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Steve Wozniak Recounts His Efforts to Engineer the Apple II Floppy Disk System
- agumonkey 8y agoremember the thread about silent computers ? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075489 very timely with the chapter on floppy tracks and heads. I never read anything so detailed about woz work. Usually it's all average apple fan or journalist reverence. But I really love the way he makes that extra step to use the hardware almost fully.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI love stories like this. True engineering porn.
- wallflower 8y agoAnd if you haven't read jwz's classic, you are in for a treat (text formatting, possible HN custom diatribe aside) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
- sanjayts 8y agoWarning, NSFW!
- maxxxxx 8y agoThere should be much more like this. They show how good engineers really think and solve problems. Instead we have all this hero worship about geniuses and their magic where we can learn nothing from.
- js2 8y agoJWZ hates HN. Here’s a derefered link: http://www.dereferer.org/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejwz%2Eorg%2Fblog%2F2002%2F11%2Fengineering%2Dpornography%2F http://www.dereferer.org/?https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ejwz%2Eorg%2Fbl...
- vernie 8y agoThat rules.
- textmode 8y agoThis (redirect) still sends referrer to www.dereferer.org. The user also has to lookup and visit two sites instead of one. Do browsers today not allow users to set the referrer? Google and countless web businesses prefix urls and act as "dereferers" so they can collect referers instead of the target websites. There is no shortage of "derefered" links on the www. A "dereferer" may be useful for a website owner, but is it useful to a user? The "defererer" can track the external sites its users visit, creating a log of users' www browsing, but how does that benefit the user? For the user, this is sharing far more information with the "dereferer" than with any individual target site. Is the "Referer" header truly necessary for the user? It is not even spelled correctly. I have been using the www with target url set as referer instead of referring url for decades with almost zero problems. The times when a site demands a certain referer are so few and far between that I cannot remember the last time it happened.
- js2 8y agoThe link was only to hide the referer header from JWZ because he chooses to show a very crude image to HN readers. That's all.
- textmode 8y agohttps://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer about:config network.http.referer.spoofSource
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- pfarrell 8y agoThe farther you get into that article, the more it makes me think about the turbo-encabulator. SFW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag
- mieseratte 8y agoBe careful clicking that link at work! You might get an image of a testicle in an egg cup along with a caption claiming we're all money obsessed man children. Of course he made his millions in the first dot so he's a bit of a hypocrite...
- always_good 8y agoAlso, the redirect + image doesn't exactly give the impression of maturity.
- nobleach 8y agoIf you haven't read folklore.org, you're in for a treat. (if you like early startup life type stuff sprinkled in with the tech)
- akshayB 8y agoIt is always great to read stories about obsolete technologies and how people put lot of effort, thinking and energy into solving the roadblocks. This provides a great prospective of history and how things evolved over time which kids these days might have zero idea about.
- maxxxxx 8y agoIt's not only historical. Stories like this show how good engineers work through a problem. There is a lot to learn there.
- puzzle 8y agoWell, it's interesting on the human and historical side, especially the part that it was all self-taught, but on the technical side, it's not clear from this interview that he's using GCR and how (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_coded_recording#Apple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_coded_recording#Apple) and that e.g. Commodore had a more efficient scheme that allowed a whole 170KB per side, at the same density.
- _jal 8y agoEvery technology you use today is obsolete; time just hasn't quite caught up quite yet. Seconding the other commenter about how much there is to learn from these stories.
- BurningFrog 8y agoWe're all dead. There is just a slight delay in implementation.
- wallflower 8y agoAnother must read is jl's interview of Wozniak for Founders at Work. http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
- post_break 8y agoDoes anyone have audio of the different sounds of drives he describes? Such a fascinating article.
- zwieback 8y agoI don't have audio recordings but 30 years later I can still hear the sound of my Apple ][ floppy drive re-homing itself, which was a scary sound. The track-to-track sound he's describing was very pleasant though.
- icedchai 8y agoI remember that "grinding" sound, decades later! I haven't boot an Apple II since 1990...
- kkylin 8y agoEspecially the sound it makes as it tries to read a disk with bad sectors. I can still hear that in my mind.
- zwieback 8y agoThat was always a sad day, especially if you saved up two week of pocket money to buy that floppy.
- acomjean 8y agoThere was a "Beagle Bros" software program that would alternatively turn left/right floppy drives on and it would sound like a train.. It would go faster and faster. I remember running it and worrying I borked my mom's floppy drives. But thankfully it didn't. I thought it was on "silicon salad" but I don't see it. Unless its "text train". Maybe it was online from Nibble magazine. https://archive.org/stream/Beagle_Bros-Silicon_Salad#page/n0/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/Beagle_Bros-Silicon_Salad#page/n0...
- joezydeco 8y agoInstead of having some kind of switch or sensor to know when the read head was at track 0, the stepper motor just banged the head repeatedly against the metal stop until it was sure things were in alignment. This was that "chukchukchukchuk" sound you heard. I remember playing around with the delays in that routine to make the head move at different frequencies. With a little bit of playing around you could make the drive play music.
