Interview With Woz

[NovaXpress]

http://www.failuremag.com/arch_business_ap...niakmalone.html

 

I found this tonight, it's a broad-ranged interview with Steve Wozniak but here's a fun excerpt:

 

We went to Commodore in the early days and showed them our Apple II before it was out and offered to sell it to them for maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars—I don’t know what Steve was talking. They turned it down and said, "No, we’ll just design our own. We’ll go cheap here and cheap there and we’ll only have black-and-white and we’ll have a crappy keyboard and we’ll only have this much memory, no expandability, we’ll build in a little black-and-white monitor. . . ." They could have been the Apple II. Jack Tramiel made the decision, but after our presentation, his head of engineering, Andre Souson, talked to us for a while. He believed in us and left Commodore to come to Apple.

Gotta love that Jack!

 

He also tells the story of how Atari rejected the Apple II because they were already heavily-invested in the 2600.

[Nukey Shay]

To what end? Educators in my day avoided the Atari computer like the plague because they saw it as a you-know-what machine. And both Atari and Commodore had ridden pretty big waves. The Apple of today might never had existed. So history did just fine. AFAIK, none of them ended up starving.

[NovaXpress]

History always takes care of itself I guess, this is just another one of those turning point moments like Atari rejecting the NES.

 

No one ever respected my poor old 800. It was all those 2600 controllers attached to it.

[Nukey Shay]

Yup...the NES is another one. With Atari's piss poor management when public interest fell, they would have probably taken the next wave with them (except maybe Sega). And they wouldn't have been able to strong-arm their vendors like Nintendo did. People weren't exactly thrilled about the Atari name around that time.

[mos6507]

I still think Atari never should have licensed the NES. If Atari were healthier, they would have crushed the NES with their own A-list hardware and games. The fact that they were even thinking about licensing the NES just demonstrated how far Atari had fallen by that point.

 

There is nothing in the NES hardware that Atari couldn't have done on its own had they had their crap together. If you concede that the 7800 is a weaker platform, had Atari held onto the Amiga then it would have been like putting up the Genesis against the NES.