The excellent Apple VHS Archive YouTube channel continues to unearth analog video gold. The latest update is a nine and a half minute company internal video featuring, among others, a beardless(!) Woz – by then an “Apple Fellow” – talking up the benefits and general warm fuzzies of hardware and software patents.

Watching Apple patent attorney Bob Martin literally smashing unlicensed Apple II clones on the floor at about the 4:00 minute-mark is not to be missed!

Texas rocker Joe Ely has released B4 84, an album he made with an Apple II, using the alphaSyntauri music system and a Roland 808 drum machine.  In a brief interview with the San Antonio Current, Ely discusses the details of the album, which was recorded over 30 years ago, his interactions with Woz, and how his record company liked the songs but wanted him to re-record them using traditional studio methods.  The redone tracks were released on 1984’s Hi-res album which, “didn’t do very well.”

Now Joe has released the original recordings and you can get your own copy for $9.99 on iTunes, with liner notes by Steve Wozniak himself.

Oh, and hey – did you know Joe ran his own BBS back in they day?

His appearance at KansasFest 2013 and recent write up on the development of Integer BASIC notwithstanding, Woz has spent much of his time recently battling the FCC’s controversial new net “neutrality” policies and generally looking to the future. This is understandable of course – you can only tell the same stories of the company’s early days so many times before they lose a bit of their luster – but the Apple co-founder still finds time now and then to spend an afternoon, recounting the past as he did when he appeared as the “surprise” guest at the Smith & Associates Thirtieth Anniversary in Houston, Texas earlier this week (in a suit jacket, no less).

From left: Lee Ackerley, co-founder and co-owner of Smith; Marc Barnhill, chief trading officer for Smith; Bob Ackerley, co-founder and co-owner of Smith; and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. (Olivia Pulsinelli/HBJ)

Woz shared anecdotes of Apple’s founding, and explained to lucky attendees to the “fireside chat” and luncheon how factors such as the company’s organization in its early years and the professionalism brought by industry vet and initial investor Mike Markkula, helped Apple achieve success in the then-nascent industry.

PRWeb has the original press release available here.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that any video of the chat has been posted online, but we’ll be sure to update you the moment it is made available.

BASIC, that simple language that was an integral part of the Apple II experience for so many fans, turns 50 this month and to help celebrate, Woz has contributed a nice little memoir about how he wrote Integer BASIC from scratch.

In 1984, Woz visited the East Ohio Apple Corps to introduce the new Macintosh and discuss plenty of other Apple related topics.  The video doesn’t include the actual Macintosh intro, but Woz gives a detailed history of the early days of Apple including Mike Marrkula and Ron Wayne, the development of the Disk II drive, his pranks with the other Steve, visiting early computer shows, and much, much more.  Apparently, even in 1984, an Apple-1 was fetching upwards of $15,000.

A digitized copy of the nearly two-hour talk has been posted to Vimeo. (HT: The Unofficial Apple Weblog.)

According to this Reuters report, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak has been hired to act as an advisor on the new Steve Jobs biopic.  No, not that one.  This is the film currently being written by Aaron Sorkin and backed by Sony Pictures.  Woz’s role is being described as that of “tutor” for the technical aspects of the computers to be used in the film, as well as Jobs himself.

Andy Kessler of Tech Ticker recently recorded a video interview with Steve Wozniak about the early days of personal computing:

We were gonna have machines that could out-calculate our companies’ huge million-dollar computers, and we the programmers … were gonna change the world with revolutionized education. We always spoke of the word “revolution” — all these big social changes we were going to bring … I wanted to help it happen. What I had to offer was my technical talents. I could build machines for these other people who wanted to use machines to better humanity … I thought, why don’t I design a computer from the ground up [with] every optimization where you save parts and you make things work, do more jobs than they did, work faster… and I added my color idea. The Apple II was this hot design that I came up with.

The full interview is embedded below.