I will admit it right up front. I DON’T watch “Dancing with the Stars”. However if you are a big fan of the program please don’t be offended. I don’t really watch TV at all. So why am I talking about the Woz and dancing if I don’t even watch the program? Well, it’s because Steve Wozniak and dancing has changed my life!
It was my junior year of high school and like most teens I had a lot of things going on. A bunch of stuff competing for my attention. Friends, sports, school and having fun, the usual mix. I had some idea what I might do. My grades were good and it was likely I would head off to college to study… something.
It was innocent enough in the beginning, the program had just started and I was curious to see what was going to happen. I watched intently as the scene developed. There were no actors on the screen, at least not yet. As the scene began to take shape I could see it was a room. A room with only a single table and a plaque on the wall that read “Home Sweet Home”. Sitting on the solitary table was a television set.
The television on the screen came to life and an opening credit scrolled across. Suddenly a man appeared on the screen. What followed next was nothing short of miraculous. Music started playing and he began to dance. The music wasn’t bad but the dancing! I couldn’t believe it. It was amazing. My friends and I had tried to put something like this together but this just blew me away!
Compared to this, what we were doing was very very basic. The smooth movement, the complexity of coordinating the movements with the music, it was nothing short of magic. I must have watched that program a hundred times. Digging into the mechanics of how it all worked. Studying every line and every shape. Trying to unravel the dancer’s secret code.
By the end of the following year I had not only uncovered the dancer’s secret I had even assembled a number of my own original routines. My destiny was set and I was off to study…
Computer Science
Thank you Steve Wozniak, and thank you Bob Bishop for peaking my interest and leading me into a field that has given me many interesting challenges and rewards.
If you are confused about my choice of study or if you know exactly what I’m talking about and want to feel a little nostalgic you can watch the dance that changed my life. It’s less than two minutes long!
Hope this made you smile,
Tanda
3 users commented in " The Woz and Dancing "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI had never seen this before. I knew “the WOZ” was a magician, but this is something else.
Yes, the Apple was a very elegant piece of hardware considering the parts that were used. What Steve Wozniak did was similar to taking all the scrap pieces from 20 old garments and making an amazing quilt. I don’t know if you watched Apple-Vision running on You Tube but it’s a very nice piece of coding. Sure there are probably kids watching it now saying, “I could do that as a JAVA app in 20 minutes.” But Bob did it on a 6502 running at 1MHz with less than 48K of ram.
Great post! I’ll subscribe right now wth my feedreader software!