A&E’s top 100

Comment from E-mail

I just wanted to write this to tell how grateful I am that Apple Computer was developed. Mainly because there would be no such as the personal computer and many advances never would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Apple. I also wanted to write because recently I was watching A&E’s top 100 hundred and was disappointed to see that you where not named and Bill Gates was. I sat there and said to myself what did he do to deserve that besides make a lot of money nothing. I would’ve at least to of like to of seen at least Steve Jobs or at least a mention of Apple but when they rounded out the top five I knew it wouldn’t happen and was deeply disappointed that the two people or even the person who changed the daily lives of everyone was not even mentioned at all during that.

Well, I just wanted to thank you for helping change my life and the way I live it everyday. If it was not for the Apple Macintosh computer I would not have a job or hobby anymore and am grateful for having it around. I am always exited about the new developments coming out of Apple and just have one question for you. As an original developer of the MacOs and with the new version of it coming out next year MacOs X I was just wondering what your comments on it and how it will change it from where it started and how you feel about it? Thanks again, Spencer Parker

Woz

I’m glad that you see things this way. It is fair to say that Bill and Microsoft did a bit of engineering (writing BASIC for the Altair computer) at the start and did take risks in setting up and running a business. But we at Apple did much more to bring computing to people and we took much greater risks and we did our own designs and used our own money and time a lot more. We worked to create the hardware and the software that would do new things. We didn’t merely buy others’ programs and find a way to sell them at a profit. Apple even popularized (and largely created) the technology that Microsoft makes it’s money off of.

I think that MacOS X will be very very great but will, at first, only reach loyal Macintosh owners. I think that it will be well accepted by the Macintosh users by the time it comes out and that the grumbling about differences will be short lived. I think that differences like fast graphics and more game software will be even more important than a more stable OS though.

“WOZ” signature on G.S

Comment from E-mail

We pooled all of our resources and bought one of the first Apple G. S’s to hit the stores up here in Alaska.

On the front of it is a strange signature, “WOZ”. I have never seen another G. S. that had been signed in this manner. Did you per chance sign the front of any of the early ones as a lark? If you did perhaps you would be interested to know this particular model ended up in Anchorage Alaska and brought our whole family into the world of technology and I still dearly love the little fellow and keep him in a place of honor in our library. (Of course both he and I are retired now but he’s still good for a fast chess game now and then with my grand-kids and I.

Thanks for the opportunity to inquire about my little guy,

Woz

When Apple asked me for a signature for a special limited edition of the Apple ][gs I figured that it was for a few hundred computers. But they made 50,000 with the signature.

Occasionally I’m asked to sign, with a Sharpie pen, one of these or one of the ones without the “Woz” signature.

Thanks for letting me know of your respect for your little fellow.

Thanks for all the fun you provided

Comment from E-mail

Hey Woz, my names Brian Dressel I’m from Minneapolis Minnesota I just wanted to thank you so much for the kick ass computer you people designed called the Apple 2, In so many ways I still enjoy that better than any IBM game out there.

I fell in love with games like Sherlock Holmes Another Bow, Wings of Fury etc etc 🙂

Thanks for all the fun you provided with that great computer 🙂
Brian D

Woz

Good to hear from you. I think that all interesting people fell in love with computer games. Just my 2…

Old Fart’s School

Comment from E-mail

Woz, I read the book West of Eden. My son has been a ardent follower of your cause for a long time. I’m 53, disabled, and looking for a midlife career change. The only friends I have is my wife, my dog, Georgia Tech, and my Computer. Would you chat with me about exploring different avenues open to people in this situation? Maybe we could start a Old Fart’s School. Any help and counciling that you can give me will be greatly appreciated.

Woz

I wish that I had the least bit to contribute to your suggestion, but I’m barely able to keep up with just my heavy email load. It does seem to me that community colleges have done a good job over our lifetimes of making education available to us older folks…although I’ve only taken advantage of it for leisure, like learning other languages.

