The Apple-II by Stephen Wozniak

How about a trip down memory lane with our favorite geek? This is a reprint of an article from BYTE magazine in May 1977. Apple co-founder, chief-cook-and-bottle-washer, designer of the Apple I & II and all around good guy, Stephen Wozniak, sounds off on the merits of the Apple II in great detail. A really good refresher of the evolution of the computer through the words of one of its greatest innovators.

The Apple II was my first computer; I loved it!

Amazing. An Apple computer where the actual details are discussed---in detail! No marketing overhype. No magical experience. No smug hypocrite hawking last year's technology for twice the price. No mindless zombies screaming at you. No unicorn dust. No hiding everything from the user. No child's-toy UI.

Just a real computer being discussed by a real guy.

Fascinating.

That article showed the attention people used to pay to making really tight code. He worked to shave off a single KB of data in his program.

People should also look at the price difference between 4KB and 48KB or RAM. Of course back then a 12 fold increase in RAM mattered much more than it does today, especially when such tiny amounts were involved.

I learned a lot from the old Apple II. Of course, the Apple of years past is completely different after the second coming of Jobs. It was a lot better and more geek friendly back then. I was awesome at the Apple IIe back in the day, even teaching the teachers some awesome new stuff. I had a C64 and a TI99/4A, but the Apple II was a staple in my childhood.

As much as I love Microsoft, I'd rather meet and have lunch with Steve Wozniak than with anyone else. Just to shoot shit, and not even talk about Apple. Seems like a damn awesome guy from everything I've seen and heard about him. I'll meet him someday, I'm sure.

Woz is the man. This is down the street from SJSU:

http://bayimages.net/images/17k/woz-way-street-sign-san-jose-16758.jpg

I had apples from the IIe up to the G1 iMac,

Teenyman45 said:

That article showed the attention people used to pay to making really tight code. He worked to shave off a single KB of data in his program.

People should also look at the price difference between 4KB and 48KB or RAM. Of course back then a 12 fold increase in RAM mattered much more than it does today, especially when such tiny amounts were involved.

Click to expand...

It's a real shame that a lot of developers don't pay nearly as much attention nowadays. Most from-the-factory Android UI's are laggy (Sense, TouchWiz, looking at you) and on perfectly fast hardware too.

Yeah too much room to fudge stuff and make it 'good enough' nowadays.

No optimisation or radical ways to improve anything. Just cut and paste from the old code and change the colour and font.

Lazy!

It's funny but back then you kind of knew that the software you were buying was pretty much as good as it could be.

Knight_of_BAAWA said:

Amazing. An Apple computer where the actual details are discussed---in detail! No marketing overhype. No magical experience. No smug hypocrite hawking last year's technology for twice the price. No mindless zombies screaming at you. No unicorn dust. No hiding everything from the user. No child's-toy UI.

Just a real computer being discussed by a real guy.

Fascinating.

Click to expand...

Well there really have been a few distinct phases in Apple's life. The original Apple was the "Woz" Apple. The products were designed to compete against the big boys for less, were designed by a genuine geek, and just marketed by his friend who was good at marketing.

After Woz's accident, Apple started transitioning in to the first Jobs Apple. Here the focus became more on control, and about selling things as "better" than the other guy, though it was technical at the time. Apple was often, ummm, "creative" with the truth but the common theme was "Our shit is higher quality, better tech, than their shit and is worth what you pay." It was that way for quite some time until Jobs got ousted.

Then you had the Sculley Apple. He tried to steer Apple more towards a mainstream computer company, to compete directly against IBM. Apple's platform was actually opened up for clones, and they even toyed with an x86 OS (the betas of which you can find out there) to sell on commodity PCs to compete with Windows.

Now you have the modern Apple. Jobs came back as Apple was not doing well and turn it from a computer company in to a consumer electronics and fashion company. They sell style now as much as anything else, they are what is cool to own. The focus is on iDevices and a complete walled garden ecosystem.

Who knows where it goes now? It is likely that eventually their cool streak will wear off, as fashion trends always do, and they'll be just another consumer electronics company, albeit an absolutely massive one. They'll then have to transition to a different style of sales and strategy.

Wozniak, I hope he never becomes a forgotten piece of computer history. Everyone will remember Steve Jobs, but I hope people also remember that Steve Jobs would have never gotten to where he was before his death without the genius of Wozniak.

SW was the original Head Genius.

My Dad still has his Apple IIe. Played my first ever video game on it: Death in the Carribean.

300 bytes for Woz's 16-bit VM on 8-bit hardware. That still blows my mind.

My first PC was an Apple IIc with a color monitor (they did 15 colors back then). Most of my friends were jealous of me because their IBM PCs were either monochrome or 8-bit CGA graphics (extended CGA was exotic and expensive anyway).

People may laugh today, but Apple BASIC was rather pimp in its day. It was certainly my first programming language, and I recall you could do all sorts of neat tricks with it. You could bypass the interpreter and invoke your own assembly routines via poke/peek, which was handy when speed mattered.

Man, those were the goold ol' days.

Didn't know the Apple II had a 1MHz clock. I remember the Atari (400/800 and later 8 bits) being ~1.8 (googling gets 1.78MHz) and that it was based on easily available crystals for TVs (read cheaper). Since the Commodore 64 was also 1MHz, I suspect that the cost of binning some part was pretty big when the Woz choose that (best guess was memory, but the 6502 was something like $25 versus several hundreds for Intel's "competition". No idea if the ~2MHz 6502 was much higher.)

Also forgot too many things about the 6502. Was gobsmacked it had a 16 bit memory address (really weird since the DRAM needed to be split up) considering the special "page zero mode": I guess the big difference was that you needed to stream one less instruction byte into the CPU (youngins see the importance of saving k (and even bytes) above), as well as there being a good chance you can save a cycle or two pulling the ram out (presumably not done on the Apple II or any mass market device I've heard of).

Teenyman45 said:

That article showed the attention people used to pay to making really tight code. He worked to shave off a single KB of data in his program.

Click to expand...

This kind of thing still matters in game development (particularly for feature phone and on AAA console games, where memory constraints are severe) and in web development. It's become less important with web development over the years, where you no longer have to be particularly afraid to go over 200KB or so, and might end up blowing 50K just on a JavaScript library, but it's still pretty important to keep the size of web applications down, and most web developers I know pay pretty close attention to what they're doing in that respect.

/me not missing cassette tape storage

The Apple ][+ was my first PC. Complete with 16kb of ram, dual 5.25" floppy drives, and a 14" CGA monitor. Times were good. My favorite games was Ultima V, The Magic Candle, and Flight-sim.

i still have mine with a modified Apple Cat ][ modem at 1200 baud full duplex (that thing cost a fortune back in the day), my modified 128k memory card plug-in where you had to take chip 0 out of the ram bank and plug in a ribbon cable into it instead. I also added 4 floppies and had an Apple Cider 40meg hard-drive that was just as big as the case. Love that thing and it still works.

You mean the only time in apple history when they did not make a crap apple products and apple hipsters did not exist AKA the early 80s?

The fucking apple 2 and the first mac are the only apple products I have ever seen that are worth something. Hell the fucking apple 2 did not suck then woz left and everything went to crap and steve jobs the worlds most evil man came to power and created the fucking apple hipsters.