14.003 5 How did Woz invent the Apple computer? C.T.: What about peripherals like the printer interface, cassette, and disk? Iguess these were all coded using an assembler; right?
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This article is from the Apple II Csa2 FAQ, by Jeff Hurlburt with numerous contributions by others.
14.003 5 How did Woz invent the Apple computer? C.T.: What about peripherals like the printer interface, cassette, and disk? Iguess these were all coded using an assembler; right?
Woz: By the time the Printer card was done with it's 256 byte ROM I may still
have been coding by hand or we might have gotten our first assembler. It's
unusual to this day that you plugged in a printer and it attached itself to the
op-sys by means of a driver in ROM on the printer card. True plug'n play.
Possible to this day but rarely done (I've heard of some Newton exception).
The ROM op-sys of the Apple II could direct output and input to any of 7
slots. Mass media was read and write an entire cassette file at once.
The floppy brought a very tight hardware design, coupled very tightly to
the lowest level access subroutines which I wrote without an assembler. Randy
Wiggington wrote the "Read Write Tractor Sector" routines, a step higher. Randy
and I began a full op-sys but we farmed it out to Shepardson associates.
Needless to say, none of that was done by hand!
By: Jason Aubrey Wells <jaw016@engr.latech.edu>
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