Interview

Comment from E-mail

Good morning!
I have been trying to reach someone to secure an interview with Mr. Wozniak. Would you be able to forward this email to the appropriate person?

Woz

I’m the appropriate person, but I’m warning you in advance that I’m a real busy person with this sort of thing and much more…

Hypercard fan

Comment from E-mail

Dear Woz,
Wow! I stumbled onto your site when doing a search about Apple things, but am I glad I did! I’ve done a LOT of studying about the history of Apple (I read the book “On The Firing Line” by Gil Amelio, watched “Pirates of Silicon Valley” and even saw a few documentaries about Apple) And YOU are the man that made it happen.

Anyway, I take it from your “comments” section that you’re a Hypercard fan. Well, hey, so am I! I think it’s a wonderful tool to work with… except for one lil nagging thing. Color. The Color Tools stack simply doesn’t work well with manipulating buttons and icons and things..

I assume that you’ve got your own solution to that since you’re a genius..

Woz

I have no solution. Apple does have a color kit that can do a little but it’s hard to use. I’ve had my own students use it for games.

Bill Atkinson developed hypercard for Apple, and they didn’t even know that he’s color blind.

David vs. Goliath

Comment from E-mail

Knowing your time is at a premium, any feedback you might supply to the following questions will be greatly appreciated.

I’m writing a story about the rise of the computer industry for our millennium series ( http://www.usatoday.com/2000/2000.htm ), and was hoping you could answer two questions.

1) Is there any other field that would’ve allowed a company as imaginative as Apple to thrive? Why or why not?

2) Did you experience a David vs. Goliath-type triumph over some of the larger computer companies when your Apple computers began to take off?

Thank you for your time, and great site by the way. (We check out the WozCam a few times a week.)

Woz

I think that a company as imaginative as Apple, coming from youngsters and not established companies, could only be started in a very rapidly and unexpectedly growing field. Of course this happens once in a while, maybe once in a decade. Surely early times of the steel industry and railroads must have been like this. Not to mention the gold rushes, and in more recent times, the internet and it’s many facets.

When we started Apple, the Goliaths didn’t think that the industry was worth much or going far. So there was really no triumph. Our first competition was with Radio Shack and Commodore, and we did feel a great triumph over them because their products were so much less than ours. But IBM was a bit tougher, even after we had the majority of the market.

Computer Program in School

Comment from E-mail

Hi
My name is Lisa L. I am interestd in setting up a computer program in West Virginia like the one Mr. Wozniak has set up for the Los Gatos schools. I have the funding to buy the computers, but I was wondering if it would be possible to sit in on some of the classes so I can see how it’s being done here.

I am a tech support engineer for Calico Commerce, and have recently graduated from Cornell University.

Woz

It is possible to sit in on some classes. My current class is on hold until January due to one son’s wrestling schedule. I’m doing less of the teaching than ever before this year because I’m so busy. But I direct the program content and teach some subjects.

The current class is not my starter class, which I think relates more to other schools. This is an advanced class. We touch on semi-professional uses of the computer and much greater skill than in just a 1-year (200 hour) course.

My biggest concern is the road to MacOS X

Comment from E-mail

Do you think they [Apple] are on the right track?

Woz

I can’t think of a better track. My biggest concern is the road to MacOS X. It’s much easier to do than to make it Mac-like enough to please our biased users. We all want UNIX underneath a usable and simple GUI shell.

Are you still involved with Apple?

Comment from E-mail

Are you still involved with Apple in any way? (one of the rumors sites claimed Apple registered Woz.com)

Woz

I’m a low paid employee. I’m loyal to the company. I like Steve Jobs and support him. I could not do what he does: I’m a techie who likes to do techie things all the time and there’s not time left over to stay up on the latest technologies and the big picture. I would be too soft with other people, regarless of what’s called for. I appear at various places around the world and like being an Apple employee. In these cases I sort of represent Apple. At least I always remind people of the company. I’m not officially or directly involved in Apple at this time.

