Re: Woz interview

["will strutts" <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com>]

"Rob New" <robroyn2@home.com> wrote in message
news:S3MH7.16647$XJ4.11151175@news1.sttln1.wa.home.com...
>
> I would direct my comments to the 'fun' of hacking - which by definition
> from the book by Steven Levy, "Hackers - heros of the computer
revolution",
> means:  Doing something for the sheer joy of doing it.
>
> Not to sound too sensational or dramatic - but the Apple ][+ changed
> my life, changed my career, and gave me a type of joy that I had
> never heretofore known.
>
> I waxed nostalgic when I rediscovered the
> Apple thru ApplePC, and fired up a game I hadn't played in 20 years.
> I almost swooned from the nostalgic wave, it was so strong.  And I
> was depressed for a very long time after when I realized that those
> days are just a part of my history now - only  to be relived again
> in some small part.
>
Although I wasn't an Apple II user back in the day, I can say this
that there was a certain "soul" to those old machines that I find
lacking in the multi-megabyte Windoze machines that we have today.
My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with Extended
Disk Color Basic in ROM. Talk about simplicity. I just turned my
machine on and I was ready to go. No bloated OS to load and
no bloated software to stand in the way. It was cool back then
with the old machines. Even the Mac has its attributes that I
find alluring. Imagine a full GUI computer that ran with less than
128k of memory. Wow! Compare this to Windoze's multi-mega
byte nightmare and DLL Hell and Plug and Pray technologies
and you get the point.

I am a recent Apple II person and in the short time I have been
playing with the II's, I am amazed at the capabilities of the machine.
I have an old 8/16 bit Apple IIgs networked to my home network
complete with a SCSI drive. That is pretty cool for a machine designed
in the mid-80's.

I was never a hardware hack but a software hack. The joy of creating
code and getting it to run was the thrill for me. I couldn't get enough
so I made it my major and went into CS. So much for the old english
major for me. ;-)

I must admit that turning on the old hardware again after so many
years of being gone was a real thrill. The cool thing with the old
8-bit machines was that the design was simple enough that you
could understand how things worked together. This simplicity
of design was its elegance. Programmers were frugal in their
code and did amazing things with so little. Today, we have too
many resources so efficiency and elegance was tossed out the
window. The rule of the thumb is "what the hell. The user will
just have to get a faster machine, larger hard drive or more memory
to run XYZ's bloatware". How many programmers today can
write a word processor to run on 16k of memory? Not too
many I am sure. Heck with Visual Basic there is a rather large
minimum size just to use the compiler since you have to include
the DLL to run your compiled code. (VBRUN)

--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...

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