Apple II Bits

Steve Wozniak has given many interviews about the old days of inventing the Apple II and working with Steve Jobs. But back when the old days weren’t yet old, Woz was interviewed by Michael Harrison, who hosted the Harrison’s Mic talk radio show on KMET in Los Angeles, 1975–1986. Harrison has since transitioned from radio to podcast, and he’s now re-aired this 1982 interview as an episode of his podcast, The Michael Harrison Interview. The episode is 33 minutes long, with the 1982 interview beginning at 4:49. It’s a fascinating opportunity to draw parallels between Woz’s observations and predictions, and the culture that eventually arose.

Woz wastes no time in sharing his insights into how the Apple II created a new generation of entrepreneurs:

It’s really amazing to find how many 16-year-olds in high school right now are making more money than even anybody’s parents in the schools are making… They’ve gone and written a program for a personal computer, like a game, a popular game, or a Rubik’s cube program, or a chess program, and they’ll market it through some of the companies that have sprung up to sell these programs, and good ones sell like hotcake… I don’t know a single one that’s as old as I. I’m 32. All the very popular names that are coming up, they’re almost all 16, 18.

This echoes Tim Enwall at Misty Robotics, who recently attributed the success of the Apple II to this third-party innovation:

Apple didn’t create or find VisiCalc. Based on the Apple II providing a relatively affordable, sufficiently powerful, and easily enough programmed platform, VisiCalc found it.

Woz also predicted the ubiquity of personal computers:

Harrison: Do you see that spreading to all of society in 10–20 years, where we’re all going to become electronics freaks?

Woz: Oh, no. No. Not at all… We all have TVs. We all have Hi-Fis. And we’re not TV freaks or Hi-Fi freaks or car freaks. But there’s going to be a lot more exposure to it. It’ll be commonplace.

This is the same thing Leigh Alexander meant during GamerGate when she wrote, "‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over." — not that an audience or culture was dead, but that it had become so pervasive as to be meaningless. We can all enjoy a good game, computer, or recipe without being a programmer, engineer, or chef; you don’t have to understand what’s happening under the hood to appreciate the results.

Speaking of electronic games, Woz expressed some concerns about this emerging medium:

It’s great when it’s fun and it’s a game, but you can get very intense into it, just like some people get into football very intensely and wind up hitting the TV set. When you take a game very seriously, it can be very addicting and result in a lot of negative behavior… We don’t have any evidence, but we know it. We know that it’s a problem.

I was surprised and disappointed to hear Woz take such a strong stance while admitting there’s no evidence to support it. We live in a society that often ignores or contradicts scientific evidence when it contradicts our "common sense". Of course, at the dawn of personal computing, there was little evidence one way or the other; nowadays, I hope any opinion Woz has now was arrived after reviewing the available resources.

Did you learn anything new in this interview? Was the Woz of 1982 much different from the Woz of today? Leave a comment with your reactions below!

(Hat tip to Talkers)