(no subject)

[unbibium]

I'm reading iWoz, in audiobook form.

I'm glad it's unabridged. Even though I'm not a hardware guy, I'm fascinated by all the technical details about the stuff Woz built.

Also, the longevity of the Apple 2 was already impressive, as I'd seen them installed in my high school as late as 1996. But then I learned that the design was completed before Woz even left Hewlett-Packard.

It woke me up a little. The dawn of home computing was exciting enough for me when I was a little kid. But to people who were grown up at the time, it must have been even more magical. Could you imagine being the first person in your city to buy Visicalc?

Comments

[halfabee.livejournal.com]

Yep, I remember the dawn of PCs - when even the idea of an electronic spreadsheet which would automatically re-calculate as you updated was . . . magical. I still have a copy of VP Planner Plus (a Lotus 1-2-3 v1 clone) around. Text mode & written in pure ASM. Small and fast!

IMHO the Disk ][ controller was one of Woz's more brilliant creations.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Well, then buy yourself a copy of iWoz, because he talks about the disk drive in great detail.

I wondered what Woz thought about the computers I grew up with like the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. I can at least tell that he'd hate the Commodore 64 just because of how slow the disk drive is, and WHY it's that slow. (It's because the video chip screws up the timing. WTF, right?)