The Children of Woz (Re: Apple, Jobs, and the irony of it)

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Richard Kilpatrick <richard@dmc12.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>The G5 is 'insanely great' - it is the most 
>powerful computer /anyone/ should be able to buy over the shelf, use 
>right away - no assembly required, no shopping for cases, motherboards 
>and such. In real terms it is probably cheaper than a Multia was.

You are obviously an Apple person.  I am a PC user
but I too consider myself an Apple person.  But I
am a devotee of the OTHER Apple.

You see, there are two groups of Apple followers.
The children of Woz and the children of Jobs.  You
appear to be a child of Jobs.

Jobs has always pushed for the "no assembly
required" model.  You seem to view building a
computer from the ground up as some kind of
weakness.

The children of Woz will disagree.  Apple was
born from a garage around a computer that Woz
built by hand.  He put the chips on the boards
and coded the ROMs himself.  Then he sold
his creation, the Apple I, and the world was
changed.  The Apple II was a direct extension
of the Apple I.

The beauty of the Apple II was that it was NOT
a fully packaged deal.  You had to configure it,
was free to add a multitude of cards and
indeed NEEDED to add a Disk2 card to make
it fully functional.  When I got my first Apple
IIe, I had to crack open the case to install the
DuoDisk controller and Extended 80 column
card.  Yes, not all of us are born with the gift
of Woz, able to create computers from chips,
but the experience of working with the IIe
motherboard and expansion cards gave each
Apple II users a feeling of direct link to Woz's
creation.

Now the children of Jobs slams the PCs for
being so configurable.  Indeed, makes it seem
like the fact that so many PCs are built by
end users who select their own components
is a flaw.  But this is not the weakness of
PCs as Jobs sees it.  It is the very strength
of the PC, the same strength that Woz'
Apple II computer had.  YOU as the user
decides.  I did this with my IIe, creating a
very unique configuration.  I did this with my
IIGS, pushing it far the limits the IIGS
motherboard could support, exanding it with
the best third party hardware I could find.
And every time I build a PC, assembling my
AMD processor, Crucial memory, motherboard
with chipset and design of my choice, getting
into the guts of the hardware and bringing a
new computer system to life, I reach connect
with my experience of owning an Apple II
computer.

The PC is the computer the Apple II would
have become had it been allowed to continue,
not the Mac.

Yes, you can buy a G5 cheaper than the Multia
was, being a child of Jobs.  But I, being a
child of Woz, can assemble an Opteron
system with motherboard, case, memory,
video, and sound of my choosing for less.
Jobs has succeeded in killing off the Apple II
and erased remnants of its past success but
he has not extinguished the spirit of the Apple II.
Every former Apple II user who now builds and
uses PCs knows this.