Apple II Bits

When Steve Jobs passed away, a flurry of media was published about his life and times, his wisdom and accomplishments, his successes and failures. It’s easy for any one piece to have gotten lost in that maelstrom — but one in particular deserves to not be missed.

In 1995, Steve Jobs sat down with Daniel Morrow of the Computerworld Honors program for a 75-minute interview, conducted in conjunction with the Smithsonian. The transcript of that interview was published the day after Jobs’ passing — but something far more fascinating has since been unearthed.

As of this morning, the original video of that interview is now available. It’s a fascinating and candid look at the man who was, at that point in his career (40 years old), still at NeXT and two years away from his return to Apple. Across the 16 chapters into which the interview has been divided, he talks about his early encounters with authority, the parallel between computing and artistry, and his hopes for NeXT, Pixar, and even Apple.

Steve Jobs in 1995. Screen capture from a Computerworld video.

The aforementioned transcript makes it easy to identify the passages where the Apple II is discussed. I could find only a handful of such moments, the first being in chapter six, where Jobs identifies the quality of his computers (both the hits and the flops) in which he held the most pride:

The things I’m most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together … The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically — those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I’m the most proud of. It happened on the Apple II and it happened on the Lisa … and then it happened again big time on the Macintosh.

The next occurrence is in chapter nine, when he draws a comparison with Apple’s competitors:

With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job.

One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was.

AFAIK, this Computerworld gallery marks the first time this interview has been made publicly available. I encourage anyone interested in a candid, unscripted, and in-depth conversation with Steve Jobs to take a look.

[Full disclosure: I was responsible for the layout of this gallery and participated in the editing, production, and promotion of it.]

I update this blog every Thursday. There’s no rule against me updating it more than once.

Steve Jobs has passed away. My co-workers and I got together this morning to reflect on what this means for us and our world.

Great work by Keith Shaw in producing and editing this video. I know of at least one more video and one podcast that will feature Apple II users. I’ll post them here on Monday.

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday at the age of 56.

Image courtesy Apple.

Here’s a video from Computerworld with more details.

An excellent profile of the man and his insights and wisdom is available in this 2005 commencement speech from Stanford.

I’m not really sure what more to say. Apple II users Dan Bricklin, Bill Budge, Chris Espinosa, John Romero, and Wil Wheaton do.

Last week, I posted a blog to Computerworld that may be of interest to Apple II users: "Steve Wozniak on Steve Jobs’ resignation". It started when Greg Nelson sent the KansasFest email list a link to the CNN’s video interview with Woz. I thought to simply repurpose it for an Apple II Bits blog post — but the more I looked into it, the more I realized there was more to say here than found in a single embedded video.

The final blog post would’ve fit right at home on this site, but I decided to post it instead to my professional blog at my day job, Computerworld for several reasons:

1. It was already Friday, and I post here on Mondays and Thursdays only. I wanted to get the post published in time for the weekend.
2. Due to my own inconsistent publication schedule and a lack of focus in topics, I’ve not attracted an audience at Computerworld, which makes it rarely worth my time to blog there. But it’s still in my best interests to demonstrate that I occasionally have something relevant to contribute to discussions in the IT sector.
3. Even without a regular audience, the readership of Computerworld.com is, unsurprisingly, significantly larger than Apple II Bits. The details are company confidential, but I can say that putting the blog post there has earned it about a hundred-and-fifty times more pageviews than it would’ve gotten here.
4. My Computerworld co-workers have little interest in my Apple II hobby, but they’ll gladly promote any Computerworld content they find intriguing. As a result, my post got much more social media love on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus than it would’ve otherwise, contributing to the above pageviews. Heck, even Steve Wozniak had something to say about it on Facebook.
5. I was able to include a link back to apl2bits.net. Since it was a link to relevant and timely information, it wasn’t a conflict of interest or a blatant plug so much as a good opportunity to bring some new readers here.

I can’t republish that blog post here, but I wanted to do more than just link to it and say "Today’s Apple II Bits post is over here." I hope I’ve demonstrated some value in choosing to write for The Man instead of myself in this instance.

KansasFest 2011 is over — and thus begins my annual coverage of the event for Computerworld.com. Each year, I find a way to bring the Apple II to this enterprise IT site, giving both our retrocomputer a wider audience and Computerworld some diverse and fun content.

