My first computer was an Apple IIc. I was thirteen years old and, at that age, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It had a gorgeous, green-on-black display screen, 128KB of RAM, no hard disk, and a Slim-line internal 5.25″ floppy drive into which you loaded whatever version of Zork you were in the mood for, and fired it up. All software was written in Applesoft BASIC, and although there was no official term for it at the time, everything was open source.

A simple Ctrl-C (or some such keystroke) was all that was required to break the flow of whatever program you were running and take a peek under the hood. I wrote my first computer program on the IIc. There might have been limits to what that little machine could do, but there were no restrictions. If you could imagine it, you could build it, and if you didn’t know quite how to build it, you just found someone else’s program that did something close, and figured out how they had done it. The Apple IIc was more than a tool, it was a teacher.

In college I used PCs and Macs, none of which I owned, of course — it just wasn’t expected in those days — and I reluctantly deciphered the library’s Unix terminals for the sole purpose of emailing friends with Pine. Until my junior year, by which time I was accustomed to using the university’s computer labs for my paper-writing and other needs, I kept that old Apple IIc around, with a dot-matrix printer, just in case.

It wasn’t until after graduation that I could finally afford (almost) to purchase my own computer. After buying and returning a couple of defective laptop PCs from a big box electronics retailer, I finally decided to go back to Apple, and I sprung for a Powerbook G3. It was beautiful, and it was definitely a Mac, but something was missing.

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Check out this cool video from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) July 23-27, 2007 in Portland, Oregon, featuring (two of my heroes) Phillip Torrone, Senior Editor of MAKE Magazine and Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, discussing the relatively new idea of open-source hardware.

It’s worth a look, if only to see Limor jam all the WiFi in the room with her hand-held Wave Bubble!

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I really enjoyed watching this hour-long talk by Jonathan Oxer, entitled “Hardware/Software Hacking: Joining the Real and the Virtual,” which addresses the growing trends in physical computing, and the process of connecting the physical world with the virtual.

~ from Google Tech Talks, July 31, 2007

ABSTRACT

Software developers usually confine themselves to working entirely within the runtime environment of a computer just pushing around bits and pixels. Even virtual worlds such as Second Life exist only in the confines of our CPUs.

On the other hand, hardware hacking has really taken off in recent years and there are now magazines such as MAKE devoted to modifying everyday objects. It’s a lot easier than software jockeys may expect, and this talk will begin with an entertaining exploration of simple ways to get started with linking a computer to real-world objects.

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