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Woz at VCF West? - Sun Aug 2 at 2PM - Mountain View, CA

MicroCoreLabs said:
Lol!
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Yes, it is pretty funny. Of course it could just be delusion instead of active deceit; if you’ve ever suffered through reading iWoz there’s enough straight-up lunacy in there we can’t rule it out.

There are interviews going back to the 1980’s where Woz comes across as a huge jerk just absolutely cr**ping all over everyone else who was working in the personal computer field in the mid-1970’s. He never gives an ounce of credit to anyone else and takes sole inventor credit for every piece of junk he’s ever cobbled together despite glaring evidence to the contrary. (For instance, a couple years ago someone did a deep dive into his insistence that he completely independently “invented” his terminals with no influence from Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter work and found the denials… lacking.) I used to chalk up the 80’s interviews as the result of being coached by Steve Jobs to push a narrative about Apple Computer Inc., but reading that book changed my mind; the poor guy seems to have one of the worst cases of Main Character Syndrome the world has ever seen. He talks as if CPU chips were these mysterious artifacts that fell out of UFOs and had no purpose until he, and he alone, had this unique and earth-shattering vision that you could build a computer out of one. It’s absolutely absurd. Maybe it’s all just a bit and actually knows better, but that just flips the coin back to malicious.

I’ll be fair here, clearly the guy *has* earned a place in the “pantheon” of personal computer pioneers for the work on the Apple II, but this concerted effort to elevate him to the position of the One True God through the time-honored tradition of just making sh*t up really needs to stop.
 
I am very, very tired of the early history of AAPL and the Hero's Journey myth.
It also ignores or downplays the real adults in the company.
Watch Bob Belleville's CHM oral history.
I worked there for 20 years and no one ever said a peep about him because "The Magnificent Seven"
and one person in particular (mentioned in the OH) didn't like him. They wrote him out of the history of the Mac.
I spent a ton of time and effort for CHM on Lisa, because it was literally a subject that by 1986 when
I started no one inside, even the people who worked on it, would talk about.

BTW, Bob built CRT terminals for Englebart's group at SRI long before Woz
 
Eudimorphodon said:
his event being the first time in history someone typed a key on a keyboard and had it come up on a screen, etc.
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HP and Beehive both were building CRT terminals already with 8008s.
The display designs using two-stage character/ column shift registers w/o microprocessors go back even earlier.
As a teenager in the mid-70s, I cloned the board set of the Ann Arbor 80x24 CRT terminal because my mentor
at the time dismissed 64x16 displays as a joke. Real computer displays needed 80 columns
I bought one of the early 00s real clone Apple I board kits with the hard to find parts and never built it
because I just never found the Apple I to be that interesting. I saw a real board when it came out at
Itty Bitty Computers in Shorewood, WI and couldn't understand why anyone would pay $666 for it.
 
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Al Kossow said:
HP and Beehive both were building CRT terminals already with 8008s.
The display designs using two-stage character/ column shift registers w/o microprocessors go back even earlier.
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That is the thing I find so fundamentally irritating about this "need" people have to crown one man as the "inventor of the personal computer"; the personal computer is the inevitable result of the rising tide of semiconductor manufacturing advancement, not some unique inspiration that a mighty Prometheus brought down from a mountain and gifted to mankind. The chips Don Lancaster used to build the TV Typewriter in 1973 were cheap enough for a hobby magazine project because they were already becoming obsolete; the state of the art for CRT terminals circa 1969 (IE, some of the first raster-screen terminals with MOS character generators combined with shift register memory, like the Datapoint 3300) was already moving to static RAM, meaning these bulk shift registers were starting to find their way to the surplus bins. (The Apple I is actually a laughable throwback by 1976 standards for using those parts in its video section.) The main things that distinguish a "personal computer" from 1977 from one from 1970 is mostly the fact that a digit has been removed from both the price in dollars and the weight in kilograms.

Woz was just another guy playing with bits that were suddenly accessable and affordable enough for mere mortals to have thanks to the work of silicon wizards achieving peak Moore's Law on the manufacturing side. There is nothing wrong with that, it's the collective effort of all these folks drawn to the hobby from all sort of backgrounds that actually brought the personal computer as we know it today to life. But it *is* wrong to just pick this one yahoo out of the crowd to elevate above all the others, and the way he feeds it with his self-aggrandizing narratives and refusal to give credit to others or even acknowledge any influence is just flat-out gross.

Al Kossow said:
I am very, very tired of the early history of AAPL and the Hero's Journey myth.
Click to expand...

