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.

The new 6502 Shack

I've create a new blog dedicated to the MOS 6502 microprocessor and the computers that are built on it, and also a new Facebook group for it.  Read more about it here.

Gakken Mini Blocks - Blink and You Miss It

I discovered sadly that Gakken made a cute little version of their EX system called Gakken Mini Blocks, but they stopped making them before I noticed.  I think this is so neat.  I blogged about my love of the Gakken Denshi Blocks a long time back.  See http://microcomputing.blogspot.com/2007/

Some people are selling these on ebay, but they are discontinued.  :-(  Too bad.

Here is a photo.

I also found a link to a video about it.  The presenter explains the product and assembles a simple computer circuit.

Electronic Flip-Flop

Early users of computers were usually also interested in electronics, and in fact I was a casual student of electronics before I knew what a computer is. So I owned a couple of electronic experimenter's labs (and I still do) that we picked up at the You-Do-It Electronics store.

Particularly interesting was the Gakken Denshi Block system, recently reintroduced to the market. This is a high quality kit with a portable radio style case. It has a transparent lid which you open to place pluggable modules.

Here is a photo of my own kit (rebranded as Skilcraft).

One of the experiments was important to my understanding of computers. It was titled Bistable Circuit with Two Lamp. This was another was of saying Flip-Flop, which is a critical building block of digital computers. Up until this point I had only an abstract concept of how a Flip-Flop actually worked.

Here is a link to an article on Wikipedia explaining what a Flip-Flop is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_%28electronics%29

My First Programming Job

As well as I can remember (this would have been 1981) I met Patrick A. Alessi when I was 14 years old at NEECO. He was there purchasing an Apple II+ and an Epson MX-100 printer, and he told the sales guy there he needed a programmer to work on some business software. They pointed across the store at me. He told me later that he said, "Who, him? He's just a kid!" They introduced us to each other.

Turns out I knew his son Michael from playing kickball at the park down the street. Mr. Alessi lived a mere 4 blocks away from me, which was the perfect distance. So I began visiting his place. As first we just played pool and experimented with his new Apple II+, and Mr. Alessi made no apologies about sharing his political opinions while smoking different kinds of pipe tobacco.

Since my friend Richard had an Apple II computer I got some games from him, and I made a joystick for the computer out of parts I bought at Radio Shack. I reused the case from an RC car's remote control. I cut out the steering wheel and replaced it with a dual-potentiometer joystick. It was ugly, but I saved some money. ;-)

Mr. Alessi was interested in creating some trend following inventory management software, and he talked a lot about this. Eventually we would begin to write this software, and do a lot of other things as well. This was not going to make me much money in the short run, but I couldn't have asked for a better opportunity to learn.

The Peacock Feather and Sinclair

I met the owner of the Peacock Feather (a gift shop in Needham, Mass that still exists today) at his store, but I don't recall his name. He was from India, and I remember getting into a discussion with him about computers. He said he had one of the new Sinclair ZX-80 http://oldcomputers.net/zx80.html computers based on the Zilog Z80.

He seemed interested that I was about his son's age and that I knew something about programming. He told me that his son played soccer, and I guess he thought that I could befriend his son and teach him about BASIC.

So we agreed that I would come to his house to see this ZX-80. I remember that his home was absolutely filled with the smell of curry (in fact he smelled like curry even when he wasn't at home). I also remember that his son wasn't there when I visited. So much for me and his son developing a friendship.

I didn't have much time to play with his computer. It was much smaller than it looked in the ads. The keyboard was completely flat, and you just touched each "key" lightly to activate it. Each key had a letter, a graphic character, and a BASIC keyword on it. Since you couldn't touch type, the way that you would type a whole keyword in with a single keystroke help speed things up. The computer was plugged into the television set (as so many home computers did), and its plain black and white output would blank briefly between some keypresses. If your program did any computation in loops it would also blank then since the display was driven completely in software by the single Z80 processor.

It was a fun little machine to play with, but I wasn't interested in owning one after I saw it. Later on Sinclair would produce the ZX-81, a much more expandable machine. I actually recently bought a kit version of this machine unassembled which I hope to assemble at some point.

Heathkit H-89

Finally in 1980 my father was awarded a generous bonus for his role in the creation of special radio equipment for use on aircraft carriers. He used this bonus to buy an H-89 kit for Heathkit. http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=135

We finally had a real computer in the house! It ran CP/M and H-DOS (we use mostly this OS) and we had a couple of different versions of BASIC for it. We had something called Benton Harbor BASIC. The computer had no graphics modes, but it had graphics characters and I remember my brother Ernie was working on a version of Galaxians for it. We wrote a bunch of games. I remember my father also did some assembly language programming for it (or perhaps he just typed in straight machine code).

One thing I remember about the machine was that it used hard sector diskettes, and the floppy drive was loud. It would make clunking sounds. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk!