- cyphrack 8y agoThis is explained in detail in woz's autobiography. I read it all in one sitting. Great book all around, and as an added bonus, I got to meet woz the next day after reading his bio, completely by chance. Weird.
- tomcam 8y agoNote to self: read Scarlett Johanssen’s autobiography all in one day
- daemoncoder 8y agoCargo cult at its finest :-)
- cmrdporcupine 8y agoI remember feeling quite giddy a couple years ago when I got a personal response from Woz on a comment on a blog posting (about the 65816 and the IIgs I think). For some reason I never saved the URL or screenshot tho. I never idolized Woz as a kid back in the 80s, but now I think he's a damn awesome guy.
- bookofjoe 8y agoSimilar thing happened to me: I wrote a blog post circa 2005 about Woz and threw in that he wasn't much of an athlete, just figuring he didn't look like one. The very next day he posted a comment on my blog post pointing out that he had been a varsity pole vaulter at Homestead High. Woz U ROOL!
- overcast 8y ago"I had never studied nor been near hardware or software." I don't understand this sentence. Steve Wozniak is saying that he's never been near hardware or software??
- agildehaus 8y agoI think he's referring to hardware and software specific to disk drives.
- neuromantik8086 8y agoCoincidentally, I've been looking into ways to transfer a bunch of data off of Apple IIe old floppies (assuming there's still data to be transferred on the media) and I came across this: http://adtpro.com/ http://adtpro.com/
- Malic 8y agoIf I recall correctly, Steven Levy's book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" also covered some of this story. Woz was intimidated by disk controllers because he didn't know much about them, other than they were big complicated things. So starting with his own ignorance as a fresh slate, he ended up with something better than his former employer HP had in their products. Sometimes (Sometimes! Not always!) not knowing better can be helpful.
- czechdeveloper 8y agoBeing genius helps with that.
- digi_owl 8y agoAnd limitations. Woz did his thing under much the same constraints as Tramiel held the Commodore engineers to, keep the chip count, and thus the price, down. Every time Woz added a chip, he carefully looked for very way he could use that chip for different tasks.
- archagon 8y agoI feel like "genius" is almost always an ex post facto label that's doled out to make us feel better about our own lack of ambition. That person did something really wild and interesting? Clearly they're a genius, so why even bother striving for anything quite so good? Same with the recent Steve Jobs threads. Or any thread featuring prominent programmers or founders. I think immediately reaching for the "genius defense" (whether deserved or not) does far more harm than good.
- newnewpdro 8y agoYou're right. Exceptional labels are often used to abdicate responsibility of the mediocre for their own mediocrity. It's easier to label someone as special than it is to admit you didn't put in the time they did, or that your fear of failure prevents you from trying. This particular Woz story doesn't scream of "genius" to me. It screams of curiosity and confidence, a fearlessness, of a young and foolhardy geek swimming in opportunity and it enabled him to discover some interesting, innovative things. The part where his (probably senior) hardware dept. colleague trolled him into completely ripping apart his work and redoing it all for cosmetic reasons with a single sentence saying "Steve, you mean you’re going to go with less than perfect?" had me laughing heartily, and caused me to reflect on the times similar things had been done to me early in my career.
- nielsbot 8y agoPeople implemented some pretty crazy disk read/write routines on top of this for copy protection... I find it super interesting. https://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/08/27/apple-ii-copy-protection/ https://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/08/27/apple-ii-copy-prote...
- martin1b 8y agoWoz is always interesting to listen to. He seems really humble and yet not afraid to try anything. Really inspiring.
- netsharc 8y agoAm I missing the "play audio" link or did people read this and found it easy to understand. To me, the transcribed rambling makes it a terrible read...
- bambataa 8y agoI agree, a little of editing would have helped the (very interesting) narrative.
- stelonix 8y agoI couldn't disagree more. The raw transcribed text made me feel immersed in the storytelling.
- princekolt 8y agoI kinda agree the "transcribed" technique can be a bit difficult to read, but at the same time, applying Woz's voice to it, it felt like he was telling the story to me directly.
- wallflower 8y agoSince it has not been posted yet, the open sourced Apple ][ source code (the 16-bit read/write) from Paul Laughton and Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton and some technical design docs can be viewed. http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-code/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/apple-ii-dos-source-cod...
- da_chicken 8y ago> The important things in life are the ones you remember with emotion and fun smiles. Woz is really special guy. > I opened up the little box with a screwdriver, and there were some dip switches, and I switched them to another position, and didn’t get billed for the movie. But that was still kind of a dick move, Woz.
- naikrovek 8y agoWell if the new setting pointed at an empty room instead of an occupied room... No way to know now, I guess. I like to think he pointed it at an empty or non-existent room.
- hinkley 8y agoAt a conference, probably no empty rooms.
- noonespecial 8y agoHe's the Woz so we can guess two things: 1) He was so absorbed in the puzzle, it never crossed his mind that someone else might get a bill instead. 2) He would have been horrified that he had caused someone that inconvenience if he found out.