Apple II Bits

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will unveil in January 2011 an exhibit entitled “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing“. The press got a sneak peek last week, with their tour guide being a historical figure himself: no less than Steve Wozniak.

Imagine what an experience that must’ve been! Seeing the computers that launched an industry and revolutionized a world, described by the man who was there to make it happen. Such narration should be captured and offered as an audio tour to future visitors of the museum.

Fortunately, this rare experience was documented by the many journalists in attendance. Harry McCracken of Technologizer.com took several photos, focusing more on his tour guide than on the exhibit himself. Along the way, Woz commented on several computers that influenced his design of the Apple II, even stopping to pose with some of his own creations that are included in the museum.

As the group walked among machines capable of so little compared to today’s computing behemoths, McCracken observed that Woz “again and again … came back to praising engineering minimalism — accomplishing a task with the fewest possible parts and the simplest possible code.” It’s a design philosophy that I expect is shared among many Apple II developers to this day. For example, in an interview with Juiced.GS in December 2009, Alex Freed of Carte Blanche fame said, “Electronic design is my day job and I work with considerably more advanced devices, but some ideas from the Apple II days are still valid. For example, I always try to find a way to use minimum hardware to do the job.”

For the Mercury News, David Cassidy provided more prose than photos and was more reflective than reportorial, wondering if Steve Wozniak isn’t more deserving of the fame and adoration that is normally heaped upon Apple’s other co-founder, Steve Jobs.

And Robert Scoble has a 360-degree panoramic photograph taken as Woz was presenting before an original Apple-1.

UPDATE: Therese Poletti shares this video from the tour:

UPDATE 2: Mark Milian at CNN also has a video:

UPDATE 3: Peter Watson pointed me to this series of videos from ZDNet:

• Wozniak on designing the first Apple computer
• Wozniak on his early work as a hacker
• Wozniak on his first favorite portable device
• Wozniak’s computer history tour
• Wozniak on humans and technology

Woz seems to be everywhere these days, but one has to make onself available to such opportunities. The Computer History Museum is one of many historical sites throughout Silicon Valley that I would be thrilled to see. My employer, Computerworld, has its offices in Framingham, Massachusetts, about an hour west of Boston. But we’re affiliated with both PC World and Macworld, which make their home in San Francisco. Computerworld has at least one employee in that location, and I can’t help but think that maybe it’d be mutually beneficial for me to be the second.

Like every Apple II user alive, I think the world of Steve Wozniak. He deserves every award, accolade, honor, and recognition the world can bestow upon him.

Thanks to the art of Len Peralta of Jawbone Radio and the humor of Paul and Storm, Woz is one step closer to that rightful immortality. He now has what every superstar hopes and dreams for: a trading card.

By the time the year-long Geek A Week project wraps up in March 2011, it will have honored 52 geeks with trading cards, featuring an original illustration and writeup. Woz, pictured to the right, has on the back of his card the following bio:

Flux capacitor? Child’s play! That is to say, he invented it as a child, in 2063. That afternoon he affixed it to his AirSegway, rocketed off, and quickly found himself stranded in the 1960s after the prototype device burned out. With spare time on his hands, he went on to assemble the first successful personal computer at the “suggestion” of his new friend, Steve Jobs. They formed Apple Computer in 1976, and when the company went public in 1980 they both became millionaires, enabling The Woz to purchase the plutonium he needed to continue his well-documented travels. Of course he constantly checks in on our timeline, fostering technological innovation and spreading goodwill with each landing.

The complete set of trading cards is a who’s-who of geekdom, counting among its honorees Star Trek alumnus Wil Wheaton, musicians Jonathan Coulton and MC Frontalot (the latter whom was featured on Get Lamp), actors Felicia Day and “Hi, I’m a PC” John Hodgman, author John Scalzi, MST3K alumni teams RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic, creative genius Weird Al Yankovic, astronomer and skeptic Phil Plait, and gamer Major Nelson.

In addition to the downloadable cards, Mr. Peralta has also produced a podcast in which he speaks with each of the featured geeks. The episodes are available from the project’s Web site or from iTunes. Woz’s interview is episode #23.

Where do I sign up to reserve a physical edition of the complete set of cards?

(Hat tip to Ann Hoevel)

Steve Wozniak, who this month turned 60, recently spoke at the Flash Media Summit in Santa Clara, California, in his role as chief scientist of solid-state drive company Fusion-io. In his closing keynote speech, entitled “Driving Innovation with Solid-State Technologies“, Wozniak reflected that hardware memory has played a pivotal role in all his designs, from the earliest to the latest. The IDG News Service reports:

“The biggest decision I made in most of the projects of my life was what memory to use that’s the exact right, smallest, simplest, and more importantly, the cheapest there is,” Wozniak told the audience in a packed auditorium.

Even the first major commercial product he designed with co-founder Steve Jobs, the Apple II, was defined largely by memory. Facing the problem of how to refresh the characters on the screen fast enough to keep up with a microprocessor that could do a million operations per second, he came up with the idea of devoting some of the computer’s dynamic memory to the display, he said.

You know what my favorite part of that passage is? Not the technical details, or the acknowledgement of the Apple II, or even the genius of Woz. It’s the “packed auditorium”. Twenty-five years after he left the company he founded, Steve Wozniak is still a superstar. It’s not just his appearance on Dancing with the Stars that has put him in the spotlight. Engineers, programmers, designers, and geeks across the globe recognize the brilliance and courage that has continuously allowed Woz to work magic.

Although he was no longer with Apple Computer Inc. by the time the “Think Different” campaign was unveiled, Woz is nonetheless the embodiment of that advertisement.

“When you’re in school, you’re always taught that the right answer is the same answer everyone else has,” Wozniak said. It’s a lesson he’s learned several times in years of engineering. “Clear out your mind of the way the world is today,” he said.