by Steven Levy
“It just seemed neat [to design computers],” Baum later recalled. “It seemed like an important thing to do. The glamour appealed to us. It was fun.” As high school progressed, and Wozniak scrounged more time on computers to perfect his skills, Baum would often be astounded at the programming tricks Woz would come up with. “He seems to have invented all the tricks on his own,” Baum later said. “Steve looks at things a different way.
He says, ‘Why don’t I try this?’ He’s driven to use all the problem-solving techniques he can because ordinary design isn’t good enough. He has to be the best. He’ll do things no one’s thought of, use every trick. Sometimes, using every trick, you find better ways to do things.”
Woz graduated from high school before Baum did, and went off to college. But a few years later, both wound up working at the same company, the Hewlett-Packard computer firm. An extremely high-tech operation, devoted to high-performance computers which were like Mercedes cars compared to IBM’s clunky Caddies, this was truly the big leagues, and Woz was very happy there. He was married, but computers still were his number one priority. Besides his work at HP designing arithmetic logic for calculator chips, he also did some extra design work for the Atari game company, where another high school friend, Steve Jobs, worked. This provided side benefits, like the time he went into a bowling alley and encountered a coin-operated videogame with a sign promising a pizza to anyone who scored over a certain level. After a number of pizzas, his amazed companion asked him how he had beaten the game so easily. “I designed it,” said Wozniak between spasms of laughter.
A prankster with an unsettling, sometimes sophomoric sense of humor, Woz ran a free “dial-a-joke” service from his home, dispensing a seemingly endless supply of Polish jokes. That was not the only amusement he derived from the phone. He and Jobs became inspired after reading a 1971 article in Esquire about a legendary fellow known as Captain Crunch who was a devoted builder of blue boxes—these were devices which allowed one to make long-distance calls for free. Jobs and Woz built their own, and not only used them to make free calls but at one point sold them door-to-door at the Berkeley dorms. Woz once used his box to see if he could phone the Pope; he pretended he was Henry Kissinger, and almost reached His Eminence before someone at the Vatican caught on.
It was a freewheeling life Woz lived, centered on hacking for HP, hacking on his own, and playing games. He loved to play games, especially electronic ones like Pong. He also played tennis; like Bill Gosper playing Ping-Pong, Wozniak got a kick out of putting spin on the ball. As he later told an interviewer, “The winning isn’t as important as the running after the ball.” A sentiment that applied to hacking computers as well as tennis.
He dreamed, always, of that computer he might design for himself. He had already homebrewed his own TV Typewriter, a good first step. His goal was, of course, a computer built to encourage more hacking—a Tool to Make Tools, a system to create systems. It would be cleverer than any preceding it.
It was 1975, and most people, had they heard his dream, would have thought he was nuts.
Then Alan Baum saw the notice for the Homebrew meeting on a bulletin board and told Woz about it. They both went. Baum, admittedly too lazy to build a computer when he was surrounded with state-of-the-art machines at HP, wasn’t terribly excited. But Woz was thrilled. Here were thirty people like him—people quixotically fixated on building their own computers. When Marty Spergel passed out data sheets on the 8008 chip, Woz took one home and examined it until he realized that those minicomputers he was thinking of designing—big machines like the ones Digital Equipment made—were unnecessary. You could do it with microchips, like that Altair he had seen that night. He got hold of all the literature he could on microprocessors and wrote for more information, started files on all sorts of I/O devices and chips, and began designing circuits for this eventual computer. The second Homebrew Computer Club newsletter printed his report on current activities:
Have TVT my own design . . . have my own version of Pong, a videogame called breakthrough, a NRZI reader for cassettes very simple! Working on a 17-chip TV chess display (includes 3 stored boards); a 30-chip TV display. Skills: digital design, interfacing, I/O devices, short on time, have schematics.
