
Steve Wozniak On Education, Engineering and Apple - arcanus
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99-professional/8963-steve-wozniak-on-education-engineering-a-apple.html
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Bud
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.

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

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orionblastar
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.

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rmason
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...](https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10153568918249655)

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digi_owl
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.

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orionblastar
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.

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digi_owl
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.

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julienchastang
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.

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lyime
He is not.

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

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orionblastar
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak](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.

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dang
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.

