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.

Soldering, and joysticks

Some of the time I spent working with Mr. Alessi was actually spent just playing around. I didn't always write business software. Sometimes I would write code to draw graphics, or read BYTE magazines, or play video games on the computer.

Some of these games allowed the use of a joystick, which we didn't have. I decided to build my own. The Apple II+ supports the reading of 2 variable resistor (volume control) knobs. Many joysticks use this to provide x/y positioning.

To plug a joystick into the computer, the joystick needs to have a 16 pin DIP connector. I went to Radio Shack and bought the connector, a cable, and the joystick module preassembled. I had an old radio control car, so I took the steering controller and cut out a hole where the steering wheel was. It had button for reverse, so I used that for button 1 on the joystick. I can't remember if I added a second button. I guess I must have since it would be hard to play games without it.

The joystick came together easily with my limited soldering skills, and it worked! Thinking back on it, Mr. Alessi was remarkably okay with my plugging in a homebrew device like this into his $2400 computer. The only thing about the joystick was that the value of the potentiometers was slightly off. I didn't get the complete range of motion of a properly designed joystick. However it was good enough to play Choplifter and some other games!

The Apple II+

My job with Mr. Alessi started out with a software project he called Forecaster-Buy. The idea was to create a trend following inventory management system for distributors and manufacturers so that overstocking was a thing of the past. The computer we did all our initial development was:

An Apple II+ with 48K RAM and Applesoft BASIC in ROM
Two 143K Apple Disk II floppy drives
An Epson MX-100 dot matrix printer
Later we added a Microsoft Z-80 Softcard but didn't do much with it

I learned so much about programming with Mr. Alessi. We worked in the basement. There was a small room at the bottom of the basement stairs where the computer was kept, and in the larger basement space there was a TV and some chairs. We would talk about the software (and politics) and I would go into room and write software. Mr. Alessi would come in and ask me how I was doing. He'd make suggestions to which I would sometimes respond "That's impossible!" Of course it wasn't impossible, but if I didn't know how to do it, that is what I sometimes said. Then we'd talk and I'd think it over and come up with some sort of code to do the previously impossible.

Working with Mr. Alessi was a great experience. He was smart enough to know what sort of software to create. He'd bring me endless coffee and cookies. On Saturdays he would make me breakfast. He made very nice scrambled eggs. His two sons Tom and Michael were a little older than me and they'd always be around. I remember I used to play with them (and with all the other kids around the block) up at the park at the end of my street; kickball, pickle, keepaway, capture the flag, and hide and seek with the whole neighborhood as our hiding place. :-)

Yeah, working with Mr. Alessi was a great opportunity. It didn't pay much, but I learned a ton!

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.

Ohio Scientific Challenger Series

I remember once while on a family roadtrip I found a magazine in the car. It seems to me that the front and back covers of the magazine were torn off, as can happen easily when a magazine is left on the floor of a car. I think it was an issue of BYTE Magazine, but I'm not sure.

There was an article detailing a single board computer with diagrams. The computer was an Ohio Scientific computer, probably a Superboard. http://oldcomputers.net/osi-600.html

These were very cool machines, and pretty cheap. They used a 6502 processor and had BASIC and machine code monitor in ROM; sort of a poor man's Apple II. For the money it was a better machine. With better marketing and a nicer looking case perhaps they could have given Apple a run for their money.

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

Apple Hacker Extraordinaire

In my early teen years I met a fellow a couple of years older than me at NEECO. His name is Richard Stoddart. We hit it off pretty well and I began visiting him at home every couple of weeks. He had an Apple II+ in his basement and he was always doing something interesting with it.

Richard was smart, and he was always very nice to me and this mattered quite a lot since I wasn't exactly a popular kid. Richard taught me a lot about Apple computers, and we had a lot of fun playing games. He was also very active in his Boy Scout troop and was working on Eagle Scout. My mother called his mother and they became friends.

One interesting thing about Richard also was that he was into electronics and was the sort of person who wasn't afraid to modify his computer.

After I hadn't seen Richard for some years I tracked him down after I got married. I was glad to see he was doing well, but now I don't know where he is. I hope you're doing fine Richard wherever you are!

NEECO, a computer store

In the late seventees a computer store named NEECO moved from Springfield, MA to Needham, MA where I lived. I'm sure it was my brother Ernie who first brought me to the store. It was at least a two mile walk from our house, but we were in the habit of walking farther than that just to go to You-Do-It Electronics on the edge of town, so this was really nothing to us.

NEECO was to become a central influence in my life for a couple of years. What a store it was. I have many memories of the place.

When I first started visiting the store there were the following models I can remember:

• Apple II
• Commodore PET and CBM 8032
• Intertec Superbrain
• Hewlett Packard HP-85
• Atari 800 and 400

There was usually something fun running on each machine, especially the Apple and Atari computers. They also had a magazine rack and lots of software for sale.

I spent a lot of time there. Sometimes I was helpful to the people running the store, but I think they sometimes wish I was somewhere else. I owe them a debt of gratitude at least. ;-)