When I was 10 years old I found the code for breakout in C++. This was a derivative of a game Woz wrote for Atari back in 1976 using discrete logic. Woz’s version was legendary for being optimized to a point that it was so difficult to manufacture and understand for most engineers at the time. Of course there is also the infamous story of how Steve Jobs only paid him $350 for a job that Atari paid over $5000 for. Those credit-grubbing managers.

At this point in my life I had already learned how to write BASIC (in GW-BASIC, Turbo-Basic, QBasic) and Turbo Pascal (still one of my most beloved languages. I bet that if I revisited the Pascal language, I would notice a ton of annoying things about it but for me this was the language that unintentionally introduced me to the world of object oriented programming). When I discovered the code for breakout I started to mess around with it changing the physics of the game. I modified the speed of the ball and the angle of its bounce. It was fun to poke around and modify a few lines of code here and there. I did not fully understand how all of the code worked but learned quickly that changing a few lines changed the behavior of the game. I had done something similar to the game gorilla.bas in QBasic. It was a lot of hours lost in just reading thru pages of code trying to find the right line to change to make the banana explosion destroy half the city. Or how to make the breakout ball blow thru the bricks instead of bouncing back. I spent a lot of time indoors in my childhood as you can all see. But the reason Woz and breakout was so memorable for me is because this was the first time I asked myself “I wonder if someone would pay me to do this all day?”

I wonder if someone would pay me to do this all day?

Mad Computer Scientist Ninja

I had not known about Woz until much later in my teenage years. I was more of a Bill Gates fan back then because of his software coding skills than I was of Woz’s hardware engineering prowess. Needless to say they we’re the nerds that inspired me during my early nerd life. I only found a closer connection with the Woz when I started my professional career. A lot of his points of view in his career echoes my personal work ethics. I have the same childlike amazement at wonderful engineering as him. I know that when I get to be his age, I would still have the same desire to be amazed at beautiful engineering like him. I am not talking about aesthetically looking gadgets here. Our love for beautiful engineering goes skin deep. I am sure that Woz gets nerd-cited at an efficient and well designed logic board as much as I am at seeing a well named method on a class.

I think Woz represents the optimistic and at times unrealistic side of me. The side that used to always say “I plan to optimize the world one line of code at a time”. I don’t say that line as often as I used to. Experience has taught me that writing code with large teams expecting lots of features given very little time produces mediocrity. The only thing that keeps me sane most of the time is the knowledge that we can do better. Software can be beautiful if it is engineered with a bit more passion and a bit more care.

How I got to Touch the Woz

I was attending the In-Memory Computing Summit in San Francisco when one of the guys from our group sent me this:

I had seen this poster in the lobby the first day we attended the summit but I never noticed that Woz was going to be in the same hotel the summit was being held. I knew immediately what I needed to do. Find a way to see him in person and talk to him. They always tell you to never meet your idols. That it would cheapen the experience if you finally get to meet them and realize that they are just as normal as you are. But that was not why I wanted to talk to him.

I have been for years trying to get my son to learn how to code. I wanted him to get as excited as I was when I was at his age to see how software made things work. I have gone thru a lot of different iterations of robots and coding games to encourage him to try coding. I wanted him to experience the same spark of amazement I felt when I wrote my first piece of code that moved an asterisk across the screen using a series of print “*”, delay, clear, print ” *”, delay, clear, print ” *” (I had not learned how to use a loop yet 🤣).

Unfortunately in this day and age of immersive graphics and touch displays, none of these rudimentary animations elicits the same level of excitement it gave me when I was 8 years old. So I decided to scam my way into getting free passes into the Fog World congress that was happening next door to get the Woz’s take on it.

Watch my short conversation with the Woz below. Thanks to my cloud faced friend who found the poster and took these videos for me. 😊

I am glad I finally got to speak to the Woz after all these years. He reminds me of the reason I started writing code. Not just in the hopes that someday, someone would pay me to do it all day. But because of this feeling of amazement and wonder I get whenever I see an asterisk moving across the screen.