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iWoz

By Edward G Nilges
Created 2006-11-12 05:11

...is the main title of a new "as told to" oral history of Steve Wozniak's adventures in creating phone phreaking devices, the Cream Soda, the Apple I, and many other nifty gadgets.

It's great, and Gina Smith, Woz's co-author, does a fairly good job in putting what we know is the spirit of The Woz into the book.

I was gratified to see Wozniak give his honest feelings about how wrong the Vietnam war was even though he was a Young Republican before the war, because I got flamed merely for saying, as fact, that "Nixon invaded Cambodia" when talking about my adventures in Fortran.

However, Gina was asleep at the switch in transcribing the great man when she wrote that on Sunday June 29th 1975, the first man in history typed a character and saw it on the screen.

This is because, among many, indeed hundreds of other times, I had prior to that date sat down at any number of dumb, if not stupid, IBM 327x terminals and...typed a character and saw it on the screen. Only a few years after the Woz, my kid as a baby sat on my lap and typed a character and saw it on the screen, and said, "dat yike Tee Wee but me can type it".

I'll finish reading and post a review here and at Amazon. I welcome comments here. It's simply not like Wozniak, what I know of him second-hand, to take credit where it's not due.


Source URL:
http://www.developerdotstar.com/community/community/node/643