I'm roughly 14 years younger than Woz, and I grew up in Seattle reading about the exploits of the Steves. While I started at a startup in Seattle at 17 years of age, I've never reached any real fame. But I was always a fanboy of the men that built high tech, with Woz being one of them.
8 weeks ago, I returned to the Silicon Valley for a job, and I bought a house in the hills of Los Gatos. After being here for a week, I was told that Woz lives up the hill a few house from mine.
I wake up every morning hoping to see him riding his Segway down the street, but I have yet to spot him.
Everbody wishes they could hang out with the Woz, and even though I'm 54 years old, I still have my heroes in the industry.
It's not critical of Woz but it does re-seat him as a peripheral figure. I was surprised given the other things I've read. I'm not asserting it as the "truth" but it was a different take.
Not at all, I'm pointing out an alternative source, nor am I "taking a dump" on him. I phrased it quite tactfully I thought.
If you want to be a fragile zealot, afraid of alternative sources which I asked if you had read, go ahead.
In fact at the cost of worshiping one person as "the creator/first" of something we have the loss to history of the role the engineers at Commodore played. That's why it's important to question this stuff.
Sounds like you are offended by hearing something you don't like and projecting something worse upon a commenter. Just short of calling him violent. 2016!!!
> I am very happy to read these posts. It's not easy to have notoriety and pretty much have accurate conceptions in the public mind. Virtually everything said her about me is accurate.
Steve Wozniak is whom I strive to be as a Computer Engineer. He is so thoughtful, creative, passionate and genuine. He has inspired me like no one else.
Around that time there was a Macintosh web server called WebSTAR. I hacked together a shareware plugin in C that used the newish (at the time) browser 'Host:' header to allow for multi-homed domains without the need for separate IP addresses. He bought an entire site license for $1500 when he could have just spent $35. I had created the $1500 option as a joke thinking nobody would spend that amount. Made my day and that really encouraged me to become a professional software engineer. Thanks Steve!
Wozniak would have gotten along well with C E Beeby: "The upheaval of the depression years and the rise of fascism forced him to think not only about differences in human abilities but also about the right all individuals should have to education in a democracy. In his view the education system suffered from undue centralisation and conformity and should open itself to variation, experiment and change. The abolition of the proficiency examination in 1937 held out hope for primary schooling responsive to the range of children’s abilities."
Alas, these tenets of New Zealand's public education system are being systemically demolished.
The Gates Foundation is one of the big funders of a movement which is trying to dismantle US public education. No idea whether that has anything to do with New Zealand per se.
It's so important that you have a good inspiring CS teacher when you start learning the ropes. The first person who taught me computing was the reason I stayed away from going into CS for 15 years before taking it up a second time. This time round my community college math teacher taught us how to program a TI-84 and encouraged us to do so. I went on to download R because I read that it was best for statistics and learnt more stuff later. An inspiring teacher who goes out of their way to ensure that your learning roadblocks are removed is the best!
Starting writing BASIC without telling us what we were doing. Kept using technical terms that sounded like a foreign language. Told me it's ok if I did not understand - girls don't always get it fast! Well, I later learned that the guys who got it had PCs at home (huge luxury when I was in high school ) and went for private lessons in Programming.
Agreed. I was taught Logo in the 4th grade and it was a great introduction into programming and computers, which ultimately led to a stronger foundation in the field.
I was taught Logo at the 4th grade and it seemed pointless to me cause you couldn't make games in it...I know now you probably could, but they only showed us how to make the turtle draw simple things, basically a recipe to draw a house etc (QBasic was the holy grail at the time, then Turbo Pascal).
I guess tho the main problem was that few primary school teachers in the early 90s actually had even basic programming competency. The only ones I knew who could do any programming beside the trivial textbook examples were other pupils.
I probably picked Logo up around that time too. I still dip into it from time to time. I just wish there was a good JS implementation that I could run in the browser - you never know when the urge to draw spirographs will hit.
What do you folks think of Scratch? I see a lot of excitement around it, but after trying it, it felt like even 10 year old me would have preferred the unconstrained freedom of Logo over the weird assemble-these-blocks environment of Scratch.
But then, perhaps introverted nerds who loved play-doh over LEGOs are not the best sample set to extrapolate from.
I've tried several educational programming environments for a semester at a time, and Scratch is by far the best for students too young to type. Logo and Processing are nice for slightly older students.
It's not immediately obvious, but Scratch is very very good at some important things for education. Loading, saving, and starting the editor are fast even on slow machines. When things go wrong, they don't stop the rest of the program. And concurrent programs are easy to write in a wide range of styles because multi-frame loops run at exactly the same speed for all scripts.
There are a lot of imitators that improve on Scratch's weaknesses by adding first-class references to lists, sprites, and functions. Or integrating a physics engine. Or binding directly to Minecraft or Sphero. But if they are slow to load or execute, you can't iterate as many times in an hour of class. If errors demand time to troubleshoot, that attention comes out of the rest of the class's instructor time. If you are limited to only one way of writing concurrent processes, it might not be a style that fits well with a particular lesson.
I hope that the ongoing HTML5 port of Scratch gets the same things right.
As an autodidact I will only note that you can learn at pace (given intelligence and aptitude) only so long as you give it 110%. That extra 10% wears on you. Eventually you will not be able to keep up. The old saying is 'learn from others mistakes'; being self taught leaves you open to not understanding others mistakes and learning a lot from your own. Time++.
I was lucky enough to meet Steve at Xamarin Evolve, this year. He is incredibly friendly, and one of the most fascinating people I've ever had the chance to hear speak.
If he wasn't successful he'd probably be quite a different person in practice - he wouldn't have had the money to do most of what he currently does. And that's quite apart from the question of whether he'd have been in the plane-crash that gave him brain-damage, and how that would have affected his personality.
Based on what he does, though? If there was somehow a person who's involved in all the different stuff he is but somehow without getting major recognition or money for him (and that was not in and of itself a notable trait)? Yeah, I get the feeling he'd probably still be interesting.
From what I saw, he's really a fun-loving person. His stories are as much inspiring as they are amusing. Success found him, and helped provide him with the resources to do more of what he already loved to do: tinker with gadgets and teach.
No you need both, either one by themselves would have made nothing, together they changed the world. Then Steve J did it a second time. But I admit I am closer to being a Woz.
"I remember feeling like I had the keys to some magical kingdom."
This post, and this quote in particular, strongly reminded me of this song by a former teacher on the current educational system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD2o6soOe1I
8 weeks ago, I returned to the Silicon Valley for a job, and I bought a house in the hills of Los Gatos. After being here for a week, I was told that Woz lives up the hill a few house from mine.
I wake up every morning hoping to see him riding his Segway down the street, but I have yet to spot him.
Everbody wishes they could hang out with the Woz, and even though I'm 54 years old, I still have my heroes in the industry.
Woz is one of them.