by Steven Levy
While the selling was going on, Steve Wozniak began working on an expanded design of the board, something that would impress his Homebrew peers even more. Steve Jobs had plans to sell many computers based on this new design, and he started getting financing, support, and professional help for the day the product would be ready. The new version of Steve Wozniak’s computer would be called the Apple II, and at the time no one suspected that it would become the most important computer in history.
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It was the fertile atmosphere of Homebrew that guided Steve Wozniak through the incubation of the Apple II. The exchange of information, the access to esoteric technical hints, the swirling creative energy, and the chance to blow everybody’s mind with a well-hacked design or program . . . these were the incentives which only increased the intense desire Steve Wozniak already had: to build the kind of computer he wanted to play with. Computing was the boundary of his desires; he was not haunted by visions of riches and fame, nor was he obsessed by dreams of a world of end users exposed to computers. He liked his work at HP, and loved the heady atmosphere of being around the gentleman engineers atop the computer industry. At one point Wozniak asked his bosses at HP if they wanted him to design the Apple computer for them—they thought it was unmarketable, and gave him a release to sell it on his own. When it looked like HP would be setting up a small computer division, Wozniak applied for a transfer; but, according to Alan Baum, “the head of the lab wasn’t impressed. He had no degree.” (Woz had left Berkeley before graduation.)
So he worked on the Apple II, often until 4 A.M.—he would soon be one more Homebrew member divorced by a computer widow. Designing the Apple II was no picnic. There were hundreds of problems in making a ready-to-program, self-contained computer-and-terminal combination; Wozniak did not have even the moderate resources and cash flow that Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein had when they designed the Sol, the first computer terminal combination and one of many inspirations for the Apple II. But he had a vision of what he wanted his computer to be, and could draw on help from Homebrew and other experts in the Valley. Finally he had a prototype working. He and Randy Wigginton carried it—a loose but fully connected jumble of parts and boards—over to a December 1976 Homebrew meeting in a couple of boxes, along with a clunky Sears color TV.
Years later, the people attending that Homebrew meeting would recall different versions of the reaction to Stephen Wozniak’s presentation of the Apple II. Wozniak, and the other fans of the 6502 chip, came out with the impression that the computer had thrilled everyone. Others thought it was simply one more advance in the frantic climb toward an ultimate homebrewed computer. As Lee Felsenstein put it, “The people in Homebrew were not sitting around waiting for the Apple to happen: people were making stuff, talking about stuff, showing stuff off.”
One thing that did not excite the members was the fact that the production models of the Apple would come only in fully assembled form—why buy a computer, hardware hackers thought, if you could not build it yourself? The hard-core old-liners, who respected the solidity and predictability of the Processor Technology and Cromemco products, thought the Apple interesting, especially in its economical circuitry and its color capabilities, but not as good a machine as the Sol, which was based on the familiar Altair bus (newly named the S-100 bus by a consensus of manufacturers, notably Marsh and Garland, who were sick of referring to a part of their computers with the name of a competitor who in most unhackerish spirit seemed to resent their existence). The Apple had an entirely new bus and a brand-new operating system, both designed by Woz; plus, there was the unfamiliar 6502 chip as its brain. Also, a proven company like Processor Technology seemed more likely to be able to support a machine in the field than did Apple, which apparently consisted only of two kids in a garage.
Basically, though, the disagreement came down to religious issues of design. The Sol reflected Lee Felsenstein’s apocalyptic fears, shaped by post-holocaust science fiction, that the industrial infrastructure might be snatched away at any time, and people should be able to scrounge parts to keep his machine going in the rubble of this devastated society; ideally, the machine’s design would be clear enough to allow users to figure out where to put those parts.
“I’ve got to design so you can put it together out of garbage cans,” Felsenstein once said. “In part because that’s what I started from, but mostly because I don’t trust the industrial structure—they might decide to suppress us weirdos and try to deny us the parts we need.” This philosophy was expressed in the VDM and the Sol itself, both of which were products which did their job cleanly, in a not overly flashy manner, and with a proletarian lack of sentimentality.
