[rmason]

I was in the audience when Woz spoke to engineering students at Michigan State. He was on campus to receive an honorary degree.

He said that he was on the Macintosh team before Jobs. Apparently they were working on something completely different, but they were both on the project at the same time when Jobs pivoted it.

Woz participated in an interesting discussion recently on Facebook about the early days of Apple:

https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/1015356891824965...

[digi_owl]

That seems to jive well with the impression i have gotten of Jobs as an outsider.

The guy never seemed to have a real interest in the innards of tech, only how it looked and acted on the outside.

Still, i find the lines about how the Mac was pretty much immune to vulnerabilities because it was mostly a ROM with a fancy UI interesting. It brings to mind what Google is doing with ChromeOS. And how you could abuse older systems like C64 to hell and back, because one power cycle was all that was needed to bring it back to a pristine state.

[orionblastar]

The C64 had the KERNAL OS that loaded from ROM, only had like 49K free in BASIC. The C64 DOS was on the 1541 drive which had its own CPU and memory and the DOS was on a ROM.

Both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga had Mac emulators with a serial port or printer port dongle that loaded a Mac 128K ROM onto it to boot up Mac System floppy disks. Atari ST had Magic Sack, Amiga had AMax. Both had the same 68000 CPU as the Mac but had better graphics and sound chips so things ran faster.

As I recall there were viruses for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, and Macintosh even if most of their stuff was on ROM. Just not as many viruses as DOS had on PC Clones.

[digi_owl]

I think the major difference was that by booting from ROM it was harder for a virus to stick around, as there was no boot sector or equivalent to latch on to.