We recreated Steve Jobs's 1975 Atari horoscope program

57 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by ptorrone

15 Comments

an0malous

4 hours ago

I wonder a lot about Jobs’ spiritual and metaphysical beliefs, I read both the Isaacson bio and Becoming Steve Jobs and neither dug too deep into this aspect. Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs and that a lot of his thinking and principles could be traced back to what he learned from the monks and yogis, but for whatever reason he chose to never speak directly about it to anyone including his biographer and closest colleagues.

coldtea

8 minutes ago

>Yet he was known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples, giving a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to everyone who attended his funeral, and I’m just learning now that he wrote horoscope software. I suspect there was much more unexplored depth to his spiritual beliefs

Does that sound like some real depth?

This part "known for taking LSD, living with monks and yogis in India, visiting the Hari Krishna temples, visiting the Zen Buddhist temples" basically describes any hipster hippie in the late 60s/early 70s. There were even bus services that catered to the market, and many celebs at the time (most famously The Beatles) did the same:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie_trail

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtPFdgZw1R0

WoodenChair

2 hours ago

If you want to learn more about those formative beliefs around the time that this horoscope program was written, I recommend the book The Bite in the Apple by his former girlfriend (and mother of his daughter) Chrisann Brennan: https://amzn.to/4aN2DQX

TheEdonian

36 minutes ago

I might just be getting old, but that post is mainly code and images so using AI to write the very limited amount of text just screams lazy to me.

Makes you wonder if they are as lazy in the rest of their products.

poulpy123

3 hours ago

After reading, it is not the horoscope in the common meaning of astrology but as a star chart but in the meaning of sky chart (albeit limited to planets)

ron_k

3 hours ago

That’s exactly what “horoscope” means in western astrology, which only uses solar system’s planets + the sun.

wnevets

3 hours ago

Did Jobs get Woz to write it for him?

jedberg

3 hours ago

Jobs was an engineer too. :)

blackguardx

2 hours ago

Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.

TMWNN

an hour ago

Calling him an engineer would be a stretch. As others aid, he was a hardware technician on an assembly line.

That said, that experience, and this article, that Jobs had an understanding of computers and electronics when founding Apple beyond the "Woz = engineer, Jobs = sales guy" oversimplification. It's just that compared to Woz—one of the century's greatest engineering minds—anyone would look third-rate.

ngcc_hk

24 minutes ago

Still not get Steve can program. Always think it is one of his key to his success is do not know this. Oh. It is a myth.

ofrzeta

4 hours ago

"[a] mini rp2350 computer, which does this and so much more (this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad and that cloudflare is on our blog)."

haha, brillant.