Apple II Bits

Here’s an oldie but goodie that shows Steve Wozniak‘s character and sense of humor. In 1979, when computers were the newest thing and its inventors were surprised by their own overnight fame, The Woz lent his image to a product endorsement: the Datsun 280ZX sports coupe, also known as the Fairlady Z. Why Nissan thought that 1979 America was ready to be hawked to by a computer geek, I don’t know, but the resulting commercial follows:

On its own, the commercial is a fun snapshot of Silicon Valley’s history. But Woz rarely lets a single joke lie, so nearly three decades later, he updated the promo
for modern times:

Note the wink to the audience in Woz’s license plate: “APPLE II”. Would he really be so proud of his most famous invention as to put it on his car, thirty years later? Even if so, I suspect the plate was a dummy manufactured for the purpose of the commercial (or for one of Woz’s many pranks). Reviewing the personalized license plate ordering system of the state of California suggests that some designs of vanity plates can indeed be seven characters long, though using all of them leaves no room for spaces or half-spaces. However, requesting “APPLEII” reports that, “Sorry, The plate you have requested is not available.”

License to geek.

If that plate is out there, I hope Woz has it!

(Hat tips to John Herrman and Sean Fahey)

Another podcast I finally caught up on this past weekend was Engadget’s interview with Steve Wozniak, which debuted this past January. It had taken this long for me to listen because the episode is available as an MP4 video only. I eventually stripped the audio and put it on a portable player I could listen to on my way home from VCF.

I’ve featured plenty of interviews with the Woz, but this one has to be my favorite. Unlike his brief appearance on NPR last December, it was nice and lengthy, running more than a half-hour. Given so much time, he was able to pontificate on a variety of topics. The tricks he’d played in his youth have been well-reported, but this was the first time I’d heard of him extending that mischief to his encounters with the government. It was also one of the rare times I heard Woz talk about his role with, and the future of, storage and memory company Fusion-io, which is soon to make an IPO. And with a moderator to guide Woz, he was less rambling yet more interesting than his recent appearance at the American Humanist Association.

The interview starts just a few minutes into the episode and runs until 40:51, followed by some live chiptune music by Zen Albatross. You can download the show from iTunes or watch it here:

Steve Wozniak is admirable not just for his inventions or even his stature as a geek role model, but also for his philanthropy. Consistent with his childhood dream to be a fifth-grade teacher, a dream he realized for eight years after leaving Apple, he also founded the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose — hence its location on Woz Way.

Furthering the cause of creativity and childhood education, on February 1, Woz sat down with CBS journalist Dana King at the Bay Area Discovery Museum to talk about his life, education, and accomplishments. The audio is marred by the sounds of the lunching audience, but it’s worth tolerating for the opportunity to hear Woz speak.

The full interview is 1:05:15 long. Here’s an excerpt from 32:01 into the video, where Woz describes how he introduced color to the Apple II:

One of my favorite questions to Woz was, “What’s it like in your head?” His rather humble reply should surprise nobody. He also makes an observation that will resonate with Apple II users: “I’m glad I had a part in this: Computers are not just the work tools, but they’re fun.”

The full video is available at Fora.TV or after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, Playboy published an online version of an interview they conducted with Steve Jobs in 1985. With Jobs currently on medical leave, it seems a timely opportunity to review his not-so-humble origins as Apple’s first CEO. Some of my favorite excerpts discuss his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:

Playboy: What happened to the partnership [with Steve Wozniak] as time went on?

Jobs: The main thing was that Woz was never really interested in Apple as a company. He was just sort of interested in getting the Apple II on a printed circuit board so he could have one and be able to carry it to his computer club without having the wires break on the way. He had done that and decided to go on to other things. He had other ideas.

Playboy: Such as the US Festival rock concert and computer show, where he lost something like $10,000,000.

Jobs: Well, I thought the US Festival was a little crazy, but Woz believed very strongly in it.

Playboy: How is it between the two of you now?

Jobs: When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history. He’s going around speaking to a lot of computer events now. He likes that.

Following suit, Newsweek has also published their own 1985 interview with Jobs. In this article are two themes in particular that I have trouble reconciling with the man who leads Apple today. The first is his prediction of his role in the world and in the industry:

I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m 30. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them … I’m probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny …I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

Despite that disclaimer, Jobs has made it practically a corporate philosophy to make Apple customers into beta-testers, with first-generation hardware that is rarely up to snuff. Given the "incremental improvements" made each year to the iPhone and soon the iPad — both products being not revolutionary so much as evolutionary — it seems Jobs had a change of heart.

