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.

Starfield Simulation in Liberty BASIC

Here is the starfield simulation that for the VIC-20 that I posted a few days ago, but ported as simply as possible to Windows using the Liberty BASIC language (http://www.libertybasic.com).  If you compare them side by side you can see that a lot of the original code is preserved across the translation.

Enjoy!

 dim st(9,1)  
 gosub [setup]  
 timer 20, [cycle]  
 [cycle]  
   for c=0 to n  
     xold=st(c,0)  
     yold=st(c,1)  
     st(c,0)=xold*1.23  
     st(c,1)=yold*1.23  
     x=int(st(c,0))  
     y=int(st(c,1))  
     if abs(x)<15 and abs(y)<15 then  
       gosub [clearStar]  
      else  
       if abs(x)>200 or abs(y)>200 then  
         st(c,0)=(rnd(1)-0.5)*3  
         st(c,1)=(rnd(1)-0.5)*3  
        else  
         gosub [drawStar]  
       end if  
     end if  
   next c  
   wait  
   goto [cycle]  
 [clearStar]  
   #starfield "color black ; place "; xCenter + xold; " "; yCenter + yold  
   #starfield "\."  
   return  
 [drawStar]  
   gosub [clearStar]  
   #starfield "color white ; place "; xCenter + x; " "; yCenter + y  
   #starfield "\."  
   return  
 [setup]  
   input"# stars (1-10)";n  
   n=n-1  
   for x=0 to n  
     st(x,0)=(rnd(1)-0.5)*200  
     st(x,1)=(rnd(1)-0.5)*200  
   next x  
   open "starfield" for graphics as #starfield  
   #starfield "home ; posxy xCenter yCenter"  
   #starfield "down ; fill black ; backcolor black"  
   #starfield "trapclose [quit]"  
   return  
 [quit]  
   close #starfield  
   end  

DOOM and the raiders of the lost hours

My first PC compatible computer ran DOS and Windows, and OS/2 and... DOOM.

In between rounds of development work on Liberty BASIC I would take breaks playing DOOM.  By today's standards this is a crude looking game, but back then it was really groundbreaking.  Playing it in a dark room was a good way to scare yourself half to death.  Today I would surely consider it rather tame.  The only thing that really compared to it was a game called Ultima Underworld which was actually a smoother and more detailed real-time 3D game.

In the world of PC gaming it really was all DOS.  Running Windows or OS/2 sucked up too many resources from what was typically a 33MHz 80486 computer.  The game would not play well.  Even when running DOS you needed to use HIMEM and play all the tricks in the book for there to be enough memory.

Other games that wasted my time included Falcon 3.0 which is probably the perfect air combat simulator and a cool game called Theatre of War which was sort of a real time version of Chess, kinda.