daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
Steve Wright of the Seminole County Fire Department, left, and D. M. Shaw of the State Department of Agriculture assessed the tree remains on Monday.
LONGWOOD, Fla. — Back, way back, before King Tut was born and Alexander the Great roamed his empire, the Senator sprouted in a swamp here in central Florida, one of thousands of its kind.
So on Monday, when word got out that the huge, 3,500-year-old bald cypress had burned and collapsed, people from the area who thought that nothing — not hurricanes, not loggers, not disease — could fell the Senator, sank into disbelief. In a state known for its sprawl and its zeal for pouring concrete, the Senator stood as a testament to nature and ancient history. It was one of the oldest trees in the country and, at 118 feet, one of the tallest east of the Mississippi.
“There is so little of this old history left,” said Lauren Wyckoff, 28, an environmental scientist and self-described tree hugger, who drove to Big Tree Park from nearby Orlando after work to pay her respects. “It’s not just some tree in your backyard. I mean, it’s 3,500 years old; I just picture everything it saw, everything it has been through.”
“I’m crying,” she said, with a laugh, as her eyes reddened. “When I first came here, I had no idea it would be as amazing as it was. No idea it would be as impactful.”
Investigators for the Division of Forestry are still trying to figure out how the tree burned down early Monday morning. Arson remains a possibility, although it had been initially discounted. Two other possible theories are being considered: the tree was struck by lightning long before Monday (maybe as long as two weeks) and slowly smoldered from the inside, or friction from the wind caused it to combust.
Around town, these last two theories were met with skepticism and a touch of derision. The Senator, which was the only tree in the small park to catch fire, was equipped with a lightning rod. And if the tree had been struck by lightning and smoldered for two weeks, residents said, somebody surely would have seen or smelled it. As for friction, that notion drew nothing but smirks.
“Of course, maybe a plane flew over and dropped an ember into the hole,” Rick Waters, 49, who runs Mel’s Family Diner in Sanford, a couple of miles from the tree’s resting place, said with a chuckle. “I think some moron started it, or threw a cigarette down. It’s sick to think somebody would destroy that.”
The revered tree wasn’t just old; it was huge. At nearly 18 feet in diameter, it was so large it would take a passel of children holding hands to surround it.
Named for Senator M. O. Overstreet, who donated the land to Seminole County to use as a park in 1927, the Senator has long been a landmark for Floridians. It survived the logging epidemic, which claimed many of the giant trees that once stood in the county. (The Senator may have been spared because it was hollow, a condition that occurred as the tree aged.) It endured centuries of nasty hurricanes, including one in 1925 that lopped off 40 feet from the top.
Back then, four decades before Disney World rose from swampland, the towering bald cypress was the star attraction in these parts. Visitors arrived on horse and buggy and then jumped from log to log to get a close-up glimpse of the tree.
“You could see it from pretty much everywhere around here” it was so tall, said Joseph R. Abel, the director of the Leisure Services Department in Seminole County.
Now children are brought here on field trips to gawk skyward and imagine what Florida was like back when it was nothing but forest and swamp and Indians were its only inhabitants. Families have always come to snap photos, and nature-lovers arrived on pilgrimages.
What remains now is a trunk, split in half, and a charred shard of wood that shoots 30 feet into the air. The remnants of the tree lie split, on their sides, black and sooty. Outside the gates of the park sits a little tribute of flowers with a sign reading “Rest in Peace Senator.” The park is closed for now as investigators determine what caused the fire.
But the new Florida had long been a too-quick walk away from the Senator. Traffic whizzes by in front of the park and fast-food joints sit right up the street. And though the tree was revered by some, competition from modern life had dwarfed its appeal a good while back.
There are not many awe-inspiring things left, Ms. Wyckoff said. “It was crazy, insane, you can’t imagine how large it was,” she said.
Yet only 40 feet from the Senator looms an understudy: Lady Liberty, now the park’s tallest cypress. It is 89 feet tall and not nearly as imposing, but in this time of transitory celebrity, its moment has arrived.
We must stop this corporate takeover of American democracy
Unless we can reverse the supreme court's dreadful Citizens United decision, US politics will become a plutocrats' plaything
The corporate barbarians are through the gate of American democracy. Not satisfied with their all-pervasive influence on our culture, economy and legislative processes, they want more. They want it all.
