Kiss My Abacus,on iwoz and computers

October 2007
On Computers


So I read iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith this week. It was nothing special as far as books go. It didn’t stink and it wasn’t great. But I felt compelled to read it any way. Like many people my first experience with a personal computer was with an Apple II back in the year 1977, or maybe, just maybe 1978 at the very latest. I was only ten years old at the time. The computer belonged to a friend of mine, his family; he his brother and his mother and father shared it. His parents were extremely generous and would let us kids sit at the damn thing for hours. Let us play games. The Apple II my friend’s family had was not hooked up to a T.V., they had it hooked up to a green screen.
Does anyone remember them? It was a monitor that was not even black and white. All of the characters on screen appeared “green”, against a black background. I distinctly remember playing a game that was text based. You didn’t have graphics at all. You just read paragraphs, made choices or decisions about what your character would do next, which way they would go, what room they would enter, and then you would read more paragraphs. It was a text-based game. It was fun. The one I like best was called Kidnapped. We played it on an Apple II. There were other games that did have graphics. I remember a pretty fun little Star Trek game. You would chase Klingons to different sectors and report to different star bases. Battle the Klingons and watch how much shield power your Enterprise had. How many photon torpedoes you had, and so on. It was fun.
I don’t recall ever doing anything productive on the Apple II. It was just fun. As I said we were only 10, 11 years old at the time.
It was through this friend of mine that I got to witness a steady parade of different computers through the years. At some point in the late 80’s they abandoned Apple and moved to the readily available and infinitely cheaper IBM clones. I think they had computers that predated Windows. It was not an easy or fun time to be strictly a user of computers. You really needed to have some technical knowledge to make the damn things do what you wanted. An example would be I can remember trying to get some programs to run; more often than not some game we wanted to play, and in order to make it happen, in order to even load the damn program you had to make a batch file. You had to edit the config sys batch file and create a boot disk. It was not for the faint of heart.
Then you would often sit and wait a very long time and watch a little meter fill up as the program loaded. It could take a very long time sometimes. Computers were slow!
At the same time, my friend and his family including his mother and father became extremely proficient at using a computer. They probably still know more than many people who come to use computers today. I witnessed my first Network at this friend’s house. By this time they had moved through so many machines they had more than one lying around. They created a very crude Network by plugging a cable into the back of each computer. The thrill of it is was we got to play a cool NASCAR racing game head to head. It was a first on hour block.
The first computer to enter my house, belonged to my father. This could have been about 10 or 15 years after Apple II. Remember he had six children, a wife and a mortgage. He bought himself a Macintosh when he felt that the technology was something he could handle. They had a reputation back then of being more user friendly. My father never let anyone use his Mac. He bought it and it was his. This is something I never held against him. To him it was more of a tool than a toy. At least that’s how I always looked at it.
Me I didn’t get my own personal computer until February of 1998. I paid over two grand for a Pentium II. It came with Windows 95 and I had to go through a painful upgrade to Windows 98 when it became available.
Now about the book, iwoz by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith; I wanted to read it mostly because it was the first time there seemed to be a first hand account of events that I had read about in the past. Most people have heard the story about how Apple started out in the garage at Steve Jobs’ parent’s house. It’s such a cool story. About how they eventually got invited to the Palo Alto Research Center and learned all there was to learn about great things to come like graphical user interface computers and peripherals such as the mouse. All of these cool things we take for granted today could have belonged to a company called Xerox. But the fools running that company gave it all away to a couple of smart guys from Cupertino. I love that story, but I’ve heard it a number of times before.
Most of this book came out sounding a little to dull.
Wozniak couldn’t seem to make the telling exciting. Maybe because to him it was a little like you or I talking about our first humdrum job, just another day in the life. You know?
I thought he was a little callous when talking about Steve Jobs some times. He mentioned that when naming Apple Computer he actually spoke with Jobs about the recording company Apple Records and a possible conflict. I’ve always felt that Apple Records is Apple Records and Apple Computers is Apple Computers, even when considering the ipod and itunes. Why mention a sore point like that? He did that at least one other time, and I just felt it was unnecessary.
Any way it was fun to remember a time before computers, and the time after. I was 10 when I first got to play with a computer. I was almost 30 before I could afford one of my own. It was that one that I really fell in love with. I remember thinking almost 30 minutes after I had the thing sitting on my desk, “How did I live with out one of these for so long!” I went to school. Learned about Networking. Bought a second computer. Had some fun. Any way that’s my blurb on computers. For now.

KGD
October 28, 2007