APPLE VISIONS

Bob Bishop would sit at his desk with an Apple II and a Corvus Hard Drive, with ten megs of memory. He would type CALL to get into the monitor software. He would write some strange code, and amazing things would happen, and they were fast! I wanted that magic! I hoped that by coauthoring Apple Visions, I would get some of those powers. Bob asked Woz to write the Foreword for AppleVisions: A Unique Approach to Assembly Language Programming. This is an excerpt from that Foreword.

"Now that computers abound, we hear every day how "easy" they are to use. Yet manufacturers no longer provide, nor make easily available, the information needed to understand how the computer and its software work beneath the outer levels. Books and courses are oriented to programming in computer "language." Yet virtually all the hackers and pioneers in this field would agree that the heart of any computer is how the processor inside actually works and the language is speaks - machine or assembly language. They would universally agree that the greatest excitement and intrigues of their lives was learning how binary arithmetic, registers, accumulators, busses, and instruction set of processors work...

I cannot imagine anyone completing Apple Visions without falling in love with the science of computers. The book is every bit as much a story as Lord of the Rings, with fantasy characters and intriguing plots, to those of us who really believe in a shimmering future for the world won by individuals pursuing "the right thing" - the perfect program. This is how the modern day computer hackers (pure information enthusiasts) are born."