Two years ago, the United States supreme court betrayed our Constitution and those who fought to ensure that its protections are enjoyed equally by all persons regardless of religion, race or gender by engaging in an unabashed power-grab on behalf of corporate America. In its now infamous decision in the Citizens United case, five justices declared that corporations must be treated as if they are actual people under the Constitution when it comes to spending money to influence our elections, allowing them for the first time to draw on the corporate checkbook – in any amount and at any time – to run ads explicitly for or against specific candidates.
What's next … a corporate right to vote?
Don't laugh. Just this month, the Republican National Committee filed an amicus brief in a US appeals court contending that the natural extension of the Citizens United rationale is that the century-old ban on corporate contributions directly to candidates and political parties is similarly unconstitutional. They want corporations to be able to sponsor candidates and parties directly while claiming with a straight face this would not result in any sort of corruption. And while, this month, they take no issue with corporations being subject to the existing contribution limits, anyone paying attention knows that eliminating such caps will be corporate America's next prize in its brazen ambition for absolute control over our elections.
The US Constitution has served us very well, but when the supreme court says, for purposes of the first amendment, that corporations are people, that writing checks from the company's bank account is constitutionally-protected speech and that attempts by the federal government and states to impose reasonable restrictions on campaign ads are unconstitutional, our democracy is in grave danger.
I am a proud sponsor of a number of bills that would respond to Citizens United and begin to get a handle on the problem. But something more needs to be done – something more fundamental and indisputable, something that cannot be turned on its head by a rightwing supreme court.
That is why I have introduced a resolution in the Senate (introduced by Representative Ted Deutch in the House) calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that says simply and straightforwardly what everyone – except five members of the United States supreme court – understands: corporations are not people with constitutional rights equal to flesh-and-blood human beings. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions – the law of the land for the last century – or dump unlimited sums of money into our elections. And Congress and states have broad power to regulate all election spending.
I did not introduce this lightly. In fact, I have never sought to amend the Constitution before. The US Constitution is an extraordinary document that, in my view, should not be amended often. In light of the supreme court's Citizens United decision, however, I see no alternative. The ruling has radically changed the nature of our democracy. It has further tilted the balance of power toward the rich and the powerful at a time when the wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good.
At a time when corporations have more than $2tn in cash in their bank accounts, make record-breaking profits and swarm Washington with their lobbyists 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for the highest court in the land to suggest that there is just not enough corporate "speech" in our system defies the bounds of reason and sanity. The ruling already has led to plans, for example, by industrialist brothers David and Charles Koch to steer more than $200m – potentially much more – to conservative groups ahead of election day 2012. Karl Rove has similar designs.
Does anybody really believe that that is what American democracy is supposed to be about?
I believe that the Citizens United decision will go down as one of the worst in our country's history – and one that demands an amendment to our Constitution in order to restore sovereign power to the people, as our nation's founders intended.
If we do not reverse it and the culture of corporate dominance over our elections that it has exacerbated, there will be no end to the impact that corporate interests have on our campaigns and our democracy.
guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 January 2012
Johnny Otis, the musician, bandleader, songwriter, impresario, disc jockey and talent scout often called “the godfather of rhythm and blues,” died on Tuesday at his home in Altadena, Calif. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Terry Gould.
Leading a band in the late 1940s that combined the high musical standards of big-band jazz with the raw urgency of gospel music and the blues, Mr. Otis played a key role in creating a new sound for a new audience of young urban blacks, a sound that within a few years would form the foundation of rock ’n’ roll.
With his uncanny ear for talent, he helped steer a long list of performers to stardom, among them Etta James, Jackie Wilson, Esther Phillips and Big Mama Thornton — whose hit recording of “Hound Dog,” made in 1952, four years before Elvis Presley’s, was produced by Mr. Otis and featured him on drums.
Ms. James spoke for many of her fellow performers when, at Mr. Otis’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, she referred to him as her “guru.” (He received similar honors from the Rhythm & Blues Foundation and the Blues Foundation.)
Mr. Otis’s contributions were not limited to music. He was also a political activist, a preacher, an artist, an author and even, late in life, an organic farmer. But music was always his first love, and it was in music that he left his most lasting mark.
Despite being a mover and shaker in the world of black music, Mr. Otis was not black, a fact that as far as he was concerned was simply an accident of birth. He was immersed in African-American culture from an early age and considered himself, he said, “black by persuasion.”
