How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch

But 4K...wow!

[1] http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~mcdirmid/papers/ghost.pdf

Until I graduated from college it was hard to get anyone to take me seriously or even respond. I think the barriers to enter the tech job market with no experience or degree is so much higher today.

When I was in grades 7-9 it was mandatory, then elective after that. We didn't flash chips back then (in the late 90's) but I bet they do now.

We mostly did hands on of making circuit boards (acid etch), and soldering all the components together for simple little circuits. I only stayed in electronics until grade 10, but I know they made some pretty cool stuff in grade 11 and 12.

The consequence was "more" available to students and teachers.

So we had the tools in the tenth grade to design a part in autocad in drafting class, take it over to the machine shop and have a CNC machine mill a mold that could then be pushed over to have parts injection molded.

All that is gone now due to cuts in funding.

And for fun we actually had a class to teach people how to be a logger.

If you needed parts for a homework assignment, the only store that had them was Radio Shack (yes, they actually sold lots of electronic parts back then). So one day, I meandered into The Shack to get a resistor I needed. Lo and behold, there was a new manager, a guy named Tony. This guy was much friendlier than the previous manager had been. That other manager just tried to get us in and out, apparently presuming we wanted to shoplift or something.

This new guy? Happy to show me the new TRS-80, and though my parents wouldn't pay for one, he scarcely complained as I went back to use it every day for more than a year. I taught myself how to code on that machine, and so I have that freshman electronics class to thank, in part, for my career.

Nonetheless I got permission to sign up for Electronics. I discovered that the course was mainly going to revolve around TV repair, and the teacher even told me that I'd be bored. So I dropped it and learned that one of the math teachers had started a course in BASIC! It's not an understatement that the course changed my life.

In the 1980s in Palo Alto, my high school AP Computer Science teacher asked parents to come in and give guest lectures in the last few weeks of class. Donald Knuth's daughter was in my class so he came and talked about TeX. Another kid's parent was a VP at a bank; he talked about secure transaction processing for ATMs. My dad (a researcher in robotics and AI) talked about expert systems.

It was okay. :-)

I started with electricity concepts and basic circuits in the 7th grade and 8th grade. Sadly had to take mechanic in the 9th as electronic classes were full.

On my last three years (10-12 grade), I switched high school to became a computer technician. We had classes about data structures, programming languages, basic compiler design concepts, DB, network and graphics programming.

It made my first CS years a walk in the park.

Understanding how these work is one thing, and that used to be enough to be worth employing. Today, you have to have a passion for using that knowledge to solve problems.

Of course, I also figured out I could get my TRS-80 Model 1 to make sounds of various pitches by tuning an FM radio to its CPU and running loops with varying delays. I added sound to a pinball game this way back then.

I checked the above link to confirm my recollection, but while Forth had been around for a while it wasn't really public until the 70s (versus BASIC). I suspect he wouldn't have even heard of it, or at least not realized its potential, in 1975.

Since he had an HP calculator, yes

> "The key to games was BASIC. Bill Gates was unknown except in the electronics hobby world. Everyone in our club knew that he'd written BASIC for the Intel microprocessor. I sniffed the wind and knew that the key to making my computer good (popular) was to include a high-level language and that it had to be BASIC. Engineers programming in FORTRAN were not going to be what would start a home computer revolution."

And actually implementing a basic interpreter isn't all that complex. The loop is simple:

Read a line.

If the line starts with an integer, you're adding a line to your program; otherwise you need to interpret then execute.

Read the first word. In some BASICs, this is the first string of characters that matches one of the keywords; in others, it's all the alphanumerics up to a non-alphanumeric.

(In effect) dispatch to the appropriate interpretation routine based on which keyword you just read in. For example, PRINT goes to the argument handler for PRINT, LET goes to the argument handler for LET, and so on.

Then you just have a bunch of routines (read one variable name, read an expression and interpret it as a number, read a destination line number, etc) and different keywords use them in different ways.

It's pretty simple, really. Way easier than writing a full LALR parser.

These might be the ingredients for innovation.

HN penalizes them without reflection.

There is a core aspect of hacking/making/doing that Woz demonstrated well and aren't represented by many modern thought leaders in the industry.