Weekend Watching: Rediscovered VHS Tapes Of Woz Speaking At 1984 Apple Pi Club

Today several bits of a couple of speeches made by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and another Macintosh legend have surfaced via a friendly holder of several VHS recordings of a 1984 meeting of the Apple Pi computer club. These tapes recorded Woz and Apple Employee #6 Randy Wigginton speaking at the Denver Apple Pi computer club back on October 4th 1984, and are being digitized and cleaned for your enjoyment this weekend. Don't miss the "Pledge of Apple Allegiance", whatever you do.

These videos were submitted initially to Tuaw where a reader by the name of Vince Patton notes that he's in the process of making sure all of the tapes are transferred and that watchable video is produced from the source material. These videos are all being displayed at Patton's YouTube channel where you can enjoy them in kind – we'll also be embedding each of them in this post, of course.

First you'll see an epic moment in the history of computing that you'll be glad you took the time to click. Here Woz leads the club in the Pledge of Apple Allegiance, complete with the following lines:

I pledge allegiance

to the logo

of corporate marketing in Cupertino.

And to the computers

for which it stands:

one notion

under Jobs -

indispensable

hardware and software for all.

Make sure you commit that one to memory, dear readers.

Next you've got Woz speaking on pranking a hotel, hacking a Video on Demand box, and re-numbering a telephone. Immediately following that, you'll find a video about additional pranks and wild times Woz had as a college students, including a choice note about how he'd used a TV jammer more than once.

A bit of a break from Woz for a moment, you've got Randy Wigginton speaking about the aversion of a near disaster 6 days before the original launch of Macintosh. He goes through the heart-pounding several days before Macintosh had to be launched as a software package, explaining that at 2 o'clock in the morning on the day they had to send the final build out at 6 o'clock in the morning (four hours later), the situation should very well have given their team all panic attacks: "nothing worked."

Once again with Woz you'll find a description of how the Apple II was created. This should enlighten your life even if you never used that magical machine, complete with its massive floppy disk drive and connectivity with the epic Koala Pad. This machine was many users of my generation's first encounter with an Apple product, as the big A had a rather important link with grade schools at that time.

With one good turn comes another – next you'll see Woz speak about the creation of the Apple I (which of course was created before the Apple II). Inside you'll have found a fabulous note about how the Apple I worked with 4k dynamic RAM built-in even though it was more difficult to design for – and how no other system worked with that advanced feature for a year (or even two) after they'd done it. This is an absolutely unthinkable situation today.

Below you'll see Woz speak on how Steve Jobs formed Apple Computer knowing full well he'd have to lose some money before he made any.

Woz returns with more information about how he was put on probation at the University of Colorado for "Computer Abuse". Such is the life of a young genius, yes?

Finally, (for now), you'll see Woz recall the point at which he was forced to quit his job at HP and put his efforts toward Apple full-time. This is an iteration of the story of Apple's creation that we've never seen before today, spoken by none other than one of the two men who founded the company. Consider that for a moment, won't you?

We'd like to thank Patton for his work in translating this all to digital video this week and look forward to the rest of the media without a doubt. Let us know if you hear any other hidden treasures in your viewing of these clips, too!