Mention the name “Woz,” and most Mac users will know exactly who you’re talking about. After all, they’ve been enjoying the fruits of Steve Wozniak’s labors for years. Wozniak spends spends most of his time these days focusing on Wheels of Zeus, a company he helped form to develop wireless consumer electronic products, but he still pays attention to that other company he helped establish with Steve Jobs 26 years ago. “I love OS X from a feeling point of view. But from capability and readiness, I still don’t rate it ready for me, I’m sorry to say.” Woz says.
Q&A with Steve Wozniak at MacWorld
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Its like listening to my dad’s computer company startup stories. Not really an interview but more of a conversation with someone more experianced then you and its told as a historical story.
Ahh I miss this type of conversation.
That’s the woz!!
He invented floppies, I still have the floppy drives that came with my apple IIe, you could fine tine tune yourself when synchronisation problem arised …
Apple II was with me bebox the best machine I ever had. A ahcakers dream, you could easely code in basic or assembly for it. You could poke the assembled code directly in memory. Hardware add-ons where esay to design … That was a cool machine.
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http://homepage.mac.com/softkid
they don’t make many like the Woz.
The next generation of homebrew products that shake the world, in my opinion, will come in the field of robotics.
So, don’t despair that the old days of a simple OS are gone and you can’t go poking around memory. You can still experience the great feeling of discovery, learning and hardcore programming and hardware hacking from looking at the future…robotics. Best of all, you can do this from home.
Go forth young man/woman and build me a robot that rocks!
I try to stick with the less-resources-doing-more. That’s the definition of efficiency. I try to design with fewer chips that do more, so I try to use simpler software and get it to do more.
i wonder why apple no longer adhare to the same high standarts as it’s cofounder? while you can argue about the PPC as a cpu, mac os X (or any mac os for that matter) is very far away from being efficient. it’s all full of bloat and eyecandy, it’s all closed and propitrary (however you spell that word
)… it’s an anti-woz system.
and you’de expect him to want a more hacker friendly system… an the mac is the least hacker friendly system, both hardware and software-wise.
I’d hardly call the mac the least frendly hacker computer. That has to be windows.
It’s a lot less “proprietary” than many other platforms, at least from a developers point of view. Certainly a lot easier to find technical documentation about Apple computers than about, say, Dell computers.
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/hardware/hardware.html
Their Apple Developer Connection kicks ass in general.
Oh, and their kernel and much of their userland is open source, so any way you look at it, it’s more open than any PC with Windows.
apple’s hardware isn’t open at all, pc hardware is.
and it might not be as closed as windows, but i was talking about linux and *BSD.
anyway, it’s a lot less configurable then EVEN windows at some things… i’m not sure about os x, but in the classic systems you could not change anything , not even some of the colors, let alone important stuff. it was apple’s way or the highway.
and again, windows isn’t much (or at all) better, but it (the mac) isn’t as hacker-friendly as linux (or as the ol’ apple][s), which is meant to make things more consistent, and thus easyer to use for joe sixpack, and that’s all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t what i’d expect from The Woz.
Woz is a hacker, but he’s a different breed of hacker. He is a hacker who uses his incredible wealth of knowledge to better the lives of joe six-pack. Many of the linux hackers do what they do in a quest for knowledge; Woz does this to a certain degree, but he also does what he does in a quest to better the lives of non-geeks. He is the model of what every hard-core mac geek should aspire to.
As for the comments about the tinkerability of apple stuff, usually apple has a fairly non-tinkerable UI, and then hackers create third party tinks to do all sorts of weird and cool stuff. For instance, OS X doesn’t really have out-of-the-box themability but one of my friends has come out with a piece of shareware called Xpression!
http://www.freeverse.com/xpression.mgi which allows people to theme the cocoa-y goodness of OS X. Many neat and interesting mac hacks can also be found in the annals of MacHack http://www.machack.com/history/
The mac is hackable, but it makes the hackers work for it. The mac is hacker friendly, but its picky about who its friends are.
The above anonymous-coward lookin’ comment was posted by me. Forgot to take credit for it.
–Ilan Volow
This is only what I heard, may not be true in the first place. Accroading to what I hear, Developers Connection is very hostile towards shareware makers, especially those that enchance OS X’s UI… Unlike MSDN. But that’s only what I hear.
Besides, Your point is still moot. Macs are still closed hardware because Mac OS could run on them. Apple should transition into a software company, ala Palm. That way, it could save a superior technology – PPC, increase their profits margin – ala Microsoft, and have a greater control over the industry besides being a style trend setter (which is hardly profitable).
Apple should transition into a software company
Apple makes most of their money from that closed hardware, sad but true. what your saying, IMO will not increase but decrease their profits.
The mac is hackable, but it makes the hackers work for it. The mac is hacker friendly, but its picky about who its friends are.
“hacker friendly” means it’s easy to hack it (in the good sense of the word). ofcourse “The mac is hackable”, you can say that about 99.9% of all OSs… but is it easy to hack it? hell no…
If you’re curious about what Woz doesn’t like about MacOS X, you can visit http://www.woz.org/ and use the google search on his page. He writes it “MacOS X”, so you’d like to search using that.
Basically his thoughts are that OSX fails in the fundamentals. GUIs give visual cues to keep people from having to remember commands. Apparently he thinks that OSX goes too far in its metaphors, straying away from the fundamentals. Maybe Apple believes that complexity is more impressive to users, as this person talks about:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/5/205049/1425/34#34
He invented floppies
Floppies where around before Woz. Woz designed the floppy controllor for the Apple ][, but he didn’t invent floppies
According to hardware guys at the time, the controllor could be conisdered a master peice of digitial engineering. Which is nice.
Basically his thoughts are that OSX fails in the fundamentals. GUIs give visual cues to keep people from having to remember commands. Apparently he thinks that OSX goes too far in its metaphors, straying away from the fundamentals.
i have not found such claims on his home page. mind giving us a link/ direct quote?
This interview is right up there with Stephen Levy’s Hackers. People need to remember why we build and use computers in the first place.
Interesting story, I worked with a guy who didn’t know computers very well but when I mentioned Woz, he remembered him as the guy who put on the US festival which I had never heard of.
In this day when heroes are hard to find, Woz is one of mine.
In this day when heroes are hard to find, Woz is one of mine.
indeed, he is (or should be) a model to all hackers.
Yes!!
Can you say “ResEdit for Windows”? How about “Inside Compaq” or “Inside Dell”?
I haven’t used Mac OS X yet, and I don’t know if it has a ResEdit equivalent.
I’ll believe that x86, Windows, and Linux are open when somebody shows me how to get my winmodem to work with SUSE.
I liked the way he thinks and works. His story was very nice to read.
I’ll believe that x86, Windows, and Linux are open
how many companies are selling mac clones? can you buy your mac in parts and assemble it your self? can you become a mac clone builder and vendor?
can you get the source code for the entire Mac OS X system? how much of it can you change? can you resell it as Mac OS X, debaddass version 1.0 ?