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IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

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Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#11

Post by philips »

stcredzero wrote: post #10
plinkplonk wrote: post #4

"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add fe…

What if someone sold a 30-pin dock connector board with an Arduino on it? Or what about an app that exposed the iPhone OS APIs through RPC to programs running on an Arduino board with Bluetooth? This kit might make for a nice product!

Microchip announced a product just like that for the PIC platform: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_P...

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#12

Post by bad_user »

stcredzero wrote: post #2

Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me? Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back…

Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't.

Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more people than the people that actually tried that HTML5 Quake2 demo).

So welcome to 1997.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#13

Post by orangecat »

philips wrote: post #6
plinkplonk wrote: post #4

"Wozniak's design was open and decentralized in ways that still define those concepts in the computing industries. The original Apple had a hood, and as with a car, the owner could open it up and get at the guts of the machine. Although it was a fully assembled device, not a kit like earlier PC products, Apple owners were encouraged to tinker with the innards of Wozniak's machine—to soup it up, make it faster, add fe…

Always Innovating's Touch Book is probably close to what you want. The hardware specs are open, there are pins for serial on the board, and it can run a variety of ARM based Linux distros (Android, Ubuntu, etc).: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/ Plus the disassembly instructions are provided by the manufacturer: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/wiki/index.php/Top_part

That looks very nice, except for the abysmal 1024x600 resolution. I'll give Apple credit for having the iPad resist the inexplicable war on vertical pixels.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#14

Post by samd »

I found this quote from Wozniak in Founders at Work to be ironic.

"You'd go to the store and they'd just have all this stuff that you could buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#15

Post by jrockway »

bad_user wrote: post #12
stcredzero wrote: post #2

Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me? Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back…

Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't. Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more…

But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#16

Post by thought_alarm »

It's funny how so many people are suddenly mischaracterizing the Apple II or the nature of early personal computers.

The very first personal computers, like the Apple II, were sold as development kits to developers/hobbyists because these were the only people who would even think to buy a personal computer in 1976 and 1977. These development kits contain all of the information one would need to create software and hardware for these machines. Is that so unusual?

Fast forward one short year to 1978 and Apple hires Jef Raskin to start the "McIntosh" project. His goal is to create a $500 computing appliance that the average person could own and use. Sound familiar?

Fast forward 32 years. There is more information published about the internals of Linux, Windows, OS X, and PC architecture than most developers would ever want to know. We can write low-level drivers that run in the kernel, to high-level scripting languages. We can design a custom hardware card to slap in a PC or MacPro; we can design custom hardware that connects to an iPhone or a laptop via USB. And the iPad is arguably the closest we've come to Jef Raskin's 1978 vision of a computing appliance.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#17

Post by asmithmd1 »

philips wrote: post #11
stcredzero wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if someone sold a 30-pin dock connector board with an Arduino on it? Or what about an app that exposed the iPhone OS APIs through RPC to programs running on an Arduino board with Bluetooth? This kit might make for a nice product!

Microchip announced a product just like that for the PIC platform: http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_P...

"Microchip’s three development platforms are available through Apple’s authorized Made for iPod component distributor.

Customers who wish to purchase these platforms must enroll in Apple’s Made for iPod licensing program"

http://www.microchip.com/stellent/idcplg?IdcService=SS_GET_P...

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#18

Post by gloob »

jrockway wrote: post #15
bad_user wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I'm getting tired of hearing about how Javascript-enabled web apps are good enough. No, they aren't. Yeah, it's exciting that Quake2 runs in Chrome/Safari, it really is. But in 95/96 I was participating in demo-scenes, with graphics that weren't accelerated by the GPU, in 386 real-mode, and it was a lot easier and a lot more exciting (demos that got distributed by a local PC magazine, having as target more…

But of course those demos were very limited in scope, because the development techniques used to create them were impossible to scale up.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but I'm not certain what that has to do with the point being made. Could you explain it in greater detail?

My understanding is that there are entire classes of programs where "let's put it on a website" is not a viable method. You can write many types of apps that way, certainly, but you pretty much give up anything so much as pretending to be performance. Additionally, it prevents you from doing anything particularly low-level - if you were desperate enough, you could always set up a web interface to gcc or something, but that won't help you if you want to hack on a device driver or something. Systems programmers are people too, you know. ;)

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#19

Post by tumult »

gte910h wrote: post #9
stcredzero wrote: post #2

Some sort of hacking sandbox is needed for the iPad. Something like Hypercard would be dandy. Then again, aren't web apps already available? Safari is a very good Javascript platform. Maybe an iPad version of iWeb with a "local server" and some sort of app publishing/sharing via Mobile Me? Actually the beauty of this approach, is that a 3rd party could come out with this quickly, using App Engine or Amazon as a back…

Apple expressly forbids "interpreted code" on the iPhoneOS platform. I will say, on Monday that Adobe is releasing flash CS5 which will build native Android/iPhone/iPad/Desktop/Web apps all from the same source (which will be compiled down, not interpreted). I for one would love for this to be the new hypercard :OD http://cs5launch.adobe.com/

No, they don't. Stop repeating this lie. They reject App Store applications which allow users to load in external code which is executed.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#20

Post by _delirium »

By these standards, hasn't Steve Jobs been notching up final victories over Woz for at least 25 years? In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read people claiming it repeatedly! As far back as the early 80s, the Mac marks the turning point where Apple became primarily focused on a self-contained, don't-touch-the-tech computing appliance. The introduction of the Mac, and the way it won out over the Apple II successors, also marks Woz's personal influence in Apple effectively coming to an end.

It's not as if this is a recent idea Apple's had. If anything, OSX's relative openness was the aberration, given their history. Despite how exciting we find the Apple II era, I tend to think of the Mac as a bigger part of their history, certainly in terms of the Mac era's influence on today's company.

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