The Homebrew atmosphere was perfect for Steve Wozniak; there was activity and energy focusing on the experimentation and electronic creativity which were as essential to him as the air he breathed or the junk food he ate. And even a person not normally taken to socializing could find himself making friends. Woz often used his home terminal to access the account that had been set up for Homebrew members on the Call Computer service. (Call Computer was a service that allowed people with home terminals to access a mainframe computer by phone.) There was a program on the computer much like the function on the MIT ITS system, where two people could “chat” to each other while on the computer, sharing information. Woz not only used this to communicate electronically with people, but he hacked into the depths of the system and discovered a way to break in on other people’s electronic conversations. So when Gordon French, for instance, was flaming about his new trick with the 8008 Chicken Hawk, his home terminal would inexplicably begin printing out these semi-obscene Polish jokes, and he never did figure out that somewhere miles away Steve Wozniak was doubled up in laughter.
Woz also met Randy Wigginton, an athletic, blond-haired fourteen-year-old computer kid who had managed to get a job at Call Computer. Wigginton lived just down the street from the cluttered garden apartment Wozniak shared with his wife, and Woz would drive the youngster to Homebrew meetings. Since before high school, Wigginton had been in love with computers. He came to almost idolize Woz for his profound understanding of computers, and deeply appreciated the fact that the twenty-five-year-old Woz “would talk to anybody about any technical thing,” even to a fourteen-year-old like Wigginton. Though Randy’s parents worried at the fact that computers were taking over their son’s life, his obsession deepened, fueled by Woz’s informal tutorials at Denny’s restaurant on Foothill Drive on the way back from meetings. They would be driving in Woz’s beat-up Malibu with its mounds of trash on the back seat—dozens of McDonald’s bags and technical journals, all soggy from Woz’s strange reluctance to roll up the windows when it rained—and stop for Cokes, fries, and onion rings. “I would ask Woz any dumb question just to get him talking—‘How does a BASIC interpreter work?’—and just listen to him as long as he talked,” Wigginton later recalled.
Wozniak soon got to know another Homebrew member who worked at Call Computer—John Draper. A semi-employed engineer, John Draper was better known as “Captain Crunch,” the “phone phreak” hero of that Esquire article that excited Woz in 1971. Draper, whose unmodulated voice could drone like the last whines of a fire alarm, a scraggly dresser who never seemed to put a comb to his long dark hair, got that moniker after he discovered that when one blew the whistle that came in the breakfast cereal by that name, the result would be the precise 2,600-cycle tone that the phone company used to shuttle long-distance traffic over the phone lines. John Draper, then an airman stationed overseas, used this knowledge to call friends at home.
But Draper’s interest went beyond free calls—as an engineer with a latent hacker tendency toward exploration which would soon prove overwhelming, he became fascinated with the phone company system. “I do [phreaking] for one reason and one reason only,” he told the Esquire reporter who made him famous in 1971. “I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a System. That’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.” It was the same fascination shared by the Tech Model Railroad Club hackers, particularly Stew Nelson (the MIT hacker who had hacked phones since childhood); but, not having Nelson’s access to sophisticated tools to explore it, Draper had to devise his own jerry-rigged means of access. (The one time Nelson did meet Draper, the MIT hacker was unimpressed by Draper’s technical ability.)
Draper was helped by discovering a network of phone phreaks with similar interests, many of them blind men who could easily identify the tones which could whizz one through the system. Draper was astonished that there were alternate phone systems from which you could get into test boards, verification trunks for breaking into people’s conversations (he once startled a woman he fancied by angrily interrupting her phone chat with another man), and overseas switching units. He soon figured out how to jump from one circuit to another, and mastered the secrets of “blue boxes,” which like Stew Nelson’s adjustment to the PDP-1 a decade earlier, could send tones over phone lines to get unlimited, free long-distance calls.
But John Draper, who sometimes acted so impulsively that he would seem an overgrown infant, wailing for his mother’s milk of systems knowledge, did not have the focused resolve of the MIT hackers—he could easily be cajoled into yielding the information about blue boxes to people who wanted to sell the boxes to people who wanted free calls—as Wozniak and Jobs had done door-to-door in the Berkeley dorms.
