28 Oct
2000
28 Oct
'00
7:40 p.m.
Last Sunday I went to see the Woz speak at the Mac
Group of Detroit. =
Fascinating speaker, if anyone has the chance to see him I highly =
reccomend it. He talked in-depth about working at TI, designing Breakout =
with Steve Jobs for Atari, and designing his own computers at the =
Homebrew Computer Club. Most fascinating factoid: He was inspired to =
make his first TV-display terminal when he paid a visit to Captain =
Crunch and saw that he had a Teletype in his apartment, and was "Talking =
to some guys in Boston!" over Arpanet.
Did he talk about his TV jammer or the first version of Breakout for the
Apple ][? He mentioned them in an interview he did for Call A.P.P.L.E. magazine.
The TV jammer was very small and could easily be concealed. He used it to
train his housemates to adopt wierd poses. He would jam the TV, they would
attempt to fix it, he would unjam it, then he would jam it again later and
make them do something more drastic than the last time. It began with his
housemates hitting the TV, but eventually he had one person sitting on top
of the TV blocking the screen with his legs!
The first version of Breakout was mostly the same as LITTLE BRICK OUT on
the DOS 3.3 System Master disk except for the cheat mode and the insulting
judgement of your score. (The finished program said things like, "YOUR
SCORE IS NOT TOO BAD. KEEP TRYING" but the beta version said, "YOUR SCORE IS
PURE SHIT.")
-- Derek