Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Steve Wozniak on Designing and Building Apples 1 and 2.

Port 25 : Catching up with Woz: Sam interviews Steve Wozniak. I was in the audience for Robert Scoble’s interview with Steve Wozniak at the University of Washington on Friday, October 6. What Woz had to say about the ways that he built on the work of others and how he passed it on to others was inspiring for me.  It is too easy to forget how much we did that in the first generations of computing.  I was also fascinated by his account of what inspired him to become an engineer.  I urged those in his party to encourage visits to pre-collegiate settings where youngsters can learn what can be inspiring and rewarding through exploration of technology.

{tags: orcmid Woz Wozniak Apple CP4E}

The PodTech.net interview may not be up for a while.  Meanwhile, there is a great interview recorded earlier Friday while Woz visited Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab. Port 25 has the video clip for Windows Media Player, an MP3 feed of the audio, and a link to an MPEG-4 of the 16–minute video interview.

The entire video is worth watching. About 9m30s in, Woz talks about how he included graphics as well as text, realizing that he could now implement a software Breakout, the game he originally created for Atari arcade hardware.  That is when he realized that games with Apple Basic would open up new worlds of creativity for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and everyone else who would use an Apple 2 in the home (wasn’t it Apple ][, or am I thinking of something else?).  Following that, he describes his commitment to provide all of the technical documentation so that others could understand the workings of the computer and build on it.

[updated 2006–10–08T18:54Z I fractured so many sentences that I couldn’t stand it and have reposted a cleaner version.  And then corrected the new mistakes that introduced.]

posted by orcmid at 10/07/2006 06:01:00 PM