Second, there’s the dejection Jobs expressed at his diminished role in his final days at Apple:

I was, you know, asked to move out of my office. They leased a little building across the street from most of the other Apple buildings. I, we nicknamed it Siberia … So I moved across the street, and I made sure that all of the executive staff had my home phone number. I knew that John had it, and I called the rest of them personally and made sure they had it and told them that I wanted to be useful in any way i could, and to please call me if I could help on anything. And they all had a, you know, a cordial phrase, but none of them ever called back. And so I used to go into work, I’d get there and I would have one or two phone calls to perform, a little bit of mail to look at. But … this was in June, July … most of the corporate-management reports stopped flowing by my desk. A few people might see my car in the parking lot and come over and commiserate. And I would get depressed and go home in three or four hours, really depressed. I did that a few times and I decided that was mentally unhealthy. So I just stopped going in. You know, there was nobody really there to miss me.

For a man who was and is often characterized as blustery, overbearing, and obnoxious, such humble disconsolation seems unlike the legend that is Steve Jobs.

Finally, Apple II blogger Steven Black injects some further humanity into the discussion:

… as a guy in the industry who cut my teeth on, and still have massive affection for, Apple ][s, and who from my early teens took a deep interest in all of the stories surrounding the germination of the personal computer industry in the 70s & early 80s, and who lived through the times that saw its initial genesis, I can’t help putting all of the intellectualism aside and just hoping that this doesn’t signal the end of Steve’s career, or indeed an inexorably downward spiral in his health.

Steve’s an icon and a giant of the industry. This sounds blindingly obvious to say. But for many of us around my age, he is in a very real sense the father of our careers, and the founder of a not insignificant proportion of our way of life. I just hope all of the non-geek Apple customers out there can appreciate what the man has achieved in his lifetime. If & when Steve is lost to us, whenever that may occur, it will really feel like the captain has left the bridge.

(Hat tips to Taimur Asad, Leander Kahney, and Arnold Kim)

As previously reported, Steve Wozniak was on-hand last month to give the press a tour of the Computer History Museum‘s new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing“. The exhibit opened last week, and Todd Miller of the San Francisco Chronicle took the opportunity to speak further with Apple Inc.’s lesser-known founder, learning more about Woz’s motivation to write BASIC for the Apple-1 and how he improved upon the original machine’s design with the Apple II:

Here’s my favorite quotation: “Most of the big companies and — a lot of new thinking went into them. They were risky, and it was difficult to say whether they would work or not — just like the Apple II.”

It’s so encouraging to know that the genius who invented our favorite computer is so welcome to continue speaking about that topic. As Jason Scott recently said in the Retro Computing Roundtable podcast, “The retrocomputing culture is very, very lucky, because … so many of the people who formed what’s important to us are part of the community still. It’s so rare that you’d have someone who’s into old cars, and the guy who invented the cars shows up all the time. We’re so lucky because we get people like Wozniak who show up and are like, ‘Oh, yeah! Yeah, hi! Oh, did you like that? Oh, thanks!’ as opposed to we all dream of what that person must’ve thought.” Thank you, Steve Wozniak, for being that guy.

While Mr. Miller’s videos are new, there were plenty more shot at last month’s press tour. Check out the original blog post for a half-dozen other appearances by the Woz.

Steve Wozniak certainly does get around! First he appeared on a geek trading card. Then he showed up in London for Christie’s Apple-1 auction before flying back to California to give a press tour of the Computer History Museum. After all that, he still had time to call into National Public Radio’s quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!

Rather than appear in the studio, Woz dialed into the December 11th episode of the show for a quick interview, in which he discussed why he created the Apple-1, what he thought computers would be used for, and how their many intended applications have surprised him. He then skipped ahead three decades from Apple’s origins to his love affair with their current products, explaining why he has three iPhones and what he uses each one for. Part of it is for redundancy, as Woz observed, “Everything that has a computer in it will fail — from a watch to a car to a radio to an iPhone. It’ll fail if it has a computer in it.” His suggestion for how to fix the situation will have you howling!

Woz was then quizzed under the auspices of the game “Not My Job”, with a set of questions grouped under the heading “This Apple Doesn’t Need No Genius Bar”. Three trivia questions about real, fruity apples demonstrated Woz’s ability to think his way out of any puzzle, be it technological or agrarian.

Here’s the clip:

You can download the MP3 from NPR’s Web site, which also offers a transcript. Or you can download the entire 47-minute episode from iTunes, in which Woz’s appearance can be found at time indices 18:11 – 28:48.

(Hat tip to mono of Say Cheese!)