Re: Apple II featured in Joy of Tech comic

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Sean Fahey wrote:

<snip>

>from http://mitglied.lycos.de/deomaki/html/glossary/tz.htm
>
>"Together with Steven Jobs, Steve Wozniak designs the game 'Breakout' for
>Atari. Wozniak gets $350 from Jobs, who himself gets $5000 from Nolan
>Bushnell. Steve Wozniak never is credited for designing the game together
>with Jobs! Years later they are founding 'Apple Computers'. Rumours say,
>that their first Apple prototype mostly consisted of Atari parts."

The last "rumor" is incorrect.

Woz worked for HP at HP Labs in Palo Alto.  Most of the parts
for the Apple I (and Apple II!) are standard parts from HP labstock.

HP's longstanding tradition (then) was to provide parts to any
engineer for their private experimentation, since anything they
learned was good for the company, too.

When I worked there, I was delighted to find all the Apple II
parts in the bins.  I had always wondered why Woz chose that
50-pin expansion connector!  ;-)  (It turns out that the HP 3000
computer was full of them.  ;-)

Lots of great, instrumentation-quality audio amplifiers and radios,
and later computers, were made or enhanced with parts from
HP's open labstock.  One of the great heads of HP Labs, Barney
Oliver, designed a great amplifier as a "g-job" that was later
built by many HP employees for themselves.

One time, the person in charge of labstock decided to try to save
some money by locking the parts and tool cabinets on nights and
weekends.  Bill Hewlett himself came in one weekend to fix an
electronic device (as he often did) and found the tool cabinets
locked.  He responded by getting a bolt cutter and summarily
cutting all the locks off the doors, and left a note that labstock
should be open 24 hours a day!

And so it remained until early in the 1990's, when another manager
decided to save some pennies at the cost of the founders' vision.
By then, Bill wasn't coming in to his office very regularly.  ;-(

-michael

Check out parallel computing for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/