But the Apple II has been represented in many other articles during my four-plus years at Computerworld. Members of our community are IT professionals with staggering amounts of institutional knowledge, and as helpful as they are in-person at KansasFest, they have always been willing to be a resource during my research into related topics. I thought it’d be fun to index who has appeared as a source, or who has provided content, to Computerworld.com:

• Tony Diaz
• The cure for a hungry, sleepy laptop— Tony provided some technical advice for an issue I was having with my laptop. I don’t remember what his exact contribution was, as I didn’t tell him during that IM conversation that I was going to use his words in this blog post.
• Anatomy of an Apple IIc — I’d sent Tony a link to the PCWorld story "Anatomy of an Icon: Inside the Apple IIc", with which he then took technical issue. With his permission, I adapted his email response into this blog post.
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Tony offered a quotation as to why the Apple II is still enjoyed by hobbyists today.
• Face-off: 1979 Apple Graphics Tablet vs. 2010 Apple iPad – Computerworld — This was my KansasFest 2010 article, but Tony provided many of its photos, as did Loren Damewood and Mark Frischknecht.
• Steve Weyhrich
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Dr. Steve provided a historical look at what made the Apple IIc a successful model.
• Tony Ward
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — Tony Ward, former file library manager on Genie’s A2 RoundTable, is a modern-day Delphi community manager. His perspective on how Delphi has survived into the present day was surprising and useful.
• Eric Shepherd
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — As a former GEnie sysop, Sheppy provided valuable insight into why GEnie was popular and what ultimately killed it.
• Mike Willegal
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — Mike’s Apple-1 index was cited for information about other known existing Apple-1 machines.
• Eric Rucker
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — I cornered Eric in IRC, where he pointed out some of the qualities of the Apple-1 that was being auctioned. The final story quoted him.
• Peter Watson
• Linux Air: Hitting the road with the Eee PC — By the time Peter got his hands on this netbook, Computerworld had already published its own review and couldn’t commission Peter to write another one. But he did anyway, which we happily published as this complimentary blog.
• Mike Maginnis
• PalmPilot, BlackBerry, iPhone: A history of conquerers — Here’s a blog post that Mike wrote and which Computerworld published.
• Ryan Suenaga
• Ryan never directly appeared in a Computerworld article, but when I was presented with a list of companies to profile, knowing Ryan motivated me to choose his employer, Kaiser Permanente.

I look forward to other opportunities to put Apple II users’ names in lights!

The computers that Apple II users grew up with were nowhere near as user-friendly as today’s machines. They had unintuitive interfaces, inscrutable error messages, and limited capabilities.

But those same limitations also made them an excellent tool for learning such important concepts as problem-solving, game design, and especially programming.

The Apple II was especially practical for that last function, as it came with BASIC in ROM. Without any other software, a user could turn on her machine and start building a virtual world of her own design. The lack of advanced features meant that the user was playing in a sandbox of conceivable limits yet infinite possibilities.

Yet by 1997, when I started college as a computer science major, I was getting laughed out of the classroom by using BASIC where other students were relying on Java and C++, as I related in Juiced.GS. Today, BASIC is almost nowhere to be found, as detailed in the leading item on Computerworld.com last Thursday "How are students learning programming in a post-Basic world?"

The story is an interesting look at the variety of languages with which to introduce modern students to programming. For some parents and teachers, the old methods work best; "My son’s math textbooks contained exercises in Basic, but we could not do the problems until we bought an old Commodore 64 online,” said David Brin, author of "Why Johnny Can’t Code". Others prefer more popular scripting languages, such as Python; still others use a language designed more for educational than practical use, such as MIT’s Scratch, the language of choice of the computer science teacher where I used to teach. She’s offering a camp this summer to introduce 13- and 14-year-olds to programming, using a different format from last year’s camp: "I changed the language from Alice to Scratch. Alice was too glitchy for me. Scratch is easy to pick up, and hopefully will be fun for middle schoolers."

But none of these languages will offer the same experience as learning BASIC. Author Lamont Wood had once dabbled in BASIC programming but had fallen out of practice until his recent experiment with Python:

The thrill was not the same as in 1979; it hadn’t taken months to get the hardware to work, and it sure ran quieter … with Basic, I felt like I was rummaging through a small box containing a few crude tools. With Python, I felt I had pushed open the door to a massive but unlit tool warehouse and was darting in to grab the few that I could see.

I learned BASIC by doing: I was running a Warp Six BBS and needed to make modifications. Eventually, I was inspired to write my own door game, though since it was a port, I had to concern myself only with the coding, not the design. In either case, I always had either the code or design to work with; I never had to conceive and build entirely from scratch (no pun intended).

My challenge in adapting those BASIC programming skills to a modern environment is not so much choosing a language as it is choosing an instruction method. Just as I learned BASIC to run a BBS, I’ve set a goal of learning PHP to help me run WordPress, a modern equivalent of an online community. But elementary concepts such as functions and arrays seem more confusing than they did twenty years ago.

What’s the best computer and language to teach programming — and where does one go from there?