They were inspired by this Esquire article from 1971 called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, by legendary writer and typewriter fetishist Ron Rosenbaum.

Woz’s boxes were simply, by standards of circuitry, but the original creator of the Blue Box, built his with failsafes in mind in case the law got too suspicious.

He sighs. “We had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to pay. The deal was a thousand blue boxes for $US300 apiece. Before then we retailed them for $US1,500 apiece, but $US300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. We had a manufacturing deal worked out in the Philippines. Everything ready to go. Anyway, the model I had ready for limited mass production was small enough to fit inside a flip-top Marlboro box. It had flush touch panels for a keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons sticking out. Looked just like a tiny portable radio. In fact, I had designed it with a tiny transistor receiver to get one AM channel, so in case the law became suspicious the owner could switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers, and no one could tell anything illegal was going on. I thought of everything for this model – I had it lined with a band of thermite which could be ignited by radio signal from a tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it could be burned to ashes instantly in case of a bust. It was beautiful. A beautiful little machine. You should have seen the faces on these syndicate guys when they came back after trying it out. They’d hold it in their palm like they never wanted to let it go, and they’d say, ‘I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.’ You probably won’t believe it until you try it.”

[Esquire, Photo of the Blue Box taken at the Computer History Museum]

In case you missed the link buried in our retrospective tech gods trivia-fest, here’s a glimpse back at Steve Wozniak, the enthusiastic car salesman. To quote the man himself, “It. Is. Awesome.” [YouTube]

Name: Apple II
Year created: 1977
Creator: Apple Computer, Inc.
Cost: $US1,298 with 4KB of RAM; $US2,638 with 48KB of RAM
Memory: 4K semiconductor
Processor: MOS technology 6502

Spurred on by the small but encouraging success of the original Apple, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, retreated to the garage (Jobs’) to craft the personal computer that was the most convincing case yet that such an item could have a mass market. The Apple II started where the Apple I left of, namely, with a case. It didn’t look like an object dropped from a starship or developed in a military lab. It had a familiar, prosaic form of an elongated beige typewriter, though additions like the television monitor and the cassette player used to store programs made it look a little like a college-dorm entertainment centre.

If its appearance was familiar, the Apple II was also attractive to consumers in a way that previous computers just weren’t—even if their manufacturers tried. It shipped with high-resolution colour graphics and sound, and it had a rainbow-coloured Apple logo that seemed both fresh and optimistic. Said Wozniak, “The Apple II, more than any other early machine, made computer a word that could be said in homes. It presented a computer concept that included fun and games—human-type things.” The ability to have a business and a social side was an important sign of computing’s growing relevance.

The price made the Apple II affordable for businesspeople, well-off families, and schools. It was in the education sector that its influence lasted longest—although it certainly made its mark on business as the first platform to run VisiCalc, the first consumer spreadsheet program. It was the programs that really hooked people, and the Apple II had a great roster of educational and entertainment software. By attracting developers, a snowball effect occurred, and a new generation of developers became attracted and then obsessed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The top photograph was taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

Name: Apple I
Year created: 1976
Creator: Apple Computer Company
Price: $US666.66
Memory: 4KB semiconductor
Prcossor: MOS technology 6502

Of course people would want their own computer. But when Steve Wozniak offered a design for one to his employer, Hewlett-Packard, it was rejected. With fate on his side, Wozniak introduced the Apple I to Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club, even if it was a little more than a kit. Kits were popular with hobbyists, and the offerings were often crafted by users onto wooden boards, as pictured here.

Sensing that the market for a personal computer went beyond people who had the time to put together their own, Wozniak (or “Woz” as he is known, and evidently signs his name) and his friend Steve Jobs sold fifty pre-built Apple I computers to The Byte Shop in Mountain View. If the biblical allusions of the price and the image of temptation represented by an apple weren’t enough, many believed that “Apple” was a reference to the Beatles’ Apple Corps record label. All of these cultural markers conveyed that this computer, and the company that made it, was for cool people who were in on the joke and ready to take the reins of technological power—or at least have a bit more fun with it. The computer industry was beginning to make serious inroads into popular culture—or was it the reverse? It was Steve Jobs whose crafty marketing sense pushed all these themes into play. Not coincidentally, the idea of the computer “evangelist” proselytising about new hard- or software took hold at Apple.

About two hundred models of the Apple I were sold—not as many as the Altair, but to Jobs and Wozniak, they established the concept and provided the fuel to form a company to launch the Apple II, a runaway success. And some important lessons were learned: Maybe it was the lack of a case that impressed on Jobs the importance of a good-looking box. Either way, no one has done more than Apple to turn the home-brewed computer into the beautiful, consumer-friendly machines, from the Macintosh to the iPod.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher.

The photographs were taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Special thanks to Fiona!

