Digging into it just now, an important distinction I initially missed is that they worked on the original arcade cabinet (all game logic implemented directly in hardware), which predated the 2600 and its software version by several years (by which time they had already founded Apple).
I saw an interview where someone asked woz about getting screwed out of a lot of the Atari money It was apparently new information to Woz, and he simply deflated a little, and muttered "not again, Steve..."
That’s not what he said in the video. He said he found out 12 years later in a book. So sometime in the mid-1980s. That book is "Zap! The Rise and Fall of Atari" by Scott Cohen. The quote is "Jobs earned himself a five-thousand-dollar bonus." on page 55.
I started coding in 1981 on an VC20, learned a lot from it, but wonder how did the world benefit more from vic20s?
As a happy smartphone user, I think the world did benefit a lot e.g. from the Newton (loved mine, dropped a Palm for it, sad it died, but it was too heavy).
The world got more benefit because it was kids like us who learned on these Commodore machines who rose in ranks in the tech world in the 1990s and laid the groundwork for products like the Palm Pilot, the iPod, and the iPhone.
This. An iphone doesn't inspire anyone to do anything except maybe try to be a tiktoker by pointing it at themselves.
An execrable membrane keyboard machine with 1k of ram inspires you to somehow make a working DonkyKong.
The iphone can do anything but doesn't let the user do anything. It exists to sell you finished solutions to problems. You don't even get to choose the problems let alone the form the solution takes.
The 1k Sinclair can't do much, but doesn't impose any artificial limits or proscriptions either. It not only allows you do to anything you want but demands it. It offers practically no finished solutions.
No matter how limited the hardware, the options are actually infinite because you can do whatever you want with that hardware, and that open-endedness causes people to explore it and try to fill it.
If I'd had an iphone as a kid, maybe I'd still be the same kind of person and develop the same kinds of skills with the help of some other tools besides my iphone, but we'll never know. What happened was I had a 4k trs-80 that objectively sucked and yet absorbed 100% of my time, and none of that time was passive consumption.
With Woz at the helm he would have worked on the Apple II architecture until the company went down, same fate as Commodore which didn't drop the Amiga and Atari which didn't drop the ST.
Without Jobs there never would have been an Apple Computer Inc. Woz would have been a kickass HP engineer and its very likely not many would know his name.
I don't really understand any of the maths in this article, and spent ten minutes at the beginning trying to remember/rediscover what little-o is (I'm familiar with big-O, but not little-o), but this is absolutely one of the best things I have read in a very long time.
I can't quite work out whether the author is demonstrating comedy, is having a hysteria from a breakdown, or if it's something in between, but it completely captures the feeling at the moment of being usurped and out-gunned by AI tooling as a knowledge worker.
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