Draper’s own phone excursions were more benign. A typical caper would be to seek out and “map” various access codes for foreign countries, and he would use those codes to leapfrog from one trunk line to another, listening to a series of edifying clicks as his signal bounced from one communications satellite to the next. After the Esquire article, though, authorities targeted him, and in 1972 he was caught in the act of illegally calling a Sydney, Australia number that gave callers the names of the top tunes Down Under. For this first offense, he was given a suspended sentence.
He turned to computer programming, and soon was a regular hacker. People would later recall him at People’s Computer Company potlucks, filling his plate sky-high and stuffing himself. A virulent antismoker, he would also scream almost painfully when someone lit a cigarette. He was still interested in phone hacking, and among the subjects he’d talk about at the potlucks were things like getting ARPAnet access, something he considered eminently justifiable—“I had some integrations I had to do analytically. The MIT computer [had a program to help me do it]. So I used it,” he would later explain.
When the potlucks ended, he gravitated to Homebrew. He was a consultant to Call Computer, and had arranged for the Homebrew Club to get its account. He became a huge fan of Wozniak’s hacking, and Wozniak was thrilled to meet the famous phone phreak who had inspired his own blue box escapades. It was not unusual to see them together at the back of the room, as they were one night in late 1975 when Dan Sokol approached them. Sokol was the long-haired, blond guy who would stand up at Homebrew, check that no one from Intel was around, and barter off 8080 chips to anyone with good equipment to trade.
Sokol at that time was going broke from using his home terminal to access the Call Computer account. Since Sokol lived in Santa Cruz, and Call Computer was in Palo Alto, his phone bill was outrageous; he was accessing the computer for forty to fifty hours a week. The solution came one day at the back of the SLAC auditorium when Sokol was introduced to Wozniak and John Draper.
Not Captain Crunch?
“Yeah, that’s me!” Draper volunteered, and Sokol immediately peppered him with questions on building a blue box, which would enable him to make the Santa Cruz–Palo Alto phone calls for free. Though Draper’s probation specified that he refuse to divulge his phone-hacking secrets, he was unable to resist when people asked; the hacker in his blood just let the information flow. “In the next fifteen minutes, he proceeded to tell me everything I needed to know [to build a blue box],” Sokol later said. But when Sokol put the blue box together it didn’t work; he let Draper know and that next Saturday, Draper, accompanied by Steve Wozniak, came over. They looked over Sokol’s box. “Looks OK,” said Draper, and began adjusting the tones by ear. This time, when Sokol tried the blue box, it worked. Sokol would use the box only for connecting to the computer—a practice which in the hacker mind justifies lawbreaking—and not for personal gain in trivial matters like calling distant relatives.
Wozniak took a look at Sokol’s “kluge,” the computer he’d gotten from bartering liberated parts, and they both lamented the high cost of hardware hacking. Woz complained that even though he worked for Hewlett-Packard the sales people wouldn’t part with any chips for him. At the next Homebrew meeting, Dan Sokol presented Wozniak with a box full of parts that would work with a Motorola 6800 microprocessor. Woz got a 6800 manual and began designs for a computer that would interface with the TV Typewriter he’d built. When someone brought a computer to a Homebrew meeting that had video included, he knew that his computer would have to have video built in, too. He liked the idea of a computer you could play a videogame on. Around that time the Wescon computer show was being held, and Wozniak went by the MOS Technology booth and found that they were selling early models of their new microprocessor chip, the 6502, for only twenty dollars. Since the chip wasn’t much different from the Motorola 6800, he bought a handful, and decided that the 6502 would be the heart of his new machine.
