Contact the WOZ? Apple affiliated members? Woz.org folks? re: SWIM Release

[Trash80toG4]

I've long suggested contacting woz to see if he'd release (or recreate) SWIM for the community:

We're of an age and thinking it might be a significant addition to his legacy. He's far deep into education and tech talent development thru woz.org. So thinking would be that giving folks young and old in the retro community the chance to put SWIM to good use as an educational/developmental tool might appeal to him?

Anyway, contacting him directly would be wonderful if someone can make this suggestion. I really think he'll like the notion.

PM me and I'll give you my email if he might want to contact me directly.

THX
jt

 

[bakkus]

Just musing here: I know he as a person invented a whole lot of ingenious circuitry and controllers. But he did it while on the Apple payroll. I'm not a lawyer, but I would understand that to mean that Apple owns that IP. Regardless of which Apple employee created it.
Does he even have the legal permission or power to do so?

 

[stepleton]

I expect Woz doesn't retain the IP rights for the original Disk II controller; Woz didn't design the IWM, Wendell Sander and/or Bob Bailey did (also); and he didn't design the SWIM either, that seems to have been Wendell's son Brian.

 

[Trash80toG4]

I've long suggested contacting woz to see if he'd release (or recreate) SWIM for the community:

Hence that suggestion that he might find recreation/cloning his namesake as a fun project to leave something so beautiful as part of his legacy.
Might he even request said developers to take on that task for him?

Can't imagine Apple refusing his request for IP release, if documentation is indeed still in the archives there?

 

[bakkus]

Can't imagine Apple refusing his request for IP release, if documentation is indeed still in the archives there?

That's making a big assumption. I can very much imagine they would.

Besides, Woz didn't invent the SWIM as pointed out over.
He could maybe be convinced to give talks that enable clean-room reimplementation of _his_ work?

 

[Trash80toG4]

Oh, I'm ever so willing to make @$$uME foibles in this regard.

Running parallel threads here and at 68KMLA in this effort, so please excuse crosstalk via copy/past in my responses:

https://archive.org/details/SWIMDesignDocs/SWIM2 ERS/mode/2up

 

[stepleton]

I also wanna muse for a bit on this idea that Woz might be motivated to do this out of interest in his legacy.

Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, occasionally the most valuable company on Earth and one whose outsize public goodwill trades on (among other things) the legend of his beaming avuncular geekish enthusiasm for tech for everyone. He's often (rightly or wrongly) credited with helping invent home computing, and certainly did plenty of work to popularise it. The first computers that tens of millions of Americans will have ever touched were his design or its close descendants. He is an archetypal figure in the Silicon Valley founding mythos: the nerd genius who hand-soldered the future in his pal's mom's garage. When he finally boards the celestial microbus to the Lord's own wozfest, his obituary will be published in newspapers around the globe, and TV news channels on all parts of the political spectrum will pause to pay fond respects to the man and his life.

Now can you truly imagine any of those future tributes saying, "Also, in 2026 he helped recreate a particular computer chip (that helps operate something called a floppy disk drive) that was derived from a design he had made but was created by some other people and that in its recreated form sold several hundred units and got forty-six Github stars"?

In general, is Stephen Gary Wozniak a man who needs to spend any of his time worrying about legacy?