Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley
Mike Masnick (mike@techdirt.com)
Tue, 22 Jun 1999 16:29:00 -0700
At 06:58 PM 6/22/99 -0400, Robert S. Thau wrote:
>Eugene Leitl writes:
> > Robert S. Thau writes:
> >
> > > 2) If it really starts out that late, why does Woz have much of a
> > > part? I thought he wasn't a really major player in Apple at that
> > > point.
> >
> > I thought it was Wozniak who designed the Apple I.
>
>Designed the Apple I and Apple ][ (or is that Apple //?), and IIRC
>wrote everything in the ROM *except* for Applesoft (a/k/a Microsoft)
>Basic; that included an interpreter for a 16-bit instruction set of
>his own invention called "SWEET-16".
>
>His last really major technical contribution to the company, by all
>accounts, was the Apple II (err.. ][, err.. //) disk controller; he
>isn't generally credited with much technical contribution at all to
>subsequent development work (Lisa, Macintosh), but I do know he shows
>up in the movie, hence, my confusion...
The movie covered much of the very early days as well (blue box days,
building the first Apple, Homebrew stuff, going to HP, etc.). Then they
show how Woz and Jobs sort of drift. They show how Woz leaves work for a
while due to a plane crash or something, and then when he comes back it's
pretty obvious that he doesn't like the direction of everything and
quits... So, it's not that the movie starts out that late, it just does the
early days, and then pretty much assumes that Apple is a big success, and
skips over to the beginning of the Mac days, at which point Woz is out and
Jobs appears as a cult-like leader over the Macintosh team.
-Mike