22 Apr
2004
22 Apr
'04
3 p.m.
On Thu, 22 Apr 2004 11:21:16 -0700 (PDT)
Vintage Computer Festival <vcf(a)siconic.com> wrote:
On Thu, 22 Apr 2004, chris wrote:
Yes. The story goes that Jobs was given the job to do a Breakout game.
He "outsourced" it to Woz. Jobs got $5K for the job and gave Woz only
$350. Woz recounts the story on his website here:
http://www.woz.org/letters/general/91.html
As far as the design, Woz optimized it to such an extent (not letting any
gate on any TTL go unused) that the Atari engineers could not follow the
logic or the physical layout of the wirewrap...something like that. I
asked Woz about it last year and he sent me a reply that was something to
that effect.
Tightly optimized TTL designs are a lost art. I remember how offended I was when a RAM
Tester design I came out with had a timing problem and my boss insisted that I put a
'glitch catcher' in (a cap to eliminate a logic 'glitch') rather than
adding one more cascade on the clock that would have let me 'deglitch' it
syncronously and correctly.
Jobs met
Wozniak when he was still in high school (introduced to each
other by Bill Fernandez). Wasn't it Jobs who got the job for Woz at
Atari?
I wasn't sure when they met, but I did seem to recall that Jobs did get
Woz the Atari job. Wasn't that where Jobs was working, and they wanted to
design a handheld game, and Jobs got Woz to do it, and he did it so well,
Atari couldn't figure out exactly how he did it.