Woz on Apple II's UPPER CASE ONLY

Steve Wozniak guest-posts on Benj Edwards’ blog, explaining from the origins of the Apple I, with nice recollections too…

I saw a friend typing on a teletype to the six computers on the early ARPAnet. I had to have this power over distant computers too… I needed a keyboard… I found an offer for a $60 keyboard modeled after the upper-case-only ASR-33 teletype. That $60 for the keyboard is probably like $500 today. This $60 was the single biggest price obstacle in the entire development of the early Apple computers. I had to gulp just to come up with $60, and I think my apartment rental check bounced that month … So my TV Terminal, for accessing the ARPAnet, was uppercase only.

Some discussion on HN.

via Nelson Minar (and RSS!)

(Archived link posted because the blog is overloaded right now, and not https)

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I found an interesting sentence in there: “I’d built my tiny computer with the capability of the Altair, 5 years prior, in 1970, with my own TTL chips as the processor.”

Presumably the ‘cream soda’ machine? Mentioned in this previous post:
Steve Wozniak on his early- to mid-’70s work

I’d say it’s definitely the “cream soda” computer, the one he built with Fernandez.

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