Steve Wozniak’s Apple was another story. Growing up in a conventional family in the sheltered, suburban California world of single homes, science fairs, and McDonald’s burgers, Wozniak had inbred security. He felt comfortable taking chances, letting the design go as far as his imagination could take him. He created an esthetic wonder by optimizing a limited number of off-the-shelf electronic parts so that, very ingeniously laid out and wired, they delivered not only the power of a PDP-1, but color, motion, and sound.
If Woz had his way, he would add features forever. Just two days before the meeting, he had jimmied up the machine so that it could display special, high-resolution color graphics. He did this not by the usual way of adding special chips to do it, but by figuring out a way to wire the machine so that the central processing unit, the 6502, could do double duty.
Woz’s genius for optimization sometimes had odd effects. For example, the way the Apple filled the screen with an image was much different than the Sol’s method, which filled things in by a proper order; the Apple drew its screen in a seemingly haphazard, crazy-quilt manner. It did this not by chance, but because Woz figured out that doing it that way would save an instruction for each line put on the screen. A clever trick, disdained by some who thought it indicative of the Apple’s unpredictability and “flakiness,” but much admired by those who could appreciate the beauty of a maximized design. All in all, the design reflected a tour de force of hacking, and a very savvy engineer could see the clever twists of plot, the optimistic flights of fancy, and the eccentrically cosmic jokes embodied in the machine.
One person who thought that the Apple II was just super was Chris Espinosa, a young acquaintance of Randy Wigginton. Espinosa was a skinny, pale fourteen-year-old high school kid who loved computers and flunked math classes because he felt that doing homework was a nonoptimal use of time. He was enthralled by this computer of Steve Wozniak’s. From the explanation of the syntax of Woz’s special BASIC commands which came out in the talk, and the explanation of sketches of the machine’s innards distributed all around, Espinosa jotted down some BASIC programs, and during the random access period of the meeting, when people crowded around this new machine, he took over the keyboard and frantically hammered in some programs that created flashy color displays on the big old Sears television set Wozniak had dragged along. Wozniak was thrilled: “I didn’t think somebody else could come up and show me—‘Look!’—and get excited and show other people and say, ‘Look, this is easy, you just put this command in and you do this.’” Here was this high school kid, running programs on this little computer Wozniak had built. Steve Jobs’ reaction was more pragmatic—he hired Chris Espinosa as one of the company’s first employees. Like the other teen-age software specialist, Randy Wigginton, he would earn three dollars an hour.
Steve Jobs was concentrating full-time on building up the Apple company to get ready to deliver the Apple II the following year and make a big splash in the marketplace. Jobs was a brilliant talker who, according to Alan Baum, “worked his tail off . . . he told me about the prices he was getting for parts, and they were favorable to the prices HP was paying.” As an engineer, Jobs was mediocre; his strength was as a planner, someone with vision to see how computers could extend to a point of usefulness beyond that dreamed of by pure h
ackers like Steve Wozniak. He was also wise enough to realize that as a long-haired twenty-two-year-old whose customary garb was jeans and bare feet, he was not the person to head a major computer corporation; most of all, he lacked management and marketing experience. He decided that he would hire top-notch, high-priced management talent to run Apple Computer.
This was no easy conclusion in those days, when engineers like Ed Roberts and Bob Marsh thought that building a quality machine was the main ingredient for success, and management might take care of itself. Ed Roberts learned the folly of this, the hard way. By mid-1976, Roberts had tired of the “soap opera” (in his words) that MITS had become, with frustrated customers, a confusing line of several new and improved versions of the Altair, hundreds of employees, vicious internal politics, perpetually panicked dealers, hopelessly muddled finances, and not a decent night’s sleep in over a year. He had been designing an exciting new Altair 2 computer—a high-powered, compact machine that could fit in a briefcase—but most of his energies were spent in management squabbles. So he decided to call it, he later said, “a page in my life—it was time to move on to the next page,” and he stunned the world of hardware hackers by selling the company to a big firm called Pertec, By the end of the year, Roberts, with his million-dollar-plus buyout, left the business and became a farmer in southern Georgia.
