Steve said Nolan wanted a one-player version of Pong, but with bricks that would bounce the ball back to the paddle.
“You gotta get in here,” he said. “They’re right. You’d be perfect for it.”
I was immediately excited because I could see that if one player could play it, instead of it needing two players, it could be a much more fun game. Because when the ball breaks enough bricks—do you remember this game?—it can then get behind the bricks and start bouncing them from behind, which bounces even more bricks out. So it’s a little more complicated, and you don’t need someone else to play.
So, not even thinking about it, I said, “Sure.”
And then Steve says, “Well, there’s a caveat. It has to be done in four days.” Wow! Back then there wasn’t a game you could do in four days. Plus, a game was all hardware. It was hardware where every single wire mattered and every single connection had to determine when signals would be on the screen. And then, I mean, there were the thousands of little connections between chips, and they all mattered, and I realized that this timetable was ridiculous. A game like that should take engineers working on a normal schedule a few months to complete.
I realized I could probably do this in a shorter time than anyone else, but I still thought it was an insane goal to do a hardware game in four days.
But I was up for the challenge.
• o •
So I designed this game Breakout.
I began by actually drawing the schematics so a TV would display light on the screen—line by line. I didn’t sleep for four days
and nights during this project. During the day, I drew the design on paper, drawing it out clearly enough so that a technician could take the design and wire chips together. At night Steve would wire the chips together, using a technique called wire-wrapping. Wire-wrapping is a way of connecting chips with wires that does not require soldering. I prefer soldering, myself, because it’s always cleaner, smaller, and tighter. But wire-wrapping is how most technicians do it. Don’t ask me why.
With wire-wrapping, you hear a zipping sound of a little electronic motor, the sound of it wrapping a wire around a small metal pole. In about a second the wire-wrap gun wraps the wire about ten times around the metal pole. Then zip onto another one. Zip onto another one. Over and over. It actually gets kind of messy, with wires dangling everywhere between the metal poles. But like I said, that’s how things are done—a lot of engineers still do it that way. I can’t understand why, but they do.
Well, then Steve would breadboard it—that means putting all the components, wires, chips, and everything, onto a prototype board—and do the wire-wrapping.
It’s funny how when you’re up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you’re halfway between asleep and awake.
For instance, I remember Steve one night saying something about how Atari was planning on using a microprocessor in a game someday soon.
Whoa. I didn’t know exactly what a microprocessor was, but I knew enough to know that what we were talking about is a whole little computer inside. And I thought, Wow, a little computer could be inside a game, which either meant that the computer would actually make all the decisions in the game or the game could be a program that used the microprocessor to make it powerful.
I imagined what it might look like someday when microproces
sors could control games. My brain just took a leap there. There were so many ways it could go.
Then there was another night when some guys were overlaying colored cellophane over the TV screen to make our game look like it had colors in it. As things went from left to right, the colors would sort of shift. And I thought, Oh my gosh, color in computer games would be so neat, that would be just unbelievable!
I used to sit on a bench with Steve on the left-hand side of me breadboarding. And I’d be thinking about how I sort of knew what the waves for color would look like in an oscilloscope. I could imagine it. For instance, one nice pure wave is called a “phase shift.” So the way color TV is designed is it has this one particular wave of a certain frequency, a certain number of times per second, which is roughly 3.7593-something cycles per second. Perfect.
According to the theory of phase delay, on an American TV set that particular signal will show up as a color. And there are complicated mathematics and circuits that can introduce the right phase delay to get the color you want. (Also, the signal itself that comes to a TV set can be higher or lower voltage. Higher voltage means lighter—more toward white—while lower voltage is darker—more toward black.)
But somehow this idea popped into my head that if you took a digital chip—a chip that works with Is and Os, not waves—and you spun this chip around with four little bits, you end up with four Os. And four Os would look just like black on a TV. And what if you put four Is in? Then you’d get white. Now, say, you put 1, 0, 1, 0, and the rotation was fast enough, it’s going to average out gray. So if you could keep spinning this register at the exact right rate, it would come out as the United States color TV frequency, showing up as color on most TV sets. You could even put it through a small filter and round it off the way real color TV set waves work. The concept I came up with is that if I kept shifting
this register around, it just might come out in purple, or red if it was shifted slightly the other way.
How amazing that one little digital chip doing nothing but Is and Os could do what color TVs could with waves! It would be so much simpler and more precise.
That was amazing because back then, color TVs operated with circuits a lot more complicated than any computer was back then. And the funny thing is, that very idea came to me in the middle of the night at that lab at Atari. I did no testing on it, but I filed it away in my memory, and eventually that was exactly how things like color monitors ended up on personal computers everywhere. Because of my wild idea that night.
• o •
In addition to thinking, while I was waiting for Steve to finish breadboarding I also spent a lot of time playing what I thought was the best game ever: Gran Trak 10. In just those couple of nights, I got so good at it that many years later, when I found one in a pizza parlor, I was able to get the score you needed for a free pizza every time. After I did that twice, the pizza parlor got rid of the machine.
