Tales of Silicon Valley: The birth of the Apple joystick Video

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Tales of Silicon Valley: The birth of the Apple joystick
Created: 04/24/2008
Video description: How Jef Raskin made a joystick and helped make the Apple II fun.

Tales of Silicon Valley: The birth of the Apple joystick Video Transcript

[Intro Music] Announcer: Silicon Valley is full of stories, some pretty, some not. This is one of those stories. [Background Typing] Bruce Damer and Allan Lundell of the Digibarn show off the original Apple joystick and tell how airplanes helped make it. Bruce: This is Jeff Rascon's [assumed spelling] Apple Two E and you'll notice it has specially marked keys, leap keys and this was when he was designing the Canon Cat, which came after the Macintosh. Jeff joined Apple early on, I think seventy six and so he worked with Woz on everything including the design of the first joy stick for an Apple computer, so Jeff was a mechanical genius if I might say. He helped reinvent model aircraft design and amongst many other things. But you see the little zero and one buttons and this was all designed to test out the concept of doing a real joy stick for an Apple computer. This is the game port, the paddle ports, okay? Announcer Three: That was great. The game port was one of the best things of the Apple Two. You could plug all kinds of cool peripherals in the game port. Announcer Two: This product evolved into this, the cursor, so the real, the real Apple joy stick. Announcer: Look for more tales of Silicon Valley at CNETTV.com.

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