I’m the sole Mac user

Comment from E-mail

I hope I’m not exploiting access to your e-mail (it may be readily available, I don’t know), but I’m the sole Mac user in a company of hundreds of PC users, and I’m very encouraged by Apple’s last two years. I’m wondering if you can give me some encouragement for the future.

Woz

I can’t add to what you can deduce for yourself. At least we Macintosh owners aren’t experiencing the level of fear now that we did before..

Museum of Computing

Question from E-mail

Thanks so much for talking to me during my recent phone call. Trying to contact [you] via the website is virtually impossible! As I explained, I am on the board of a new Museum of Computing which is going to be built in Lubbock, Texas. I have been asked to take charge of the Apple displays to include Apple 1, Apple ][, Apple III and Lisa and Mac. We would like to recreate the famous garage where the Apple 1 systems were assembled. We are convinced this would be very interesting to all of the visitors, especially the young ones! But there is a problem…I have no idea what the layout of the garage was! If we recreate this famous scene, we would like it to be fairly accurate. Can you help me? Here is my home address and home phone and e-mail address. Thanks in advance and waiting to hear from you!

Woz

First, the Apple I (and Apple ][) computers were entirely designed and tested and debugged in my Cupertino apartment (not the garage) and in my cubicle at Hewlett Packard in Cupertino (that ‘calculator’ division is now in Corvallis, Oregon). The PC boards of the Apple I were made in Santa Clara. As soon as they came off the production line (only 200 total were manufactured) components and chip sockets were inserted by workers and the board were wave soldered there. This was the major manufacturing step. We’d drive down and pick up a batch of boards and then drive them to the garage. We’d pay Patti Jobs and other friends $1 per board to insert all the chips from boxes of chips that we had. The garage had a single engineering workbench with a mylar top and a shelf. A monitor and transformers and keyboard, the other 3 pieces of an Apple I, were on it, as well as an oscilloscope of mine and maybe a soldering iron. I’d hook up a PC board and try it out. If it seemed to work, it would go in the ‘good’ stack. If it was bad I’d look at the microprocessor data and address pins with the oscilloscope. If I saw a missing signal it meant that a chip had a pin out of a socket. If a signal seemed like two fighting signals (halfway between high and low) it meant that two traces were shorted on the PC board. About half of the boards had such problems.

The workbench (lab table) was mounted right up to the garage door. So if you were seated at the workbench and someone opened the garage door you’d be looking straight out. We also had a small container of spare parts, like chips, in small pullout drawers. It sat on some table behind the workbench. There were no manuals or drafting tables or other design aids here. I can’t tell you much more.

Do you go to the MacWorld shows?

Comment from E-mail

Do you go to the MacWorld shows?

Woz

Very seldom…Steve

Your relationship with Steve today

Comment from E-mail

Hello Mr. Woz. I am a 14 year old fan of yours. I admire you and Steve Jobs and I was wondering about your relationship with Steve today.

Woz

I’ve always considered Steve a good, if not close friend. We have quite different lives and goals in some ways but we share many great memories of the times when our lives were forming, even before Apple. I enjoy chatting with Steve once in a while. He is always polite and respectful. He doesn’t ever offend or intrude on my space. I try not to intrude on his. Many times I wish that we were close. Steve can relax and enjoy my many stories, whereas a lot of business driven people can’t. He is more trapped to his job responsibilities and partly wishes that he could be like myself, with freedom and time for experiences with students and family. I don’t long for his success and daily notoriety and running of companies, but I’m glad that Apple is in his unusual hands and hopes that it continues in that fashion even when he’s gone.

Congrats on sticking to your guns

Comment from E-mail

Hi “Woz,”
I’ve had a great time reading your website. Good stuff, all around. I esecially liked your one response:

“I can lose all my money or get no credit for inventing the personal computer that started things or many more things. But never should my ethics and moralities and principals challenged in a way to make it seem that I sold out or acted out of less honesty or just looked after my own interests or was selfish.”

