!pr2
An Evening with Woz.................................Bill Morgan

Well, maybe not a whole evening, but a good portion of it.  And certainly not alone, there were about 150 others in the room.  But I did have the opportunity to attend a dinner sponsored by the River City Apple Corps, in Austin, Texas, and hear a speech by Steve Wozniak, the designer of our favorite pastime.

Most of Steve's speech was devoted to the history of his involvement with computers, and the development of the Apple II.  That story is pretty well-known by now, so I won't mention too much of it here.  The most interesting facets to me were hearing how much of a prankster Woz has always been, and finding out how many features of the Apple II were motivated only by Steve's desire to write a Breakout game in BASIC.

My favorite part of the evening was the question-and-answer session and the informal chats afterward, when we all got our chance to ask about what we really wanted to know.  The first question is mine, the rest came from all around the room.  These are the items that seem to be of most concern to AAL readers:


How about 65816 machines?

We're heavily involved in a computer based around that chip.  But, final computer becoming a full-fledged product is subject to too many other variations, such as:  you start working on it and you decide, no, this computer didn't come out right, it's too long, the actual date it will be done, it's not enough, we have to do a different product.  So, it may be as soon as a few months, and it may be as long as a couple years before Apple has a  product based around that new processor.  Fortunately it is 100% compatible with what we've done before.  Meaning it's a compatible upgrade, and that's what the Apple II has to do.


When can we expect a portable //e?

It's ... in the works.  We're certainly thinking about it and delving into it and unless the project gets cancelled, probably very soon, but you can never say for sure until it's out.


How about color on the Macintosh?

There is no color on the Macintosh. ... Laser printers ... (and) ... LCD displays ... are converging on black and white technology being appropriate for that product line.  There is no color for the Macintosh at this time.


Do you expect to see the 3 1/2 inch disks on the //e?

Apple believes that it's time to start moving the entire company toward higher density, better technology, more modern technology disk drives, and the 3 1/2 inch disk drives from Sony that is in the Lisa and Macintosh computers now is the proper direction to move in.  It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds over time, as to how the conversion is made and yet extreme compatibility and support taken into account.  All the software exists today on 5 1/4 inch disks.  How do we get there?

It could be like your second disk can be a nice 3 1/2 inch with a lot more storage capability, but it may be years before it's proper to expect bootable software, to be able to boot on 3 1/2 inch drives.  It's a challenge, and it just can't be turned over overnight.  We could come out with a product for the Apple II today that uses a 3 1/2 inch drive as your only drive, and you know you can't run any of your software on it....  The sales of such a product would not start until there was a software base established.


What are you personally working on?

I'm interested in the future Apple II families.  We're always pursuing higher performance-to-cost versions of the Apple II.  And sometimes that's achieved by integrating several chips down into one custom chip, or by looking at accessories that are very commonplace, that almost everyone's going to buy for their //e.  You can build one version of it with a lot of those accessories in and save a lot of money in the end, a lot of hassle.  There are ways to improve the cost/performance ratio.

The other end, we're always trying to improve the capabilities of the machine.   How are we going to eventually, someday, challenge IBM in the multi-megabyte computer world, the high-end?  How are we going to improve performance?, increase screen resolution?, all those sort of questions, those sort of enhancements.  I've been working very closely on one of those projects in Apple since returning.

... I think we've got to start heading towards a real, more useful home machine that does have a few of the things that we originally pursued, that we now believe is only about 10% of our market.  Things such as:  speech recognition and speech generation, built in, because they're relatively inexpensive and easy to do now to some level of quality.  And it should also have more of the home-ish features, the features that are used in a personal, home environment built in.


So, that's the gist of it.  I would like to thank Stuart Greenfield, of the River City Apple Corps, for the invitation to attend their dinner, and of course thank you, Woz, for coming to visit us.

One last note:  Steve referred to a portable Apple //e as "probably very soon".  Lately we've been hearing about the Apple //c, a 9-pound machine sporting 128K RAM, one disk drive, built-in serial and parallel ports, and no slots.  Also no monitor, which sounds a little strange.  Price -- $1200.  The //c announcement is expected in late April.
