Steve Wozniak 55 in Font

Generator Data Matrix ECC200 in Font Steve Wozniak 55

data and I said read track 0; stuck in the other floppy and said write track 0, read track 1, write track 1. There were 36 tracks I had to switch floppies back and forth. When I got done, I m looking at these two floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, Oh my god, Apple has a floppy! It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say run Color Math, and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time. But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy but read it back, got it right. I just died.

Livingston: Where were you when you did this Wozniak: I was actually in Apple s office for the entire floppy disk creation. We were in that office building that I described earlier. There were about five of us in there, then there were about eight or ten. Then I moved out to a second little room that we got a smaller room in the same office complex but down in another building. Randy Wigginton and I were in there, and Captain Crunch who developed the phone board for me. Livingston: What advice would you give to hackers who are thinking about

Wozniak: First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truth-

ful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you re doing. Don t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would. If you can just quickly whip something out and it s done, maybe it s time, once in a while, to think and think and think, Can I make it better than it is, a little superior What it does is not necessarily make the product better in the end, but it brings you closer to the product and your own head understands it better. Your neurons have gone through the code you wrote, or the circuits you designed, have gone through it more times, and it s just a little more solidly in your head, and once in a while you ll wake up and say, Oh my god, I just realized a bug that s in there, something I hadn t thought of. Or, if you have to modify something, or add something new, you can do it very quickly when it s all in your head. You don t have to pull out the listing and find out where and maybe make a mistake. You don t make as many mistakes. Just believe that what you have is better than whatever has existed before. We should only move forward in technology and not backwards. Lack of tools: find a way to do it. If you say, I have to have a tool, and you are a prima donna I have to have a certain development system if you