“Genetically, I’m pure Greek,” he told The San Jose Mercury News in 1994. “Psychologically, environmentally, culturally, by choice, I’m a member of the black community.”
As a musician — he played piano and vibraphone in addition to drums — Mr. Otis can be heard on Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love,” Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” and other seminal rhythm-and-blues records, as well as jazz records by Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet. As a bandleader and occasional vocalist, he had a string of rhythm-and-blues hits in the early 1950s and a Top 10 pop hit in 1958 with his composition “Willie and the Hand Jive,” later covered by Eric Clapton and others. His many other compositions included “Every Beat of My Heart,” a Top 10 hit for Gladys Knight and the Pips in 1961.
As a disc jockey (he was on the radio from the 1950s into the 21st century and also had his own Los Angeles television show from 1954 to 1961), he helped bring black vernacular music into the American mainstream.
Johnny Otis was born John Alexander Veliotes on Dec. 28, 1921, in Vallejo, Calif., the son of Greek immigrants who ran a grocery,. He grew up in a predominantly black area of Berkeley.
Mr. Otis began his career as a drummer in 1939. In 1945 he formed a 16-piece band and recorded his first hit, “Harlem Nocturne.”
As big bands fell out of fashion, Mr. Otis stripped the ensemble down to just a few horns and a rhythm section and stepped to the forefront of the emerging rhythm-and-blues scene. In 1948 he and a partner opened an R&B nightclub, the Barrelhouse, in the Watts section of Los Angeles.
From 1950 to 1952 Mr. Otis had 15 singles on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues Top 40, including “Double Crossing Blues,” which was No. 1 for nine weeks. On the strength of that success, he crisscrossed the country with his California Rhythm and Blues Caravan, featuring singers like Esther Phillips, billed as Little Esther — whom he had discovered at a talent contest at his nightclub — and Hank Ballard, who a decade later would record the original version of “The Twist,” the song that ushered in a national dance craze.
Around this same time Mr. Otis became a D.J. on the Los Angeles radio station KFOX. He was an immediate success, and soon had his own local television show as well. Beginning in the 1970s he was heard on Pacifica radio stations in California, where his weekly show remained until 2005.
Hundreds of Mr. Otis’s radio and television shows are archived at Indiana University. In addition, he is the subject of a coming documentary film, “Every Beat of My Heart: The Johnny Otis Story,” directed by Bruce Schmiechen, and a biography, “Midnight at the Barrelhouse,” written by George Lipsitz and published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.
While he never stopped making music as long as his health allowed, Mr. Otis focused much of his attention in the 1960s on politics and the civil rights movement. He ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the California State Assembly and served on the staff of Mervyn M. Dymally, a Democratic assemblyman who later became a United States congressman and California’s first black lieutenant governor. Mr. Otis’s first book, “Listen to the Lambs” (1968), was largely a reflection on the political and social significance of the 1965 Watts riots.
In the mid-1970s, Mr. Otis branched out still further when he was ordained as a minister and opened the nondenominational Landmark Community Church in Los Angeles. While he acknowledged that some people attended just “to see what Reverend Hand Jive was talking about,” he took his position seriously and in his decade as pastor was actively involved in feeding the homeless and other charitable work.
In the early 1990s, he moved to the small northern California agricultural town of Sebastopol and became an organic farmer, a career detour that he said was motivated by his concern for the environment. For several years he made and sold his own brand of organic apple juice. The store he opened to sell the produce that he and his son Nick grew doubled as a nightclub where he and his band performed.
Later that decade Mr. Otis published three more books: “Upside Your Head!: Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue” (1993), a memoir of his musical life; “Colors and Chords” (1995), a collection of his paintings, sculptures, wood carvings and cartoons (his interest in art had begun when he started sketching cartoons on his tour bus in the 1950s for the amusement of his band); and “Red Beans & Rice and Other Rock ’n’ Roll Recipes” (1997), a cookbook.
Mr. Otis continued to record and perform into the 21st century. His bands often included members of his family: his son John Jr., known as Shuggie, is a celebrated guitarist who played with him for many years, and another son, Nick, was his longtime drummer. Two of his grandsons, Lucky and Eric Otis, also played guitar with him. In addition to his sons, he is survived by his wife of 70 years, the former Phyllis Walker; two daughters, Janice and Laura Johnson; nine grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and a great-great-granddaughter.
