HP
About Atari
Posted on 27. Jun, 2012 by awsome_helper in
Comment from E-mail
I was just curious about what you did for Atari? I've heard that Steve Jobs had worked there and was using you for chip consolidation on the Breakout arcade game. I was curious if this is true and what all you did for Atari?
Woz
I did design Breakout for Atari, in very few chips. Steve got me to do it in 4 days which is unbelievable for hardware. We both stayed up all night for 4 nights in a row and barely finished it. While Steve wirewrapped my design and it's changes, I would go onto the factory floor and play all night, for free, the first driving arcade game, GRAN TRACK 10. I got so good that years later, when I'd moved to Scotts Valley, I found a pizza parlor with that game and a free pizza for a score over 36. I could easily do this and after two free pizzas they took the game out.
I worked at Hewlett Packard. I had designed my own version of Pong with very few chips and the Atari people saw it and offered me a job. But I loved HP too much.
What kind of religious beliefs do you have?
Posted on 29. May, 2012 by awsome_helper in
Question from E-mail
I was still in diapers when you and Steve Jobs started Apple in his parents garage. When I was in grade school my father bought me an ADAM computer (Z80) made by Coleco. Soon after that I was turned to the Apple //e. I remember very vividly the first time, at a convention, the first LISA. I was mesmerized. I first start using the MAC 512 in school, the newspaper. I used them until I graduated from school. I had every thing from the 512 to the Power Mac. Then because of the ever rising price of computers I was forced to turn the enemy, IBM. I now own both.
I was wondering how much you used the IBM compatible computers if ever?? Also, who decided to leave the bite out of the Apple in the logo?? You have seemed to be a very concerned person, kudos on your outlook on life. What is your outlook on the afterlife? What kind of religious beliefs do you have? Please reply, and thank you for your contributions to world that I grew up in .
Woz
I barely used the IBM compatables in early times. I kinda' liked the "junior" or something but nobody else did. I use them once in a while these days, when they are needed for my network administration. But I work around them as much as possible. I have a friend who has to use them and develop for and on them and he hates them just as much and always uses a Mac if there's any way. In his case, he's definitely expert enough on both platforms, the PC's are just more difficult.
I talked myself into some very strong religious beliefs around the start of college, and before too. I was very good and pure and generally only crossed streets at the corners and didn't drink or smoke or use drugs or participate in wild things. My religion was a pact with myself. I was very independent and had been strongly influenced by writers like Emmerson and Thoreau. I wasn't to be a follower. I wouldn't conform to my peers and do things just because they did them. If I was to get drunk it would have been alone only, because I had a reason and not just to follow others. I wouldn't join any church because then you're just going along with a bunch of other people. Is it that hard to figure out what's good and bad? I had nothing against the bible but didn't really read it. I admired Jesus. He must have been great to be so well remembered 2000 years later, and his turning the other cheek meant something akin to being good to those who are bad to you or say bad things about you. I picked up a lot of my internal religion cues from Dylan songs and Paul Simon songs (the "Boxer") and Dave Mason ("We just Disagree") and others to this day. I love popular music for these sorts of insights.
My favorite religious person was an engineer at Hewlett Packard who was also a Mormon (but not the former Mormon who was the lab manager and who turned down the idea of a computer, not as the movie shows but rather because he couldn't justify it as an HP product despite the fact that he loved it very much). Bill said that when people say that they have inner goodness, how can you tell if they're telling the truth. Outer things like the clothes they wear or the college they graduated don't mean as much as how they feel about and treat people, what's in their heart. He explained that he didn't forego coffee and other things because they were evil or bad or unhealthy. But these sorts of sacrifices are on the outside where everybody can see. Others can't see your inside but they can see these things. If you make such sacrifices for you religion and never waver, people can see that you hold true to your religion's tenets and beliefs, they can see that you must be true to these other tenets of being good as well.
What kind of education did you have?
Posted on 29. May, 2012 by awsome_helper in
Comment from E-mail
When you first began working with the Apple (and I've read that you worked for both HP and Atari) what kind of education in the area of hardware construction and software development did you have (e.g. formal logic, mathematics, etc.)?
Woz
In third grade I was the only boy that could do flash cards as fast as the girls. In 4th and 5th grades I built electronics projects for science fairs. By 6th grade I could build and design many simple electronic circuits and had a ham radio license. I built my Hallicrafters receiver and transmitter as kits. In 6th grade I also built a tic-tac-toe computer out of hundreds of transistors and diodes on a 3' x 4' piece of plywood, using nails for connectors to solder to. I almost finished this computer, based on logic gates. In 8th grade I built a 10 bit parallel adder/subtractor and did very well in the local science fairs. The Air Force gave me their special award for the best electronic project in the Bay Area Science Fair, even though as an 8th grader I was competing with up to 12th graders.
I constructed house to house intercoms in my neighborhood as a kid and read Popular Electronics, along with Tom Swift. I once won a soldering iron from Popular Electronics Magazine for submitting a joke. Occassionally I could ride my bike all the way to Sunnyvale Electronics and buy enough parts to build some small project, most often for a school prank.
In high school I got my first minicomputer manual. I know how logic worked and I'd already sketched out many pages of a calculator design. Now I worked out a design for the PDP-8 computer based on my knowledge of logic. I started getting more and more computer manuals to practice my designs. Also I kept up with the latest chip catalogs. Every time I redesigned a minicomputer, I tried to use fewer chips than before. My design skills got better and better and I started getting very tricky on occassion. I would first look for the best chips that did the job at hand, but then would spend many more hours trying to find one chip intended for something else, that would do the job with fewer chips than normal. I found that I could often win at this game.
It was only a game. I had no friends or relatives or teachers that did this design stuff with me. I had nobody to even show my designs to. I'd be embarrassed if anybody watched me designing them while in classes. It was an advantage for my shyness that nobody knew what I was doing.
I was a math and science and electronics star in Junior High School and in High School, winning many honors. I was also a good math and science student, achieving many 800's on my college entrance exams. I didn't apply to any prestigious colleges because I visited the University of Colorado in Boulder and saw snow for the first time. That was the only place I'd go after that.
I kept up my designs in college. I took a year off to pay for my third college year, programming for a local computer company. I took some real computer courses my third year, at Berkeley. I loved these courses so much that I'd sometimes finish the course bookwork in 2 weeks.
I took off a year to earn money for my fourth college year. I wound up working on calculators at Hewlett Packard as an engineer. As my career progressed, I didn't have a chance to complete my degree. I worked on countless interesting computer projects outside of work. I also ran my dial-a-joke in this time frame. Eventually, we started Apple.
You may have some answers in this long discourse, but mainly it boils down to my having been mostly self taught and not formerly educated in computer areas.