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analogue age gave way to the digital, and most of our favourite toys were just being born.

OK…meaningful…here goes…

For that definition, it was probably an electronics learning kit I got for Christmas at about age 8 or 9. As I recall, it didn’t teach electronics formulas or resistor codes, but was full of projects to hook up input devices like switches and output devices like buzzers and lights. It was like learning how to connect all the devices to your hi-fi, or connecting all your peripherals to a computer. It also gave me a good start toward understanding logic rules, like both switches have to be on for the light to shine, or if switch A is on, then switch B selects which light is on.

I call this one the most meaningful, because, pretty clearly to me, it preceded my other important gadgets and inspired me to like gadgets and to understand how to build some. It’s like how the transistor led to the chip, which led to microprocessors, which led to personal computers. Everything goes back to the first invention, in that sense. This electronics kit gave me the understanding that made it easy to progress to large logic devices with multi-pole switches, and some relays, which then progressed to a large tic-tac-toe computer with transistors which progressed to a large adding/subtracting machine with transistors, etc.

The word ‘meaningful’ has the root ‘meaning’ which implies some emotion. In that sense, my first transistor radio, at about age 10, would fit the bill. It gave me portable music that I could listen to all night long as I slept, every night. 20 years later came the walkman, and 20 more years later came the iPod, but the real change in life, the one having the most ‘meaning’, was with the transistor radio.

I always wanted my own computer. With the Apple I, I now had a machine that I could program. I would never run out of things to do in my entire life. So it’s a close runner up to the other two.

The gadget that has been the most attractive of attention ever is not my Segway. It’s my nixie tube watch from CathodeCorner. It looks very large to other people and looks very strange. It’s handmade in America too. The nixie tubes run on 140 volts on your wrist. Airport security guards who have seen every kind of watch ever made have a thrilling time with this watch.

I used to fly to Japan regularly to scour new gadgets, and always bought tons of things which were always surprising at the time, but looking back, few have special meaning. The first consumer digital camera, I think the Mavica technology, was meaningful. The first one for computers, not TV’s, was the QuickTake from Apple. But in many ways, no digital camera to this day has been as good as the first Ricoh one.

The HP-35 calculator was also very meaningful in my life, as it led me to an incredible job designing for the follow-on models.

Much thanks to Woz for helping to kick off our series. Coming up soon: Phil Torrone, gadget maker and modder extraordinare.

Image credit: Sony Mav, HP Calculator

I just got my iPhone this morning at the Apple Store in Valley Fair (San Jose, CA) and Steve Wozniak was there.

I arrived at 3:50am and Mr. Woz was chopping it up with the manager at Apple. Then around 4:30am he politely asked everyone in line if he could be the 1st to get his iPhone at the store and everyone said yes.

I would have let him go first too. [MacRumors Forums via Silicon Alley Insider]

It’s a photo of a banner that he, Steve Jobs and Allan Baum were going to unfurl off a roof during graduation or something. If you look closely, you can see the word SwabJob on the bottom, which was mashed up out of the initials SW, AB and “Jobs”. They got caught before the prank went down, and I think, later it was revealed that Jobs was bragging about the prank to someone, which lead to them getting caught.

Anyhow, the site is fun. If you’ve got geeky childhood photos of you, please send em over to [dorkyearbook.com.]

One of our more educated readers has chimed in on The Woz’s Dancing With the Stars elimination. If he’s right, let the Internet masses descend on ABC with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns.

Says Giz reader (and dancer?) Dallas in an email to Gizmodo from this morning:

I just watched the [Woz] episode tonight and David Allen Grier and his partner Kym did not dance a Lindy Hop. He got a complete bye! He danced a Charleston. The entire routine there was not a single swing out. That was not a Lindy Hop at all! He should not have received scores nearly as high as he did, because he did not dance the correct routine.

This is the Charleston
This is a correct Lindy Hop

Watch the episode for yourself. Count how many swing outs or triple steps (the “and 8″ ’s) you can see. There are ZERO! The Judges would have known the difference between a Charleston and a Lindy Hop. That was no Lindy Hop. Steve Woz was screwed off of Dancing with the Stars.

Woz was screwed.

Is he right? Can any of you geeks dance? Personally, when I dance at the clubs people tend to speak in tongues and go blind, so I have no idea if this is legit or not. But I do know I love The Woz, and I agree with Blam that his dancing was “a giant (but rapidly decreasing in weight, mind you) bundle of circuit board, Segway riding, love bouncing around with the enthusiasm of a child on two barely-functioning legs” awesomeness.

Of course, as any DWTS aficionado knows, the three judges’ scores are only a portion of the tally that decides a dancer’s fate each week. However, if the audience vote was close, and it was the judges’ score that decided Woz’s fate, well… I think you all know what to do.