Steve Wozniak and Sergey Brin - Video Stories of Yesterday and Today

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Spend enough time rooting around the Web and you can more or less find anything and everything you are looking for. Take for example, Apple Insider, which has managed to uncover an excellent video of Steve Wozniak - who will be our ITEXPO Las Vegas 2013 keynoter in late August - speaking in depth about the early days of the personal computer. What we mean here is a video that dates back to 1984, with a very young Steve Wozniak telling us deep dark secrets of how the original Apple I came into existence and why.

The most interesting thing to us is Steve's perspective of how geeks who were building their own Heath kit computers were actually doing themselves and their fellow enthusiasts a dis-service by actually building their own. Steve speaks about discovering that through the miracle of "wave soldering" a complete computer (or at least the circuit board itself) could be assembled for all of $13. All it took was the proper placement of the integrated circuits and a hit with the wave soldering and…there you had it.

It's a fairly short, but awesome clip of a longer talk he was presenting at the time, but it is nevertheless very interesting to take an ear to. We've now thought of several additional things we'll want to ask Steve when he presents our upcoming keynote at ITEXPO Las Vegas 2013.

 

Let's fast forward now to a few days ago, when Sergey Brin did a brief presentation on Google Glass at the recent Ted conference. Sergey doesn't actually tell us anything we haven't already heard or seen on Google Glass, but it is nevertheless quite interesting to hear about Sergey's view of smartphones being "emasculating devices" (yes, this is the talk where that tidbit comes from) and his view of how Google Glass changes this scenario for the better.

 

The similarities between the two videos are eerie as both are speaking, within their own unique settings, about the dawn of new ages based on new discoveries that always keep us moving forward. That both are informally dressed and both sport beards (something we ourselves absolutely approve of!) completes the picture, but the underlying themes in both videos are completely interchangeable. It speaks volumes about the overall trajectory of technology.

Twenty years down the road the same talk will appear yet again, no doubt by a bearded guy (well, we're just extending the theme here, it can easily be a woman who will give the talk) with completely embedded/implanted technology speaking about entirely new possibilities.

We're reminded of a particularly interesting book that was written some time ago - in 1983 - by renowned physicist and cosmologist Robert Jastrow, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe, where he noted that the size of the human brain ceased to grow well over a hundred thousand years ago, and that the only way to evolve the brain any further would be through wired connections to computers. We may finally be getting there.

We've come a long way between the Steve Wozniak of 1984 and the Sergey Brin of 2013, and it appears to us we are beginning to get closer to Jastrow's vision. The Apple I and II were a starting point and Google Glass is a next step. Along with such things as the Argus II bionic eye these connections to the brain are becoming quite real as well. The Argus II interacts directly with the optic nerve, which in turn communicates with the brain.

The next step is to speak directly to the brain through our emerging world of wearable technology such as both the Argus II and future generations of Google Glass. These are indeed interesting times!




Edited by Brooke Neuman
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TechZone360 Senior Editor

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