The moral of the story was that engineers can’t necessarily run companies. But finding people who can isn’t easy, especially when your company, on the surface at least, looks like a small coven of hippies and high school kids. Chris Espinosa later noted that, in early 1977, Jobs looked so slovenly that “they wouldn’t let him on minibuses and airplanes, much less into the corridors of power of the semiconductor industry,” yet he pulled off a major coup by getting Mike Markkula on the Apple team. Markkula was a former marketing whiz, now in his mid-thirties, who’d retired from Intel a few years back; he had been spending his time since then in various pursuits, some business-oriented, some as odd as inventing a wheel chart to show different fingering positions for guitar chords. Jobs asked him to help draw a business plan for the Apple, and Markkula wound up helping to get venture capital for the company and signing up as its first chairman of the board. It was through Markkula that Jobs also got a nuts-and-bolts manager from Fairchild Semiconductor named Mike Scott to become president of the firm. So, while the most prominent company with a terminal-computer on the market, Processor Technology, was struggling with the inexperienced management of hardware hackers Bob Marsh and Gary Ingram, Apple was set for growth.
This real-world activity hadn’t really sunk in as far as Steve Wozniak was concerned. Chris Espinosa and Randy Wigginton would come over to his house from playing with Wigginton’s half-built version of the Apple II, and there, on the living room floor of Woz’s small place, they would debug programs and hardware, write tone generation programs, solder boards. It was fun. Meanwhile, in his own garage, Jobs was running the day-to-day operations. “He would come by every once in a while and see what we were doing, make recommendations, but he didn’t do any designing,” Espinosa later said. “He would pass judgment, which is his major talent: over the keyboards, the case design, the logo, what parts to buy, how to layout the PC board to look nice, the arrangement of parts, the dealers we chose . . . the method of assembly, the distribution method, everything.”
He was guided in this by the experienced hand of Mike Markkula, who was taking the Apple venture very seriously. One thing he apparently recognized was that Steve Wozniak’s commitment was to the computer rather than to the company. To Woz, the Apple was a brilliant hack, not an investment. It was his art, not his business. He got his payment by solving puzzles, saving chips, impressing people at Homebrew. This was fine for hacking, but Markkula wanted, at the least, Wozniak’s full-time participation in the company. He told Jobs to tell his partner that if Woz wanted there to be an Apple Computer company, he must quit HP for all-out work on pre-production of the Apple II.
It was a tough decision for Wozniak. “This was different than the year we spent throwing the Apple I together in the garage,” Wozniak later recalled. “This was a real company. I designed a computer because I like to design, to show off at the club. My motivation was not to have a company and make money. Mike was giving me three days to say yes or no, was I going to leave HP. I liked HP. They were a good company and I was secure and there was a lot of good work. I didn’t want to leave, and I said no.”
Steve Jobs heard the decision, and called Wozniak’s friends and relatives, begging them to persuade Woz to quit HP and work for Apple full-time. Some of them did, and as Woz heard the arguments he reconsidered. Why not work to let the Apple II go out into the world? But even as he agreed to quit HP and work with Jobs full-time, he told himself that what he was doing was no longer pure hacking. The truth was that starting a company had nothing to do with hacking or creative design. It was about making money. It was “stepping over the boundary,” as Wozniak later put it. Not in any kind of rip-off—Wozniak believed in his computer and had confidence in the team that would produce and sell it—but “there’s no way I would associate Apple with doing good computer design in my head. It wasn’t the reason for starting Apple. The reason for starting Apple after the computer design is there’s something else—that’s to make money.”
It was a crucial decision that would symbolize the shift taking place in small computers. Now that hackers like Wozniak were building machines with terminals and keyboards, machines that might presumably be useful to people other than hobbyists, the direction of the budding industry was no longer in the hands of those hackers. It was almost twenty years after the TMRC hackers had been introduced to the TX-0. Now, going into business was The Right Thing.