This is the *actual quote* from iWoz (end of chapter 10, page 166 in the edition that I'm inflicting on myself as I'm typing this) that is so laughably stupid it genuinely makes me angry:

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that day, Sunday, June 29, 1975, was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them
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The date is a lie(*), which is bad enough, but the rest of that paragraph is, again, just so monumentally stupid it makes me physically ill. And it also has to be a calculated, bald-faced lie, because it's crystal clear from the rest of the book that he knows damn well that people were building their own computers and interacting with them via video terminals; he was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club, for #@$#'s sake. (His narrative makes it sound like he was the hero of the local chapter and all those peons there were hanging on his every word; odd that if you look up the newsletters from the time he actually doesn't seem to show up that much...) The whole book actually kind of ticks me off because it reads like it was written by a narcissistic high school Freshman, and honestly, I actually try to argue with myself that maaaybe this juvenile tone is evidence that he's not actually lying, he's just so high on his own supply he can't objectively distinguish reality from fantasy, but... whatever it is, it's just... yuck.

(* That same chapter says this:

WESCON, on June 16-18，1975，was being held in San Francisco’s famous Cow Palace. A bunch of us drove up there and I waited in line in front of MOS Technologies, table, where a guy named Chuck Peddle was peddling the chips.
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Again, provably wrong date, and... "A guy named Chuck Peddle". Nice.) 🤮
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Yes, it is pretty funny. Of course it could just be delusion instead of active deceit; if you’ve ever suffered through reading iWoz there’s enough straight-up lunacy in there we can’t rule it out.

There are interviews going back to the 1980’s where Woz comes across as a huge jerk just absolutely cr**ping all over everyone else who was working in the personal computer field in the mid-1970’s. He never gives an ounce of credit to anyone else and takes sole inventor credit for every piece of junk he’s ever cobbled together despite glaring evidence to the contrary. (For instance, a couple years ago someone did a deep dive into his insistence that he completely independently “invented” his terminals with no influence from Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter work and found the denials… lacking.) I used to chalk up the 80’s interviews as the result of being coached by Steve Jobs to push a narrative about Apple Computer Inc., but reading that book changed my mind; the poor guy seems to have one of the worst cases of Main Character Syndrome the world has ever seen. He talks as if CPU chips were these mysterious artifacts that fell out of UFOs and had no purpose until he, and he alone, had this unique and earth-shattering vision that you could build a computer out of one. It’s absolutely absurd. Maybe it’s all just a bit and actually knows better, but that just flips the coin back to malicious.

I’ll be fair here, clearly the guy *has* earned a place in the “pantheon” of personal computer pioneers for the work on the Apple II, but this concerted effort to elevate him to the position of the One True God through the time-honored tradition of just making sh*t up really needs to stop.
Click to expand...

Woz has always struck me as acting like he wished he could have been the other Steve. That and that his plane crash scrambled him a lot more than everyone ever thought.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
The chips Don Lancaster used to build the TV Typewriter in 1973 were cheap enough for a hobby magazine project because they were already becoming obsolete; the state of the art for CRT terminals circa 1969 (IE, some of the first raster-screen terminals with MOS character generators combined with shift register memory, like the Datapoint 3300) was already moving to static RAM, meaning these bulk shift registers were starting to find their way to the surplus bins. (The Apple I is actually a laughable throwback by 1976 standards for using those parts in its video section.)
Click to expand...
This specifically is one thing I've always wanted to have a proper discussion about with someone who understands the Apple I but isn't blinded by hero worship. Obviously many events this year are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the machine, but we know it wasn't the only machine from '76 to have a 6502 and an (optional) video system that may as well be a fancy TVT. But one company survived, and their computer gets all the celebration, hype, and insane price speculation. Anyway, if that aforementioned person is you, you know how to contact me.

I would love to see more time spent celebrating the TVT in all its forms at this point.

As for the talk, I know a few folks were disappointed that Woz didn't walk the show floor to see what was out there. But I can understand how that would quickly turn into a mess, even with a team of handlers clearing a path.
 
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that day, Sunday, June 29, 1975, was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer's screen right in front of them
Click to expand...

Yeah. How about the Xerox Alto, which dates to 1973? Not to me3ntion NLS (because aek already did...)

But I've noticed this effect from others. Things that were done by BBN, SRI, Xerox PARC got reinvented 20, 30 years later by people who were oblivious to the history and thought they'd created something new and patent-worthy. I can remember IBM basically reinventing the National Software Works (NSW) project, an early distributed system research project that dates back to around 1976. Also, Novell reinventing RSEXEC, which dates to around 1975, in the 2000s just as a couple of examples...

