iWoz Points of Interest
May 14th, 2007
- Woz wanted to access the ARPANET, but did not have the thousands of dollars to buy a teletype system. He put his engineering skills to work and built a terminal system using a typewriter keyboard and a television.
- Combining the knowledge gained from his television terminal project with digital chips, Woz envisioned how color could be introduced to computer displays while working on Breakout for Atari.
- Woz did not like the “hard-to-understand lights and switches” of the Altair. He saw the potential of combining his CPU design with his television terminal to form a stand-alone computer.
- Being of substantial wealth post-Apple co-founding and an electronics engineer, Woz was an early adopter of home theater technologies (laser discs!). He found the array of remotes required to control everything problematic. Knowing that all the different components needed were infrared signals, he designed and built the first universal remote.
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