saturday, april 12, 2008
Wozniak visits the College of Creative Studies
Last week Steve Wozniak visited Santa Barbara and gave a talk at the Arlingon Theatre downtown. I didn’t go to that, but earlier that day he did a friendly question-and-answer session at my college because our dean Bruce Tiffney is great and wrangles that kind of thing sometimes. Wozniak seemed happy to talk about himself to a bunch of random kids; he fielded questions ranging from the Apple II memory layout to Segway polo. Here are some things he said, transcribed from the scribbles in my notebook so they might not be quite accurate.
As part of his introduction to himself, he said that he got in a lot of trouble in his first computer class in college for “abusing the system” — he ran every program he could think of on their one big computer, which single-handedly made his class go way over budget for computer use. Later he and his friend made a copy of the computer room key so they could sneak into it in the middle of the night to mess around.
Somebody asked what he considered his biggest mistake, and he said it was leaving out floating-point numbers in his early version of BASIC as a way to save time. Later Apple needed floating-point stuff for business applications so they had to license their GUI to Microsoft in exchange for it.
He was excited to talk about his Segways and explained that he has three: one at home for trundling about town, one in his car for trips, and one for Segway polo. He also liked talking about his pranks and mentioned that he once pretended to shave with one of his metal business cards on an airplane, weirding out his seat-mate.
The person who wrote an early version of Emacs for Apple computers (and wrote other famous things) asked for Wozniak’s thoughts on low-cost general purpose computing. The answer involved OLPCs and waving a Macbook Air around.
When people asked about hacking, he seemed to think they meant cracking. He told the story of how he once figured out Captain Crunch’s password by looking over his shoulder as he typed it.
Doug asked if his iPhone was jailbroken. He said that it’s not jailbroken right now, but it has been at various times in the past.
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