iWish, iWish, iWish iWoz iWoz

I've been reading a book lately, iWoz. It's Steve Wozniak's autobiography, that's Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, chip designing whiz, though Woz may be the more appropriate term, and creator of the Apple I and II and, of course, Breakout. Also, he created the first Dial-A-Joke line in the San Francisco Bay area, a fact for which he wishes he got more credit.

Now, many people won't have heard of Wozniak and many of those who have may not know just how far reaching his inventions were. Now, Wozniak created the Apple I, a computer which was revolutionary at the time. Why? It had a keyboard and a monitor. It was small, cheap, fast, far faster than most other machines at the time, but the truly great thing was that it hooked up with a glorified typewriter and a TV.

I haven't read far enough through the book to the point where he and Steve Jobs created Apple and got around to distributing it and changing the world and whatnot, so I'm not going to go into the events of then. But think about it. Picture any old sci-fi movie, picture early Star Trek. Computers of the future were operated like computers of the day, if such things existed. Switches, lights, the occasional dial. If it were a truly top of the line, super-duper computer it might have a few reels of magnetic tape twirling back and forth. Trying to operate the weapons on the Enterprise was not unlike setting your Christmas tree to stun.

All computers were like that then. Switches for input, blinking lights for output. Nobody had though of combining it with a display, nothing beyond the occasional home Pong game (which, interestingly, Steve Wozniak produced a simple version of, which he connected to his TV, over a year before Atari did it). Heck, the Enterprise had a giant freaking screen, right there. Huge. Directly in front of Kirk. What did it show? A giant screen-saver and the odd Klingon. Not even the wildest imaginations of the time had put two and two together. And Wozniak did.

It's like the Post-it note, and I don't say that to trivialise it. You all know how highly I regard Post-it notes. Such a simple idea, though technical, which combined existing parts to make something new. Something incredible. Something which is now the basis of so many things, even much of civilisation itself relies on these little boxes, all descended from that Apple I, made just a few decades ago.

I wonder what it's like to look around and see something you created taking over the world?