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Found Footage: Woz on coloring computers

by Mike Schramm Feb 5th 2010 at 9:15PM


This video of Woz talking about the "revolutionary" idea of putting color into computers is amazing. It sounds like an LSD trip -- he says he was awake for four days in a row, plunged into some sort of television screenglow madness, and somehow emerged from this zeroes-and-ones induced frenzy with a cheap way to create color screens (which we presume eventually found its way in the Apple II).

This is why Woz is really the preeminent geek for our times -- he's done some brilliant things with computers, really helped revolutionize the industry, and invented from scratch some of the most amazing things in this already amazing age, and when asked how he did it, he doesn't credit his own intellect or any personal insight. He says he stayed up for four days, and "sometimes, you're not sure if it's going to work because it didn't follow all of the methodology, all of the science that's in the books... but in this case it did." That is quintessential Woz -- way before marketing types put together the "Think Different" slogan, this guy was living it.

[via Cult of Mac]

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This video of Woz talking about the "revolutionary" idea of putting color into computers is amazing. It sounds like an LSD trip -- he...
 

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Chris

Tip of the Day: If TUAW doesn't like Flash, stop using it on your site!

February 07 2010 at 12:04 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SSteve

Woz is a joy to behold. He's just the right kind of crazy.

February 06 2010 at 3:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
bumbacloth

All hail the Woz ^:)^

February 06 2010 at 5:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
FightTheFuture

Genius or Madness? i wish i could get in the head of these guys when they were designing the mac in the 80s.

February 06 2010 at 1:36 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to FightTheFuture's comment
Ennrib

Genius or Madness? BOTH! You gotta be crazy to be a proper genius!

February 06 2010 at 5:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
rs230055

Colour already provided by os
srisystems.net

February 06 2010 at 1:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stan

What Woz is talking about makes a little more sense if you understand how (and how simply) computers generated video signals back then. One could say the Apple II was designed almost solely around generating its video signal.

Woz had an amazing ability to focus like a laser on specific tasks; but the Atari Breakout story shows that Woz was also thinking about the right things at the right time (e.g., generating a color video signal in 1975), and that's what really put the Apple II at such a large advantage over everyone else.

For example, the closest competition back then may have been the Commodore PET; it was released in 1977 only a few months after the Apple II, but could not display graphics of any kind, let alone color. It only displayed text characters, via an off-the-shelf character-generator chip.

February 05 2010 at 11:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
rawrawrawr

I love The Woz.

February 05 2010 at 10:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jimmy C

I love the quote about designing Breakout "because Steve needed money."

February 05 2010 at 10:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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