In January of 1977, the half-dozen or so employees of this new firm, which would not incorporate until that March, moved into a cramped space on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, within stone-throwing distance of a 7-Eleven and a Good Earth health food restaurant. Wozniak preferred to walk down the street to go to Bob’s Big Boy. First thing in the morning, he and Wigginton would go there, order a cup of coffee, take a sip out of it, and talk about how bad the coffee was, leaving the almost full cup on the table. It was sort of a ritual. Woz had a fondness for taking packets of Fizine, a bubbling antacid, and emptying them into the sugar containers at Bob’s, where he would wait until some unsuspecting customer put what he thought was sugar in his coffee. It would erupt like a small volcano, and Woz would get a big kick out of it. But often Woz would just talk, mostly technical stuff, and sometimes about Apple. Wigginton and Espinosa, both still in high school, had taken some of Jobs’ planner-like hyperbole to heart—they all had to some degree—and believed that the Homebrew crusade was focused right there on Stevens Creek Boulevard. “Everybody was so much into it.” Wigginton later said. “We were motivated more by a dream of what was going to happen than by what was actually happening. That we would be a successful company and were going to come out with the neatest product that had ever been produced.”
They would often work around the clock, soldering, designing, and programming. One of Woz’s friends hired as a hardware specialist would make bird calls as he worked. Woz would pull pranks, play games, and then do an incredible amount of work in a brief burst. Woz and his friends were preparing a different kind of computer than the previous bestsellers, the Altair, Sol, and IMSAI. Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula felt that the Apple’s market went well beyond hobbyists, and to make the machine look friendlier. Jobs hired an industrial designer to construct a sleek, low-profile plastic case in a warm beige earth color. He made sure that Woz’s layout would be appealing once the lid of the case was lifted. The Apple bus, like the S-100 bus, was capable of accepting extra circuit boards to make it do interesting things, but Woz had taken some advice from his friend Alan Baum and made it so that the eight “expansion slots” inside the Apple were especially easy for manufacturers to make compatible circuit boards for. They would be helped, of
course, by the “open” architecture of the machine; true to the Hacker Ethic, Woz made sure the Apple had no secrets to prevent people from creating on it. Every twist and turn of his design, every coding trick in his BASIC interpreter (which would be included inside this machine, hard-wired into a custom circuit chip) would be documented and distributed to anyone who wanted to see.
At certain points, Woz and Jobs relied on their Homebrew connections for help. A good example was what happened with a potential problem in getting FCC approval of the computer. Rod Holt, an engineer from Atari who had been helping design the power supply, sadly declared that the machine’s connector to a television set—called the Radio Frequency (RF) Modulator—gave off too much interference, and would never pass muster with the FCC. So Steve Jobs went to Marty Spergel, the Junk Man.
Spergel would often show up at Homebrew meetings, holding some esoteric part and giving it away. “I’d look through my junk box and say, ‘Here’s a box full of A through Z,’ and people would run over at six hundred miles an hour and before I could even let go of the box it was gone.” He had a nose for niches in the electronics market, and had recently made a killing by importing joystick controllers from Hong Kong so that people could play games like Steve Dompier’s Target on Altairs and Sols. At one point, his company, M&R Electronics, even introduced a computer kit, but that product never really caught on. One day Marty visited the one-room Apple headquarters in Cupertino and talked to Woz, Jobs, and Rod Holt about the modulator situation. It was clear that Apple could not ship the computers with the current modulators, so it was decided that Holt would give Marty Spergel the specifications for the modulator, and he would build them. “My part was keeping the FCC away from Apple Computer,” Spergel later said. “So what I did was ship modulators out of my door, Apple shipping Apples out of their door. But when they got to the dealers, the dealers would sell a modulator to the end user, and when the end user [went] home he could plug in the modulator. Consequently, it’s now the end user’s responsibility [to prevent RF interference].”