Re: The Woz being inducted into National Inventors Hall of Fame

[noprivatereplies@please.it (Morel)]

Greg Buchner <nobody@wavetech.net> wrote:

> Just read the following on Macintouch <http://www.macintouch.com/>
> 
> Personal computer pioneer and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is among
> seven inventors who will be inducted later this year into the National
> Inventors Hall of Fame for bringing about "advances in a broad range of
> technologies, including computers, medicine, manufacturing and 
> communications." Specifically, Wozniak was honored for the "Apple II 
> personal computer, which brought together the central processing unit
> (CPU), keyboard and disk drive in an affordable unit."

A well deserved honor!

The basic design Wozniak devised for his Apple II had some new and great
ideas in it. My favourite one was the way each slot had some ROM space
reserved for it, so the drivers for a card could com in a ROM chip on
the card itself. The system monitor had a simple protocol for linking
the driver routines in the I/O vectors. IN#x from BASIC, Cx00G from the
monitor would install the routines for I/O through the card in slot x.

That was 'plug & play', in 1977. I can't believe that IBM, which copied
most of the Apple II design for their PC, didn't copy this great
feature. Did Apple own a patent for it?

-- 
Morel