We recreated Steve Jobs's 1975 Atari horoscope program

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.

The choice of AppleSoft BASIC for a recreation seems to be somewhat odd and deliberate, and doesn't represent the typical limitations of the time (AppleSoft BASIC does floating point math!): in August 1975, the MOS 6502 hadn't even been announced and the Apple ][ wasn't yet a dream. Even Microsoft 4K BASIC for the Altair hadn't been introduced, yet (this was to happen only later in October.) Meaning, none of the basic technology of choice would have been available.

Something along the lines of Intel 8080 assembly may have been more appropriate, given that the target platform would have probably been a coin-op machine. (Given that "Gun Fight", the first arcade video game utilising a microprocessor, wasn't yet released, even this would have been an ambitious choice. Atari doing research for something that required an ALU may be even more interesting than the involvement of the young Steve Jobs.)

PS: This is just to give some truth to "this is where the hackersnews jerks will say this is an ad". ;-)

> made a program you can actually run, on an apple ii, or an emulator, or the open-source adafruit fruit jam – 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).

As I read that sentence, before reaching the parenthesis, I actually thought it was cool and smart marketing. It feels like the author misunderstands what is typically called an ad, which are those blog posts which read like “has this ever happened to you” infomercials, inventing a problem and then publicising their product as the exact solution at the end.

This, on the other hand, is just for fun and the joy of hacking, and HN typically enjoys those. Heck, you even listed alternative ways to run it before your own.

The only thing that bothers me about the article is the poor formatting and the insistence on lower case, both of which make it unpleasant to read for me.

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.

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)

Did Jobs get Woz to write it for him?

"[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.

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.