Looking for a Computer

Computers were very expensive back in 1980. My father worked for GTE at that time and he was offered a deal on the Rockell AIM-65 computer http://oldcomputers.net/AIM-65.html since GTE and Rockwell had some sort of relationship. It was a nice 6502-based computer and ran BASIC. It was small, had a single line display, and a built-in thermal printer.

Obviously a computer with a full size display screen (though one could be added) would have been preferable but we were excited at the prospect of having a computer in the house! Ultimately the AIM-65 was not our fate because my father decided that the nature of the deal amounted to a conflict of interest.

Heathkit

Since our father is an electrical engineer he would sometimes build electronic devices. He had built a very nice stereo receiver from a kit he bought at Heathkit. My brothers and I enjoyed reading through the Heathkit catalogs that would arrive in the mail.

There were many different kinds of computers that could be bought from Heathkit at that time including the H-8, the H-11 and the microprocessor trainer ET-3400 which had a breadboarding area, could be programmed in machine code and could also be expanded to drive a terminal and be programmed in BASIC.

We spent a lot of time fantasizing about these and other machines, but we never got to see one in person. Computers were too expensive for kids with paper routes. Of course that would all change very soon.

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. ;-)

Enter the TRS-80

I remember when Radio Shack started to advertise the TRS-80 computer on television. I don't think I had ever seen an ad for a computer on TV before this. It was $599 for the computer which seemed pretty amazing.

When these machines arrived at the local Radio Shack store my brother and I went to have a look. The only interesting thing you could do with the machine was program it. They may have had a couple of applications on tape in the store but we ignored them. The programming manual was very friendly, with a cartoon character that looked like a TRS-80 spouting explanations.

As I understand it the Level I BASIC that came with the machine was a custom version of Tiny BASIC. It had single letter variable names, only one string variable (I think), and it had only three error messages for the programmer:

• What? - Syntax error
• How? - Divide by zero, etc.
• Sorry. - Out of memory

Level I BASIC also had SET and RESET commands so you could draw graphics on a 128x48 grid.

My own TI-57

For Christmas in 1978 My father bought me a TI-57 calculator http://www.rskey.org/detail.asp?manufacturer=Texas+Instruments&model=TI-57.

He also bought one for my brother Ernie. This was not as nearly as powerful as an HP-67 (or the TI-59 my brother Neil had), but it was a wonderful first "computer" for me and my brother. Since we both had the same model we had a lot of opportunity to work together on games and other things.

These calculators came with very good instructional books and also a pad of program sheets where you would write down all program steps and explain what the program was for and how to use it. Great stuff.

Some of the sorts of programs we created did things like:

• Compute primes
• Plot curves
• Artillery games
• Lunar lander
• Number guessing games

The Northeast Computer Show

The year was 1979. What an impression it made to me when my father took me and my brother Ernie to the Northeast Computer Show at the Hynes Auditorium in Boston. Compare this show to COMDEX or E3. It was a cornucopia of computers.

Before IBM blandified the computing landscape by killing off people's imaginations with the IBM PC there was an unbelievable amount of variety in computers. Computer companies were popping up everywhere and non-computer manufacturers were also getting into the game.

Some things that stand out most in my memory are:

• A really cool red and white R2D2 style robot that was roaming around the conference floor. There were other robots too.
• A computer that you programmed with geometric symbols as part of the syntax. I can't remember the name of the computer unfortunately.
• The RCA COSMAC VIP computer. Boy did I want one of these. It was a single board computer you could plug into your TV set. You assembled it yourself and programmed it in 1802 machine code using the hex keypad. The VIP had a cassette storage interface. It was expandable with a real keyboard. Very cool. I wish I could still get one of these! :-)

Calculator or Computer?

I can remember it clearly the day I first was introduced to programming. When I was 11 or so years old I wandered into my father's home office and saw his calculator flashing patterns on its red LED display. I asked him what it was doing and he told me "You don't want to know." I told him, "Yes I do!"

The calculator in question was an HP-67. http://www.rskey.org/detail.asp?manufacturer=Hewlett-Packard&model=HP-67

My father was really wonderful about finding ways for me and my siblings to pursue things we were interested in. As long as my homework was done I could use his HP-67 in the dining room. The calculator came with a wonderful manual which taught programming in a most clear and enjoyable way. The HP-67 uses a Reverse Polish Notation style of arithmetic entry. It also supports a GOSUB and RETURN style of programming like BASIC. The other amazing feature of the HP-67 is a magnetic card reader. This is like a tiny floppy disk drive except that the card just moves straight through the calculator instead of spinning around. The cards are about a half inch in width. This made the HP-67 more of a personal computer than a calculator.

Radio Shack

In 1977 I was ten years old and I was learning about transistors, resistors, Ohm's Law, reactive inductance and stuff like that from my father. I used to go to Radio Shack a lot after school and poke around. They always had a bargain bin box which always had odd things like computer keyboards, and other stuff that seemed good for making computers. Their catalog also listed things like this.

I had no idea of course how to do anything with these kinds of electronic parts, but it was very intriguing. I wasn't sure yet what a computer was, but I knew just a little bit. My life was about to get interesting.