Jobs vs Woz - The Closed vs Open Hand

Most people know who Steve Jobs was.  He was the charismatic and visionary frontman for Apple for many years.  He even managed a friendly coup at Apple when he took back the company he was ousted from.  He was a controversial person.  He had his fans and his detractors.  I think he certainly had his good points, but I am really more of a fan of the other less well known Steve of Apple, Steve Wozniak affectionately known as Woz.

Woz was the designer of the original line of Apple II computers.  He had a vision of computers as computers, for everyone.  A hippy vision of computing?  ;-)

What appeals to me more about Woz is that he was generous and wanted to give people something great.  His ambition lay more in personal accomplishment and also in sharing his knowledge with others.  When he created the Apple II computer he wanted it to be open.  He provided a schematic so that users could understand the computer, and so that they could modify it.  People even wrote books about how to do this.  Another example of this is that Woz included expansion slots so that people could extent the computer in this way.

When you turn on an Apple II you can program it right away.  There is a built in machine language monitor.  Depending on the model you can either use Woz's Integer BASIC or you can run Applesoft BASIC.

This version of an Apple computer is a real computer, for computing, by programming.  A computer is a device for a computer user.

Enter the computer as appliance.  :-/

Steve Jobs had a vision of computer as appliance.  This is purely a business perspective.  Sell more computers by marketing to the fat middle of the bell curve.

Of course he is not the only one to think this way.  Somehow progress in computing tends towards reducing it down to a touchscreen and away from programming and true computer literacy.  The Macintosh was a step in this direction.  This has a certain irony because the form of the Mac user interface was inspired directly by the Smalltalk windowing user interface, a programming system.  In addition to the appliance-like format of the Mac software, the computer itself was meant to be closed unit.  You need a special screwdriver to open it, and there are no expansion slots.

So the Mac was a closed machine, and it pointed other systems in this direction (i.e. Microsoft Windows).  You could purchase programming software for the Mac, but unlike other computers on the market there was no direct path to programming when you turned on the machine.  Why was there no easy programming option on the desktop when you started the Mac OS?  For more on this issue see Why Johnny Can't Code which is a popularly referenced article on this topic.

HyperCard eventually was made available on the Mac as an easy and fun programming tool and it was included free of charge for some years, but now it is gone.

Microsoft followed suit with Windows and they too also did not include even a version of their famous BASIC as an icon on the desktop of their new system.  I wrote Liberty BASIC back in the early 1990s as a response to this.  Microsoft eventually provided Visual Basic, but I strongly suggest the this should have been included, for free, and an icon to start Visual Basic should have appeared on the Windows desktop on startup.

I'm not going to suggest that there is some sort of conspiracy to dumb down the computer.  What I will say is that this amounts to a stupid and harmful mistake.  The computer is so powerful and wonderful as a creative too.  These new computers as appliances are depriving people of so much by simply omitting an easy and friendly programming tool.  A desktop icon to entice the curious to try something simple enough for children and powerful enough for casual applications programming.

So, what is really better?  How do you define progress?  What of the early 6502 and Z80 computers when compared to what we have today?  The new computers dwarf these charming old timers, but they are less powerful in terms of the concepts they omit from the user.

Floppy disks

In the early micro days we used cassette tapes and floppy disks. Floppies were better for many reasons but they were expensive. The Apple Disk II drives were $495 including the controller. Once you had one of these babies you still needed floppy disks. I remember pretty clearly in the early 80's spending $80 for a box of 10 floppy disks. These were Dysan disks, and were of very good quality.

However these disks probably exceeded the quality required. Later on some less expensive floppy disks became available from the likes of Maxell and memorably named Elephant Memory Systems. These were $2.50 or so per disk. The disk surfaces weren't as polished, and some cheap brands didn't have a reinforced mount but no matter really. The cheap disks were pretty much as reliable as far as anybody could tell.

Disk drive systems themselves were all quite different from each other. Apple's legendary Steve Wozniak had managed to create the ultimate in economy of design for a disk controller with a small card having only 5 ICs. Most other disk controllers were long circuitboards with 2 to 3 dozen chips. Monsters. ;-)

Some of these floppy drives used hard sector disks, meaning that there was an index hole in the media for each sector on the disk. So, if the disk was meant for a 16 sector drive, the disk would have 16 timing holes cut out of it evenly around the inner part of the disk. This would be read by an LED and a sensor. The Apple II used soft sector disks where there was only one hole cut in the disk, and the drive controller itself decided how many sectors to put on the disk by doing careful timing.

I remember that my father's H-89 had hard sector disks. The drives also made a strange clunking noise as they operated. The Apple II's drives made the much more familiar brrrr, brrr, mmm, mmm sound of most floppy drives and they were faster than the H-89 drives.

The Home Computer Era

In the early 1980s there were so many kinds of computers before IBM killed off all the diversity with their IBM PC. This was a shame, especially since the microcomputer industry was only 5 years old and there wasn't a rich computer culture yet. The PC stopped the innovation in its tracks. Before the IBM PC small computers were usually called home computers.

It was wonderful that you could usually buy a 250 page book for the computer of your choice. That book would tell you everything... EVERYTHING about the innards of the machine. You could bend the computer to your will. These days you have no idea what's going on in the machine. As a programmer you deal with the Windows API, or with the Java SDK platform.

Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to create a new computer simple enough to master it all the way down to the bits. The operating system would be very small and simple, and the machine could be programmed in BASIC, Forth, and assembly language. The code for the whole thing could be open sourced. Perhaps there wouldn't be a way to make money with such a product, but it would be fun. :-)

To get a feel for what this time was like, watch this YouTube video of Steve Wozniak relating his experiences growing up and designing the Apple computer. Great stuff! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctGch5ejjT4