A very honorable and rare stance it seems, nowadays. :-/ This resonates for me, as I’m slaving away in the “ivory towers” of academia, amidst people who are driven primarily by ego and to whom the truth is mutable and stretched by careful phrasing and hand-waving. I’m certainly not as niave as when I started my PhD degree five years ago, but I’m hopeful I can emerge from this with my ideals in tact, and not having to screw someone else to finish my degree.

It’s sad when so much emphasis is put on results (“publish or perish”) and the desperate pace at which they much be attained. The business world can be much the same, if not worse, I know. It doesn’t matter if someone is a total jerk and chews up and spits people out, if he/she can produce results and bring in the cash.

Anyway, congrats on sticking to your guns and going the direction you want to go; it’s not easy at all. I hope I’ll find my niche out there with a minimum of politics and conflict. I suppose I’m a “sensitive soul” as well, because conflict and posturing among coworkers really kills my productivity and makes me want to be anywhere else.

I’m really surprised that people have written and called you egomanical, etc. There’s a huge difference in being proud and self-assured in one’s accomplishments versus recognition-seeking for “ego stroking.” I think the authors of those posts need a good dose of maturity and some psychological counseling.

Anyway, I think I’m starting to ramble at this point, so I’ll just close by saying that some of my fond memories of first being exposed to computers and learning to program involved a “Bell and Howell” all-black Apple (I or II?) and later a “signed” Woz-edition IIgs. Fun stuff!

It’s also fun to look at what I’ve owned since then: Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Amiga 500, Amiga 3000, Mac IIvx, PowerMac 7100, and now a “beige” G3. Too bad the Amiga didn’t catch on. Lots of potential there with full pre-emptive multitasking in 512K of RAM. 🙂

Best wishes,
B

Why didn’t Apple make the Mac Apple // compatible?

Comment from E-mail

Hi Woz! My first experience with computers was in 1982 when I was 12 years old. Shortly after that my Dad bought me an Apple // clone (sorry 🙂 … The Franklin Ace 1000. I kept that until the ][GS came out and drewled over it (and bought one). I still have it (Woz limited edition). Between 1983 and 1991, my life revolved around the Apple // (I’ve grown up now and have more important goals in life, such as my wife and children), but at the time, every waking moment was spent hacking my clone or my GS… discovering different softswitches, entry points into ROM, etc… When Apple started wayning in its support the the Apple //, it was extremely discouraging to me and my fellow Apple // “buddies”. It seemed that they couldn’t actively kill the // line for fear of loss of loyalty, but that they made every effort to let it die a slow death and that it continued to out-sell the Mac for years with absolutely no marketing for the // line. I’ve always wondered since then what was the reasoning for letting the Apple // die instead of continuiing that line with upgrades so that today, the current Mac would actually be the latest version of the Apple //? I had been hearing rumors at the time that Steve Jobs didn’t like the “game” reputation the Apple // had and wanted a “business” competitor and that you were actually more of a // fan and you were the only reason the // line lasted as long as it did. What’s the real story behind that? Why didn’t Apple make the Mac Apple // compatible? Thanks,Michael Q. (previous graphics editor for GS+ magazine… If you remember that mag?)

Woz

The Apple ][ certainly was an excellent machine to get into the hardware and software and the basic levels of the computer. It made a lot of what a computer is understand to very many like yourself. But Apple’s leadership had a very strong direction toward making the geeky parts as hidden as possible. That has it’s benefits but it also takes away a very fun part of our lives, figuring out how to do our OWN things.

Apple never was very good at carrying on two lines at one time. Apple actually totally ditched the Apple ][ from 1980 to 1983. Every ad was for the Apple ///. But the Apple ][ was the best selling PC in the world in those years. It was also ignored when the Macintosh arrived because it was not the future and we can’t have two high priorities at once. It’s just too bad. Even though the Macintosh platform has a low market share, we keep supporting it enough to keep it working. But we didn’t do the same for the Apple ][.

