41–50 of 182 posts
I don't think many people realize that Woz's dad was an electrical engineer at Lockheed who would bring home computer manuals that Woz would read as a kid. This seems to be a fairly effective way to create world-changing computer engineers.
If you gave computer manuals to kids today, they'd cry and beg for their phones back
Having written a lot of 8 bit assembler for the 6800 microprocessor for 2K eproms, I can attest it is a very different skill from writing modern software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 50-hour pilot in a Bonanza A36TC is insane, I had no idea Woz landed off-airport. I do checkouts in Bonanzas, and the more typical A36TC/TN pilot has 500 hours' experience or more. (Some of us still use small planes like ATVs -- but if the description of Woz' experience in the incident is accurate, this is like taking a Lamborghini out with a fresh driving permit) [1] https://www.cultofmac.com/465778/today-in-apple…
> With Woz, who had only flown for 50 hours at the time, at the controls, the plane climbed too abruptly. Then the aircraft stalled and careened through two fences into the car park of a skating rink. Woz later said he thought Candi might have accidentally leaned on the controls. How could leaning on the yoke (or any other control) cause a stall? She'd have to pull back on it to force a climb like that. I'm kind of a…
The wikipedia page for the Beechcraft Bonanza says: "The NTSB investigation revealed Wozniak did not have a "high performance" endorsement (making him legally unqualified to operate the airplane)" and links to https://web.archive.org/web/20121019022620/http://www.ntsb.g...
Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…
I wonder why rich people have such a high urge to fly small airplanes. It seems to expose you to a lot of risk, which you could easily avoid (I’ve lived a considerable number of years without facing a single situation where I was likely to fly an airplane).
It can be an interesting experience, even if you have no desire to become a licensed pilot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With Woz, who had only flown for 50 hours at the time, at the controls, the plane climbed too abruptly. Then the aircraft stalled and careened through two fences into the car park of a skating rink. Woz later said he thought Candi might have accidentally leaned on the controls. How could leaning on the yoke (or any other control) cause a stall? She'd have to pull back on it to force a climb like that. I'm kind of a…
I read a description why aircraft like the Bonanza A36TC are more unforgiving. I think he said because because of higher power, higher speeds, and airfoils to match these aircraft can rapidly leave the stable flight envelop. It takes fast reflexes and knowing what you are doing to get them back. And because they are fast they'll fall out of the sky very quickly in a stall. Fast reflexes comes from being young or bein…
No, most Bonanza owners are mid-career doctors, dentists and lawyers. Never seen a teen fly one.
Also, you generally have a second or two at least to deal with issues. Hence the old saw about "winding your watch before reacting to an airliner emergency."
> There is a reason the air force trains 20 year old's to fly jet fighters.
I talked to an ex-Air Force, now civilian flight school owner about that.
He said the problem with 30 year-old military aviation students is that they talk back when fed b.s., unlike kids. So it's a general discipline issue, not an age one.
Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…
> Woz was scary good at both hw and sw You damn-near gave me a heart attack then! :D I thought he had died for a moment, Phew!
Having written a lot of 8 bit assembler for the 6800 microprocessor for 2K eproms, I can attest it is a very different skill from writing modern software.
Would love to hear more about this - have you written on your experiences?
Anyhow, programming an 8 bit 6800 for an embedded controller means keeping track of 6 or more things going on at the same time, while modern software focuses on one thing at a time and isolating it from everything else.
Those things include the contents of each register, the stack level, the size of the code, interrupts going off, polling that has to be done, counting cycles, etc. Organizing code into functions is a luxury not usually affordable.
It sounds tedious, but it was fun. I attached my own hard disk drive to my LSI-11, meaning I had to build an interface board and write a device driver. To figure out how to write the device driver, I dumped the floppy driver code. It was a marvel of tight engineering. The bootstrap loader was executing code only an instruction or two behind it getting loaded. I was just in awe.
Woz was scary good at both hw and sw (author of Apple BASIC.) If you have time, go through his various Apple documents online. I believe he was never the same after his small plane crashed. (Back then, wealthy people used small planes like ATVs, and had about the same safety record.) I worked with another hw engineer of similar ability back in the 80s. Mind-blowing watching him just pick up a pen and draw out a compl…
When you can fit the entire architecture into your head, all the way down to the chips and board layout, you'll find that you're capable of quite a lot on that platform.
A human with a skillet that has scaled up as much as computing hardware has scaled up is going to be virtually impossible to find, if not actually impossible.
Systems today are just too complex for one person to understand at the breadth and depth that Woz understood the earliest Apple hardware.