The creator of the first Apple personal computer — the Apple I — spoke about the past, present and future of innovation during his keynote at the Freescale Technology Forum 2015 here (June 23). Says Wozniak, innovators today have the wrong motivation — to make money — whereas in his day, innovation was something he did because there were no affordable electronics to use at home for fun.
"I was working with calculators at Hewlett Packard, using RPN [reverse-Polish-notation], which meant you had to be smart already to be able to use them," Wozniak told his audience during his keynote at FTF.
Computers in those days were either mainframes or programmed in binary with switches on the front of them. And the storage drives for input/output (I/O) data cost as much as two cars, according to Woz. So he set out to design his own I/O that used inexpensive audio cassette tapes encoded with tone from a modem and eventually floppy disks.
After meeting Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari for Nolan Bushnell, Jobs enlisted Wozniak to help him design the circuit board for the game Breakout. For the board Job's said he was paid $700, which Woz and Job's split 50/50 — $350 each. Wozniak reduced the number of chips in the Atari game by 50, using random access memory (RAM), for which Bushnell paid Jobs a bonus of $5000 the knowledge of which was withheld from Woz. But Woz holds no grudges — in fact he begged Jobs to share the wealth with key early employees after Apple took off. And when Job's refused, Woz claims to have distributed $20 million of his own money among those employees who were key to Apple's early success.
The experience at helping Jobs at Atari also payed off technologically, since it gave Woz the idea of using an inexpensive TV for output and RAM for program storage and scratch-pad memory. The other big problem Woz had was programing in binary, so he invented his own form of Basic that could run in 4-kilobytes of memory with no operating system.
"I was the first one to write Basic, because I needed a language," said Woz. "But color was the best thing I thought of for Apple. Everybody was using black-and-white in those days, but after my break with Atari, after four days with no sleep I thought of a way to use square waves instead of sine waves to drive the TV, which gave me the ability to make color in that way. If I hadn't been so tired, I never would have thought of that."
After that Wozniak started paying attention to his dreams, and after forgetting a potentially great idea he had had during sleep, he started writing them down in the middle of the night. "Often they were nonsense the next morning, but many of my best ideas came while I was sleeping," Woz told us.
Woz was still giving away the plans for his PCs for free, until Jobs stepped in and they partnered up.
"I would work on my own projects after work at home, and I offered the PC idea to HP four times, but they refused, which is probable a good thing, because they would have just made it into a boring computer for engineers, whereas the social integration was more important to me — the idea of making connections with other people computer-to-computer. That's why I was giving away the plans on how to build a computer."
Steve Jobs gave Woz the idea of selling his plans. Jobs idea was to make the kits for $20 and sell them for $40, but the vision grew from there to the Macintosh and all the other Apple products available today.
The Apple-I computer was invented by Wozniak for his own use since he wanted to experiment with computing at home when all that existed in those days were unaffordable mainframes.
Apple-II computer also designed by Wozniak, but commercialized by his new business partner Steve Jobs.
Today, everybody's motive to innovate is all wrong, according to Woz. Today people want top invent things to make money, instead of to satisfy some need in which they have a personal interest.
"Today most innovators are just trying to duplicate Facebook or Uber with a new twist," Woz told us."The big innovations that are likely to be the most successful are those that have emotional effects on people, like virtual reality. If I were 24 years old today, I would be trying to build things that people told me were impossible."
Woz is not inventing things anymore. He drives a Toyota Prius rigged to carry two Segways (souped up with a homemade key programmer) and virtually invented the game of Segway Polo which is now played all over the world.
When asked what he thought of Android, he responded "the Apple iPhone set the course and the pattern. Apple products are made for people who are not experts--who don't have technical skills, Android has finally become useable in that way, and it had bigger screens first. Apple practically gave Samsung the big screen market for many years, but finally Apple has both big and small screens."
Inventors today have it easy, according to Woz.
"Intel microprocessors were hundreds of dollars in my day, which was hard to afford, but today you can buy a microprocessor on an Arduino board for $35. In fact, the Arduino guy was like me--he wanted a board that was affordable so he could do his own projects," Woz told us. "Today all the technology disciplines are available and cheap enough for everybody, but today most people are just trying to make money with computers rather than make them do things they want done."
When asked if robots were going to take over the world, he admitted that he had once worried about that, but no more.
"If you go into an airport and use the kiosk, that machine is taking over a job the same as they are doing at factories. So what happens when computers achieve conscious?" Woz asked us. "Now I think it will be 100s of years before computer even be smart enough to take over, but by then they will understand that nature has to be preserved and man is a part of nature, so I'm not worried. Besides people want to be taken care of--we want to be the robots pets, that's why I take such good care of my dog. But if the machines will want to take over the world in the future, they have probably sent a message back from the future saying create the Internet of Things."
Woz predicted that self-driving cars will be here within five years and that eventually people will be prohibited from driving manually on the freeways. He also predicted that by then Apple will have its own car too.
His final piece of advice to engineers was to try and find clever tricks to use fewer patents to get the same job done, and that motivation is more important than content. "You want to work on things that you would like to show off to others," Woz concluded.
via : www.eetimes.com