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Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

I found this audio recording of an Apple user's group meeting very fascinating from 1978. https://archive.org/details/camvchm_000069/camvchm_000069_t0...

Woz at one point talks about how if you don't understand the undocumented instructions maybe they aren't for you. Anyway, kind of nice ambience to it as well.

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Thanks for sharing this. Do you have the timestamp for that particular bit?

Edit: Looks like it's from 6:00 to 6:40

Wow, Apple was two years old at that point!

Officially, but Jobs/Woz were making and selling illegal blue tone boxes 10 years before that around 1972. They allowed you to basically steal phone time from the phone companies by simulating the sounds that nickles/dimes/quarters made when inserting them into a payphone so you didn't have to pay to use the phone for local or long distance calls.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/27/blue-box-circuit-...

A 'blue box' routed calls through the network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box A red box simulated the tones made when coins were inserted into a pay phone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_box_(phreaking)

shrug

Everyone still called it blue boxing when you were putting tones into the phone

And people called HTML a programming language. Doesn’t make it correct.

And people call cracking hacking and hacking cracking. How deep should we go?

and phreaking - hacking

Nice to know Apple is still Apple.

How so? Woz is answering pretty much every single question in insane levels of detail. So much candor. That's the opposite of the Apple I know.

I think we are saying the same thing; it’s a cheeky remark that to read Apple’s documentation is in it of itself, a learned skill, essential to being productive in Swift.

I read the comment as Woz saying documentation isn’t for the faint of heart ... true

(Mind you, I love Apple’s docs now, and honestly prefer it compared to Stripe-y and Twilio-y documentation... to me S&T docs are a style that tries to smooth over the cluttered calls and returns. Are they APIs that makes sense to accomplish x style or job succinctly, or do I have to read the 8 million other things I don’t care about to do the one thing I need to do?)

Ah, ok. No, we weren't saying the same thing, but I now understand what you meant, and I also happen to agree. Current Apple documentation sucks. I think you may be exhibiting some kind of Stockholm syndrome :).

You're doing it wrong. The actual documentation is all in the WWDC videos... just better hope it covers the section you're concerned about!

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