Long after he was a force on the rhythm-and-blues charts, Mr. Otis was a familiar presence at blues and even jazz festivals. What people wanted to call his music, he said, was of no concern to him.
“Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it’s all African-American music,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993. “The music isn’t just the notes, it’s the culture — the way Grandma cooked, the way Grandpa told stories, the way the kids walked and talked.”
More than half a century later, Pound's 86-year-old daughter still savours the isolation of Brunnenburg castle's lofty wood-panelled and book-lined rooms, where she reads the poem to visitors and mulls over her extraordinary upbringing by the renegade US poet.
But Mary De Rachewiltz's peace has been shattered by the murky world of Italian neofascist politics and the fallout from a bloody shooting spree through Florence's ancient piazzas that left two immigrants dead in December.
Angered by the decision of a rising fascist group called CasaPound to name itself after her father in honour of his support for dictator Benito Mussolini, De Rachewiltz is seeking through the courts to force the group to drop the name, and has accelerated her efforts after a CasaPound sympathiser shot dead two Senegalese street traders and wounded three others before turning the gun on himself.
"I was ashamed and hurt by the news," she told the Observer. "The fascists want to claim Pound, but they have nothing to do with Pound. They are a nuisance and there has to be something I can do to stop them."
Striding up the stone spiral staircase of the castle, De Rachewiltz heads for a corner study that commands breathtaking views up to rock faces and a piercing blue sky and down past the family vineyard to the valley far below.
An accomplished poet herself, De Rachewiltz has surrounded herself at Brunnenburg by Pound's possessions, including sculptures and old school books in which he drafted, in different coloured inks, sections of The Cantos, the historical work seen as one of the 20th century's major poems. She calls it "her bible".
De Rachewiltz's devotion to her charismatic father has never flagged, despite being given up for fostering at birth in 1925 to a peasant couple in South Tyrol by Pound and her mother, the US violinist Olga Rudge, who was the poet's mistress. Before her birth, Pound had settled in Italy with his wife after blazing a trail across the London poetry scene, en route to becoming a fixture on Paris's Left Bank, where he helped TS Eliot edit The Waste Land and mentored Ernest Hemingway, who tried to teach him to box.
In total contrast, De Rachewiltz's early upbringing revolved around bee-keeping and sheep herding, albeit broken up by trips to see her father and his mistress at the home they kept in Venice.
"The Tyrolean peasant is still ingrained in me," said De Rachewiltz, who recalls smashing a violin her elegant mother gave her. A tense relationship between Rudge and her dialect-speaking daughter ensued. "I think I was influenced by my foster parents, who probably envied 'the lady in the silk stockings' who would pick me up," she said.
With Pound she forged a strong bond as they roamed Venice together, visiting bookshops and taking the vaporetto waterbus out to swim at the Lido. Later, Pound would ask his daughter to translate the poem he had started, The Cantos, into Italian. "In 1943, at the height of the war, when I was back in South Tyrol for safekeeping, Pound made his way from Rome to make sure I was safe," De Rachewiltz recalls. During the visit he finally confessed to her that he had a wife in Rapallo on Italy's Ligurian coast. By that time Pound was a wanted man in the US after endorsing Mussolini's brand of fascism and making a string of radio broadcasts – which were riddled with antisemitic statements – to persuade America to stay out of the war.
Arrested in 1945 by American troops and kept in a cage for three weeks, where he showed signs of a mental breakdown, Pound was charged with treason and spent the next 12 years in a mental institute in the US.
De Rachewiltz has since fought a lifelong battle to separate Pound the poet from Pound the fascist and antisemite, which is why the emergence of CasaPound – now boasting 5,000 members – is so painful.
She rebuffs the suggestion that CasaPound's lionisation of him is no more than he deserves. "Pound just quoted what Mussolini said," she said. "This organisation is hiding behind Pound's name for intellectual cover," she added. "He made mistakes and we have to take the good part of him, just as he did with others. He fell into certain antisemitic clichés that were rampant in Europe and the US at the time."
Pound later told the American poet Allen Ginsburg that his worst mistake in life was his "stupid suburban antisemitic prejudice".
Released by the US government in 1958, Pound returned to Italy, where his daughter had married an Italian Egyptologist of Russian descent, Boris de Rachewiltz. They had purchased Brunnenburg, then in ruins. "It cost more to put in windows than to buy the castle," she recalls.
