A nice story previously posted elsewhere:
…Woz came down, and I got to interact with him and it was really fun because he was working on installing these 16-sector disk driver routines, and he’d go ‘type type type type type’ – and he didn’t type in assembly language and have it assembled. No, he’d type in 6502 machine code. Hex. – He’d type in hex, and then, you know, watching him type and he’d go ‘type type type’ – pause – ‘type type type type’, and when he finished I asked him what was the pause? And he said “forward branch, seven instructions, I had to compute the offset before I continued”. So, he didn’t back-patch the offset, he actually looked at what he was going to be typing, knew how many bytes it would take… he was brilliant.
- Bill Atkinson, quoted in a conversation about Pascal on the Apple II, specifically about when he was given just one week to code something to convince Jobs that Pascal was a good idea:
From the HN post:
I’m reminded of a really great interview with Bill Atkinson where he describes (among many other things) how he initially brought Pascal to Apple and the Apple II.
The Pascal bits are from 45:00 to about 50:00.
Upstream blog here with more good stuff in the comments.
It’s discussing this 10 page history (also available in pdf):
