But that was still kind of a dick move, Woz.

~~~
naikrovek
Well if the new setting pointed at an empty room instead of an occupied
room... No way to know now, I guess. I like to think he pointed it at an empty
or non-existent room.

~~~
hinkley
At a conference, probably no empty rooms.

------
post_break
Does anyone have audio of the different sounds of drives he describes? Such a
fascinating article.

~~~
zwieback
I don't have audio recordings but 30 years later I can still hear the sound of
my Apple ][ floppy drive re-homing itself, which was a scary sound.

The track-to-track sound he's describing was very pleasant though.

~~~
joezydeco
Instead of having some kind of switch or sensor to know when the read head was
at track 0, the stepper motor just banged the head repeatedly against the
metal stop until it was sure things were in alignment. This was that
"chukchukchukchuk" sound you heard.

I remember playing around with the delays in that routine to make the head
move at different frequencies. With a little bit of playing around you could
make the drive play music.

~~~
scarface74
_With a little bit of playing around you could make the drive play music._

That's basically the same thing you had to do to make the Apple play music
anyway -- do a LDA to a certain address with various timings to toggle the 1
bit speaker. Amazingly enough, you could do legible text to speech with it --
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth)

~~~
joezydeco
Absolutely true....although I'm not sure the Disk ][ head was meant to be
vibrated at 400 Hz like a paper cone speaker was. =)

------
wallflower
Another must read is jl's interview of Wozniak for Founders at Work.

[http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-
wozniak.html](http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html)

------
overcast
"I had never studied nor been near hardware or software."

I don't understand this sentence. Steve Wozniak is saying that he's never been
near hardware or software??

~~~
agildehaus
I think he's referring to hardware and software specific to disk drives.