I don’t have a strong personal ‘side’ on this issue. But I do receive continual email talking about how much the Apple ][ meant to people that could play with software and entry points and the like.

I am just another admirer of your work

Comment from E-mail

I am just another admirer of your work. You probably get tons of letters like this, and I thought I’d just add to it. I’m no good at writing or talking to famous people, so this may be a short letter.

I still have our first Mac. I think it started with my uncle, and it was the 128k (may have been more), but he upgraded it to 1MB. I am getting it repaired. Sadly I fried the motherboard as a young child by using it on a nice fuzzy statically charged rug. We still have all the original disks for it, like Excel 1.0, PageMaker 1.0, and all sorts of old programs.

I think what you did revolutionized the computing world. I think the fact that I was born the same year brought me to the Mac side of computers. I still have our collection ranging from the Original, the Performa 550, the 7200/75 or the almost brand new G3 350 Yosemite.

Woz

Although I founded Apple Computer and was a part of our early developing corporate image (including ‘thinking different) I didn’t have much to do with the Macintosh line. The most that I could say is that some of my best Apple friends, including ones that were inspired by myself and others that inspired me, were on the Macintosh team.

For the thinking that took personal computers in the graphical user interface direction (including even Windows) you should thank Steve Jobs. All I can say is that I love the Macintosh and supported it from the first…Woz

TalkCity

Comment from E-mail

I thought it would be fun to drop a line, even though I have never met you and you don’t know me. Also, I was talking to someone on TalkCity who said that you were their father. If it really was your kid, say hi for me please.

Woz

My kids are online a lot but I’d have to know more to say if one of them might have been the one to whom you refer…

4444444

Question from E-mail

Is it true that you got the cellphone number 4444444 and got a whole lot of ‘prank’ calls from babies?

Woz

I have sought repeating phone numbers for ages. I did get (408) 444-4444* and it is unusable because I get about 100 calls a day from babies that can’t even talk. In October (very soon) our area code gets what is called an area code overlay of (669). Then we well be forced to dial 1-408-nnn-nnnn for every call, even if it’s next door. The full 11-digit number will be too hard for babies to dial by luck so I will finally be able to use my (408) 444-4444 number.

Also, after I had 444-4444, they came up with free numbers in the U.S. using (444) as the area code. If people try to call a free (444) number, for a company or something, but they leave off the ‘long distance’ code of 1 (one) before it, they can reach me.

For example, if they are supposed to dial 1-(444)-444-8526 but leave off the ‘1’ then they get me because their first 7 digits are 444-4444. This only reaches me if they are in my (408) area code. But in October, the 7-digit numbers here (in our area code) will no longer work, so I will no longer get these calls either. It’s interesting because I have one 444- number that gets calls about once a week for an escort service, “Bored Housewives.” I generally get these calls at 2 AM or thereabouts. I now answer these calls with a very weird sounding voice, like I have a different plan in my head, and tell them that they have to drive to a certain place and wait for me. I tell them, in the weird voice, that I’ll pull up and open the door and that they should get in and we’ll go “somewhere.” So far, everyone that I’ve done this to has changed their minds.

*Numbers used in the above response have been changed for obvious reasons, but I think you get the idea.

Did you actually play a 2600?

Question from E-mail

Just wondering, Woz… Did you actually play a 2600 in the hospital after the crash? If not, why do you think the writers placed on ein there? Also, I noticed that the game on the film was nothing like any 2600 game I’ve ever seen– could that be due to any refusal by Atari/Hasbro to place a real 2600 game in there?

Woz

I have no memories of my hospital stay, but I have seen pictures of myself playing games on my Apple ][. I’ve never played a game on a 2600. I think that I was playing the first ever “Choplifter” game around this time.

Friends tell me that I had them sneak in pizza and milkshakes to the hospital. I can’t remember the hospital food, but I’m sure it was bad and I’m sure that this is a true story.