Re: Woz interview

["Rob New" <robroyn2@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.

Like tons of other guys, I really drank the milk of the Apple][, its
software
its games, its ethic, and found out I was an obsessive/compulsive.
AppleSoft and
the Merlin Assembler, assembler classes, and the joy of running a
fully debugged program.

Always waiting to hear that Apple followed thru on its
promise for a 'greatly' enhanced Apple ][:  Megs of memory,
running at wild speeds that would embarrass the IBM 'PC' crowd.

I hoped with all the other Apple Addicts that the ][ *would* live
forever.  Open-architecture, hundreds of thousands of titles,
fanatical following - new hardware add-ons year after year.
My friends and family thought I was crazy.  Apple-speak
was all I ever talked back then - the mini-assembler,
peeks and pokes, BASIC-ese.  It made a kid out of
me at 23.

What saw more fervor than Apple ][ development, and the
'Home Computer'?

Well, I guess the market continues to climb and there
are more titles and apps than ever before - but

Where's the Fun?

Since I've made it a career, and moved
over to IBM back in '85, it lost all its fun.  PC's really killed it for
me.  Give me the 'Home computer' as it was called back then.
As others have said, Linux was a taste of the hacker fruit.
When the Home Computer became a real business, and stepped
into Fortune 500, it was the beginning of the end for the
Hobbyist Hackers.

Sorry about getting so personal in a newsgroup.

But, I'm discovering that I still burn
with the simplicity of the ][.

Rob

"steve at crackershack dot com" <steve@remove.crackershack.com> wrote in
message news:grWG7.207$q71.317401@news.uswest.net...

>
However, the PC in the mid 80's was really a hackers paradise. Software
cool, simple and fun. You could mix and match hardware. How cool was it when
8 bit digitized sounds was standardized with the SoundBlaster Pro???
...
All these things are possible, and easier to do with Windows, but the fun is
largely gone.
<

"Roy Miller" <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote in message
3BCF0F3E.4F53EEDE@inetnebr.com">news:3BCF0F3E.4F53EEDE@inetnebr.com...
> Robert McAllister wrote:
>
> > Doede wrote:
> >
> > "Steve ends with: 'I really would like a chance to recreate the Apple II
> > fun someday.'
> >
> > -----
> >
> > I don't believe that same leap or high or whatever you want to call it
> > as far as the personal computer itself is possible now. PC s are so
> > universal now, mundane, not like back in the Eighties, or for those of
> > you who got a real early start, the Seventies. Now it seems as though
> > everyone has one, like toasters. Processors get faster and storage
> > capacity increases, and someone is always finding a more efficient way
> > to do things (except for Microsoft), but there doesn't seem to be the
> > potential for that same "amazement" that at least I felt back in the
> > Eighties when I got my //c (not that I was ever any kind of computer
> > geek as you can tell from the questions I ask, but it was pretty cool
> > back then).
> >
> > Then again maybe I'm just nuts.
>
> Not nuts, but I think you missed Woz's point. In context, I think the fun
he
> was referring to was the fun in creating the II, and, perhaps, the fun
> people had in exploring the II. Macs and PCs are too complex (esp. the OS)
> for much "tinkering" types to accomplish much. The II was a hacker's
> computer, that begged for people to open it up, and dig into it, push it,
> expand it. That spirit of adventure isn't really possible with OS X and
XP.
> Linux.... maybe.....
>
> Roy
>
> >
> >
> > -+-+-+-
> >
> > Rob McAllister
>