Okay, well he's a nice jerk, but still...
This book typifies Apple the computer and Apple the company to a "T". Style and image and little real substance. In the main, that goes for Apple users as well.
Yes, Woz did some cool stuff, but so did many of the other pioneers of the the mid-70s era. And his stuff was by no means so revolutionary as he claims.
He goes on for several pages extolling his two-chip floppy card. Well, if he'd simply used a real floppy controller chip like the others (such as the Western Digital 17xx series FDCs used in the TRS-80) his drive might have actually worked. Because of his el-cheapo approach, he couldn't use the reliable FM and MFM encoding. Instead he was forced to use Group Code Recording, which is supposedly self-clocking. Yes, it works OK, but ***only when the drive is new***. When the head drifts out of alignment, the clamping mechanism starts slipping, or if the drive speed goes off, his amateurish scheme fails big time. I happen to know because I worked for several years as a disk duplicator for a big-time software publisher, and I saw for myself the people in the customer support department tearing their hair out and climbing the walls taking calls and processing returns from irate customers with their piece-of-**** Apple drives.
His info on the TRS-80 on pages 208 and 209 is completely wrong. It didn't earn the moniker "Trash-80" for nothing (spontaneous reboots, key bounce, lousy cassette, etc), but it was hardly as primitive as he describes.
He gloats because his Apple II can go up to 48K and the "Trash-80" only goes up to 4K. HA! In 1977 the first Model Is were sold with 4K (when many other computers only had 1K or 2K), but all could be later upgraded when 16K chips became available.
Contrary to Woz, the TRS-80 also had a "real" keyboard. Unlike the Apple, you could install a numeric keypad in the main unit. So much for being the greatest ever "business machine" (I must admit though that Tandy skimped on lowercase letters, just to save $1 in hardware)
Yes Woz, the TRS-80 does graphics. Sure, they're block graphics in black and white, but with CPUs as slow as they were back in that day, that's all you can do well. The Apple had sharp color graphics, but all it could do was static displays because the piddling 1 Mhz 6502 could push all those pixels around. The '80 had many wonderful games with objects zooming all over the screen, you should check it out.
He says the Apple could be programmed in machine language or BASIC, and that made it a business machine (Visicalc came later). Not the TRS-80, which is BASIC only. Wrong. Look back into all the articles in 80 Microcomputer having to do with coding in assembler, and moreover, how to interface BASIC with m/c subroutines in protected memory. The Apple has no means of protecting memory, it's all or nothing there, no flexibility.
Speaking of BASIC, only Tandy had the good sense to include Microsoft Basic in their machine. Compare Applesoft vs. TRS-80 Level II feature for feature. No contest, the Woz machine doesn't do complex strings, no double-precision floating point, file handling is a joke. Yes, Apple had Visicalc first, but that was only because Bricklin picked the Apple completely at random as his development target -- it says so in Accidental Empires by Robert Cringely. But Visicalc was not everything, there are hundreds of business apps besides, and in this day they were mostly written in BASIC, and the "Trash-80" was the only computer with a REAL BASIC.
This exemplifies Woz's whole approach to the Apple -- cheap cheap cheap. Cheap CPU, cheap disk drives, cheap software. Typically Apple: cheap in everything but $$$.
Woz completely omits the fact that to buy an Apple you had to buy it through mail-order (at least until later when they got some dealers). Of course he doesn't mention that Radio Shack was the first computer retailer EVER where you could bring it in for servicing or upgrading, buy approved accessories and software, and get training. Apple users had to settle for "user groups" for support. Since we're talking about Apple users here, perhaps I should say "user groupies".
Much is made of the Apple's presence in the educational market. Fact is, the TRS-80 had a greater market penetration here. It's not well known because Tandy was famous for not disclosing its sales figures. Here again Apple propoganda reigns supreme.
Which reminds me, it was Tandy's massive advertising efforts that were the coattails that Apple rode to the market on.
I hope all these specific examples show what this book is about: Woz's self-loving ego. I'm sure he's a nice guy and all, and there were some good things to the Apple (color hi-res 80-column screen, sound, slots), but he wasn't all that, child.
If you want to read a really good, even heroic, story of an inventor-genius, read this one: Copies in Seconds by David Owen. How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communications Breakthrough since Gutenberg - Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine. And do get the hardcover, after you read this tale you'll be glad to have the deluxe version.
Woz could learn more than a thing or two about writing from this book.
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