Wozniak was not thinking of building a computer to sell. He was building a computer to have fun with, to show to his friends. He would mention what he was doing to his friend Steve Jobs at Atari, who was interested in terminals and thinking about setting up a company that made them. Every two weeks Woz would go to Homebrew and see or hear what was new, never having any problem in following up on technical details because everyone was free with information. Some things he would incorporate into the computer; for instance, when he saw the Dazzler board, he knew he wanted color graphics. He knew, of course, that he wanted a BASIC, and since the only BASIC that ran on the 6502 then was Tom Pittman’s Tiny BASIC, and Woz wanted a “big” BASIC, he wrote his own. He gave out the code to anyone who wanted it, and would even print some of his subroutines in Dr. Dobbs Journal.
By the time he was finished, he had a computer which was not really a kit or an assembled computer, but one board loaded with chips and circuitry. With just that board, you could do nothing, but when you attached a power supply and a keyboard and a video monitor and a cassette tape player to the board, you would have a working computer with video display, mass storage, and input/output. You could then load in Steve Wozniak’s “Integer BASIC” and write programs. There were several amazing things about his computer, not the least of which was that he had delivered the power and capabilities of an Altair and several boards on one much smaller board. What it took other people two chips to do, Woz did in one. This was not only fiscally prudent, but a sort of technical machismo reminiscent of the code-bumming of TMRC days, when Samson, Saunders, and Kotok would attempt to whittle a subroutine down to the fewest instructions.
Wozniak later explained why the board used so few chips: “I’m into it for esthetic purposes and I like to consider myself clever. That’s my puzzle, and I do designs that use one less chip than the last guy. I would think how could I do this faster or smaller or more cleverly. If [I work on something] considered a good job using six instructions, I try it in five or three, or two if I want to win [big]. I do tricky things that aren’t normal. Every problem has a better solution when you start thinking about it differently than the normal way. And I see them—every single day I see several problems, I ask if it’s a hardware problem, I start looking at a lot of techniques I’ve done before, counters and feedback or chip registers . . . a bottom-line approach, looking for little specific end points from a hierarchy . . . it creates basically a sort of different mathematics. The discoveries did increase my motivation because I would have something to show off and I hoped that other people would see them and say, ‘Thank God, that’s how I want to do it,’ and that’s what I got from the Homebrew Club.”
Wozniak brought the board, along with the hardware to make it work, to Homebrew. He didn’t have a cassette recorder, and while the meeting went on he sat outside, frantically typing in the hexadecimal code—3,000 bytes’ worth—of the 3K BASIC interpreter into the machine. He would run a test on part of the program, and the test might clob
ber it and he’d start over again. Finally it was running, though it was only a preliminary version which didn’t have the full command set, and when people drifted over Wozniak would explain, in his breathless, high-speed drone, what the thing could do.
It was not long before Wozniak addressed the entire Homebrew Computer Club, holding his board in the air and fielding questions from the members, most of them asking how he did this or if he was going to put this feature or that into it. They were good ideas, and Wozniak brought his setup every two weeks, sitting in the back of the auditorium where the electrical outlet was, getting suggestions for improvements and incorporating those improvements.
Woz’s friend Steve Jobs was very excited about the board; he thought that, like Processor Technology and Cromemco, they should make the boards in quantity and sell them. Jobs, at twenty-two, was a couple of years younger than Wozniak, and not much cleaner. He had what was described as a “Fidel Castro beard,” often went shoeless, and had a Californian interest in Oriental philosophies and vegetarianism. He was a tireless promoter, silver-tongued, a deft persuader. Soon the pair was known as “the two Steves,” and Wozniak’s computer was known as the Apple, a name conceived by Jobs, who once worked in an orchard. Though the official address of the as yet unincorporated Apple company was a mail drop, Jobs and Wozniak really worked out of a garage. For capital, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Woz sold his HP programmable calculator. Jobs placed ads in hobbyist publications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66. Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder, and Woz published the routines for his 6502 “monitor,” which enabled you to look into memory and see what instructions were stored, in magazines like Dr. Dobbs. The Apple ad even said, “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.”