Pound moved to the castle to continue work on The Cantos, joined by his wife Dorothy, "who stayed in her room reading Henry James", recalls De Rachewiltz. But after years in an overheated mental institute, Pound was not fit for drafty castle life, and returned to Rapallo, where Olga cared for him until his death in 1972.
De Rachewiltz now sees that rivalry with her mother for Pound's affections clouded their relationship. "Anyone who met Pound loved him," she said. "When he wrote 'Pride, jealousy, and possessiveness/ 3 pains of hell', he was writing about all of us, including his wife. We all wanted him for ourselves. I re-read my mother's letters now and see how much she loved me."
Decades on, surrounded by her family, De Rachewiltz reads and writes, stopping for lunches of bread and cheese with a glass of red wine from her vines, followed by a cup of Earl Grey at four. TV soap operas are an occasional pleasure.
The CasaPound legal case, she insists, will not break up her routine. "I do not want to meet them," she said. "If he was here, Pound would say they need to go back to kindergarten."
THE vast data centers that process information for the Facebooks and Amazons of the Web work at a brisk clip. But even so, they can’t always keep up.
During sudden bursts of activity, bottlenecks occur as traffic moves among dense clusters of servers. Typically, the servers are stacked one on top of another in rack after rack — and are connected by switches, routers and cables.
To better handle the congestion, researchers are testing a shortcut that doesn’t involve costly rewiring. They are experimenting with wireless links, mounted atop the server racks, to supply extra bandwidth for moving data along at crunch times.
Researchers in the field, as well as data center administrators, initially were skeptical about the idea of applying wireless technologies inside data centers, which have stringent requirements for reliability and security, says Victor Bahl, director of the mobile computing research center at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash. His group began trying the links to supplement wired systems three years ago.
“That skepticism is normal,” Dr. Bahl says. “Wireless links have always been considered flaky.”
Wireless performance, as anyone who has lost a cellphone connection can attest, can be affected by many things, from a door opening or a microwave oven starting to changes in the weather.
But a data center is a highly predictable environment, with controlled temperatures and infrequent movement of people and equipment. That minimizes fluctuations in the quality of wireless links. “You set up these racks of servers and walk away,” Dr. Bahl says. “The environment stays the same.”
The Microsoft team forged ahead with the project, building and testing a system with tiny directional antennas at the top of each rack to send and receive data. A central controller monitors traffic patterns, finds network bottlenecks, configures the antennas and turns on the wireless links when more bandwidth is required, says Daniel Halperin, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington, who worked on the project as an intern at Microsoft. Signals go out on a horizontal plane and are steered right or left. The design sped up traffic by at least 45 percent in 95 percent of the cases tested, Mr. Halperin says.
The wireless signal that the Microsoft group uses to carry multigigabits of data per second between racks isn’t the familiar Wi-Fi of coffee-shop hot spots. That type of signal spreads out over an entire room so that many people can open their laptops and go to work.
The wireless signal for the data centers is a narrow beam of extremely high-frequency radio waves in a part of the spectrum known as the 60 gigahertz band. The band is already used in home entertainment, replacing bulky cables that connect high-definition televisions to Blu-ray players, for example. Hardware for this bandwidth, which is available worldwide for unlicensed use, is likely to drop in cost as the band gains more use, Dr. Bahl says.
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Heather Zheng, an associate professor in the computer science department, and colleagues are also designing multigigabit wireless links to augment wired data center networks. The links in the system can travel horizontally, but they can also leave one rack, bounce off a reflective ceiling at an angle, then move to another rack.
“When we bounce signals off the ceiling, we take advantage of much more bandwidth than we could if we restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane,” says Amin Vahdat, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in large-scale data center architecture and deployment and is working with Dr. Zheng on the project. Dr. Vahdat, who is on sabbatical leave from the university, is also a principal engineer at Google.
Craig Mathias, a principal at the Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless communications and mobile computing, agrees that the 60 GHz band is suitable for indoor, high-bandwidth use in information technology, but he maintains that wired systems are best for connecting servers.
The wired connections used in a data center are highly reliable, so “why introduce variability in a mission-critical situation?” he asks.
MARK THIELE, executive vice president for data center technology at Switch Communications, a Las Vegas builder and operator of data centers, says he thinks wireless technology offers a promising solution to congestion. “If it deals effectively with bottlenecks, a wireless connection could eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars in required network connectivity,” he says.