And all this talk around egos and people taking credit for things reminds me of a conversation I had with Bob Clements (rcc). This took place in the computer room at BBN around 1977 or so - when the Z80 was still very new. Bob was in the computer room (restricted access) with a Z80-based system that he was doing some sort of testing on. Don't know if he has designed & built the system or gotten it from somewhere else...

me: Doc just told me that you designed the PDP-10. Is that true?
rcc: The KA-10 processor. It was designed by a team and I was the junior member of that team.
me: Wow. And now you're playing with Z80s.
rcc: Well, I got demoted.

And so if you've never heard of Bob Clements, that's why. Not the "demotion" but his humble nature as opposed to all those self-promoters out there...
 
One of the things I had been working on for decades was finding original documentation and software from institutions that were in the ARPA funding orbit. It was a big deal up until Congress pulled the plug on such research in 1970. It was a small but hugely influential group of people and there were a huge collection of them in the Bay Area. CHM is ending up with a lot of personal paper collections from them, along with some huge institutional collections not affiliated with local universities, which is probably a good thing since places like Stanford special collections is an absolute pain in the ass to deal with as an outsider and CBI at the University of Minnesota doesn't seem to be collecting any more.
 
NeXT said:
Are you sure it was a good idea to mention this so far in advance? The last few years the CHM was already close to crush capacity in the hall during peak hours, now we'll have people pouring in for a chance to meet Woz.
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Yes. It was fine. Approximately 350 in the room which was 369 people capacity. It worked out great. No problems!
 
NeXT said:
He also just sort of appeared, then he was gone. Took the side door in and out and spent no time in the exhibit hall much less in the mezzanine lobby. Somewhat of a disappointment.


It was interesting. The main hall thinned out around 2pm but immediately after the talk the room filled up again and remained like that for the rest of the afternoon.
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Yes. Everyone was disappointed that he couldn't stick around afterwards, but he had to go due to a medical emergency.
 
Al Kossow said:
It should have had a moderator. Liza was insightful. Woz was just Woz.
Who was the guy to the left of Kottke? I watched it for an hour and he was nowhere to be seen
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I believe that he was part of the Byte Shop and it was a mock presentation of the first Apple I to Woz. The original intention was to have Woz present Corey Cohen's Apple I (On stage next to them) to Liza. That didn't happen. We had much discussion about what would happen for this panel, but the best laid plans of mice and men often ...
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Yes, it is pretty funny. Of course it could just be delusion instead of active deceit; if you’ve ever suffered through reading iWoz there’s enough straight-up lunacy in there we can’t rule it out.

There are interviews going back to the 1980’s where Woz comes across as a huge jerk just absolutely cr**ping all over everyone else who was working in the personal computer field in the mid-1970’s. He never gives an ounce of credit to anyone else and takes sole inventor credit for every piece of junk he’s ever cobbled together despite glaring evidence to the contrary. (For instance, a couple years ago someone did a deep dive into his insistence that he completely independently “invented” his terminals with no influence from Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter work and found the denials… lacking.) I used to chalk up the 80’s interviews as the result of being coached by Steve Jobs to push a narrative about Apple Computer Inc., but reading that book changed my mind; the poor guy seems to have one of the worst cases of Main Character Syndrome the world has ever seen. He talks as if CPU chips were these mysterious artifacts that fell out of UFOs and had no purpose until he, and he alone, had this unique and earth-shattering vision that you could build a computer out of one. It’s absolutely absurd. Maybe it’s all just a bit and actually knows better, but that just flips the coin back to malicious.

I’ll be fair here, clearly the guy *has* earned a place in the “pantheon” of personal computer pioneers for the work on the Apple II, but this concerted effort to elevate him to the position of the One True God through the time-honored tradition of just making sh*t up really needs to stop.
Click to expand...
A lot of the stories are just Apple "marketing" (aka, lies) and I'm glad others can call him out for it, even if not to his face.

Using NTSC tricks for color on the Apple II was clever, even if the idea probably came from the Dazzler and other products before it/him. He did optimize the chip count, and that is something he could just be proud of, along with the Disk II controller.

It's like listening to my old grandfather who was full of shit and couldn't shut up. We still love him and all, but it's exhausting.
 
rittwage said:
Using NTSC tricks for color on the Apple II was clever, even if the idea probably came from the Dazzler and other products before it/him.
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One of the first articles in Byte magazine was Don Lancaster explaining how to do NTSC color phasing on the cheap. (“Television Interface”, October 1975, page 20.) I’m sure that’s just one of many articles that Woz absolutely swears he never saw before inventing it all on his own months before anyone else. (Insert eye-roll emoji here. *sigh*)
 
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