Much work is still ahead. “You’ll have to prove its security,” he says, “and you’ll have to prove that 100 times out of 100 times” no information is lost.
"While the whole “who’s a genius” debate is, in general, fraught and unwinnable, since genius itself is always going to be ill-defined, in the case of Steve Jobs it is even more fraught and even more unwinnable. In part, this is because the tech world, where most of us reside simply by owning cell phones and using computers, is not unlike the sports world or the political world: it likes a good rivalry. If, years ago, it was Microsoft versus Apple, these days it’s Apple versus Android, with supporters of one platform calling supporters of the other platform names (“fanboys” is a popular slur) and disparaging their intelligence, among other things. Call Steve Jobs a genius and you’ll hear (loudly) from Apple detractors. Question his genius, and you’ll be roundly attacked by his claque. While there is something endearing about the passions stirred, they suggest the limitations of writing a book about a contemporary figure and making claims for his place among the great men and women in history. Even though Isaacson has written what appears to be a scrupulously fair chronicle of Jobs’s work life, he is in no better position than any of us to know where, in the annals of innovation, that life will end up.
The other reason nominating Jobs to genius status is complicated has to do with the collaborative nature of corporate invention and the muddiness of technological authorship. Jobs did not invent the personal computer—personal computers predate the Apple I, which he did not in any case design. He didn’t invent the graphical interface—the icons we click on when we’re using our computers, for example—that came from engineers at Xerox. He didn’t invent computer animation—he bought into a company that, almost as an afterthought, housed the most creative digital animation pioneers in the world. He didn’t invent the cell phone, or even the smart phone; the first ones in circulation came from IBM and then Nokia. He didn’t invent tablet computers; Alan Kay designed the Dynabook in the 1960s. He didn’t invent the portable MP3 music device; the Listen Up Player won the innovations award at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show, four years before Jobs introduced the iPod.
What Jobs did instead was to see how each of these products could be made better, or more user-friendly, or more beautiful, or more useful, or more cutting-edge (quite literally: there is a popular YouTube video making the rounds that shows the sleek new MacBook Air being used to slice an apple). A few years ago, in a profile in Salon, Scott Rosenberg called Jobs a digital “auteur,” and that description seems just right.
The template for Jobs’s career was cast in 1975, months before he and his friends set up shop in his parents’ garage in Los Altos, California, near Palo Alto. Jobs, who had dropped out of Reed College and moved back home, was hanging around with his high school buddy Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, a shy, socially awkward engineer at Hewlett-Packard, was drawn to a group of phone hackers and do-it-yourself engineers who called themselves the Homebrew Computer Club. It was at a club meeting that Wozniak saw an Altair, the first personal computer built from a kit, and he had the insight that it might be possible to use a microprocessor to make a stand-alone desktop computer. “This whole vision of a personal computer just popped into my head,” Isaacson quotes Wozniak as saying. “That night, I started to sketch out on paper what would later become known as the Apple I.”
Then he built it, using scrounged-up parts, soldering them onto a motherboard at his desk at night after work, and writing the code that would link keyboard, disk drive, processor, and monitor. Months later he flipped the switch and it worked. “It was Sunday, June 29, 1975,” Isaacson writes, “a milestone for the personal computer. ‘It was the first time in history,” Wozniak later said, ‘anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.’”
Wozniak’s impulse was to give away his computer design for free. He subscribed to Homebrew’s hacker ethos of sharing, so this seemed the right thing to do. His friend Steve Jobs, however, instantly grasped the commercial possibilities of Wozniak’s creation, and after much cajoling, convinced Wozniak not to hand out blueprints of the computer’s architecture; he wanted them to market printed circuit boards instead. They got to work in the Jobses’ garage, assembling the boards by hand. As Wozniak recalls it, “It never crossed my mind to sell computers. It was Steve who said, ‘Let’s hold them in the air and sell a few.’” It was also Jobs who pushed his friend to sell the circuit boards with a steep mark-up—Wozniak wanted to sell them at cost—and Jobs’s idea to form a business partnership that would take over the ownership of Wozniak’s design and parlay it into a consumer product. Within a month, they were in the black. Jobs was twenty-two years old. He hadn’t invented the Apple computer, he had invented Apple Computer. In so doing, he set in motion a pattern that would be repeated throughout his career: seeing, with preternatural clarity, the commercial implications and value of someone else’s work."