Maybe you’re wondering why I didn’t use the extra two hours to sleep instead of playing Gran Trak 10, a racing game I loved. It was because at any moment Steve might call me in and say, “Okay, I’ve got breadboard. Let’s test it.” And I had to be there for the testing because I was the one who’d understand the circuit I’d designed.
The bottom line of this story is that I actually did finish this project in four days and nights somehow, and it worked.
Steve and I both ended up with mononucleosis. The whole thing used forty-five chips, and Steve paid me half the seven hundred bucks he said they paid him for it. (They were paying us based on how few chips I could do it in.) Later I found out he got paid a bit more for it—like a few thousand dollars—than he said at the time, but we were kids, you know. He got paid one amount, and told me he got paid another. He wasn’t honest with me, and I was huit. But I didn’t make a big deal about it or anything.
Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t really understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another. But, you know, people are different. And in no way do I regret the experience at Atari with Steve Jobs. He was my best friend and I still feel extremely linked with him. I wish him well. And it was a great project that was so fun. Anyway, in the long run of money—Steve and I ended up getting very comfortable money-wise from our work founding Apple just a few years later—it certainly didn’t add up to much.
Steve and I were the best of friends for a very, very long time. We had the same goals for a while. They jelled perfectly at forming Apple. But we were always different people, different people right from the
start.
You know, it’s strange, but right around the time I started working on what later became the Apple I board, this idea popped into my mind about two guys who die on the same day. One guy is really successful, and he’s spending all his time running companies, managing them, making sure they are profitable, and making sales goals all the time. And the other guy, all he does is lounge around, doesn’t have much money, really likes to tell jokes and follow gadgets and technology and other things he finds interesting in the world, and he just spends his life laughing.
In my head, the guy who’d rather laugh than control things is going to be the one who has the happier life. That’s just my opinion. I figure happiness is the most important thing in life, just how much you laugh. The guy whose head kind of floats, he’s so happy. That’s who I am, who I want to be and have always wanted to be.
And that’s why I never let stuff like what happened with
Breakout bother me. Though you can disagree—you can even split from a relationship—you don’t have to hold it against the other. You’re just different. That’s the best way to live life and be happy.
And I figured this all out even before Steve and I started Apple.
Chapter 10
My Big Idea
I can tell you almost to the day when the computer revolution as I see it started, the revolution that today has changed the lives of everyone.
It happened at the very first meeting of a strange, geeky group of people called the Homebrew Computer Club in March 1975. This was a group of people fascinated with technology and the things it could do. Most of these people were young, a few were old, we all looked like engineers; no one was really good-looking. Ha. Well, we’re talking about engineers, remember. We were meeting in the garage of an out-of-work engineer named Gordon French.
After my first meeting, I started designing the computer that would later be known as the Apple I. It was that inspiring.
Almost from the beginning, Homebrew had a goal: to bring computer technology within the range of the average person, to make it so people could afford to have a computer and do things with it. That had been my goal, too, for years and years before that. So I felt right at home there.
And eventually Homebrew’s goal just expanded and expanded. It wasn’t long before we were talking about a world—a possible world—where computers could be owned by anybody, used by
anybody, no matter who you were or how much money you made. We wanted them to be affordable—and we wanted them to change people’s lives.
Everyone in the Homebrew Computer Club envisioned computers as a benefit to humanity—a tool that would lead to social justice. We thought low-cost computers would empower people to do things they never could before. Only big companies could afford computers at the time. That meant they could afford to do things smaller companies and regular people couldn’t do. And we were out to change all that.
In this, we were revolutionaries. Big companies like IBM and Digital Equipment didn’t hear our social message. And they didn’t have a clue how powerful a force this small computer vision could be. They looked at what we were doing—small computers, hobby computers—and said they would just remain toys. And a relatively minor business. They didn’t imagine how they could evolve.
There was a lot of talk about our being part of a revolution. How people lived and communicated was going to be changed by us, changed forever, changed more than anyone could predict exactly.
Of course there was also a lot of talk about specific components that would make faster computers, and about technical solutions for computers and accessories themselves. People would talk about the humanistic future uses of computers. We thought computers were going to be used for all these weird things—strange geeky tilings like controlling the lights in your house—and that turned out not to be the case. But everyone felt this thing was coming. A total change. We couldn’t always define it, but we believed it.
As I said, almost all of the large computer companies were on record saying that what we were doing was insignificant. It turned out they were wrong and we were right—right all the way.
But back then, even we had no idea how right we were and how huge it would become.
• o •
It’s funny and maybe a little bit ironic how my involvement in the whole Homebrew thing got started. Remember Allen Baum? He shows up again and again at a lot of important times in my life. He was my friend who sometimes worked at Sylvania with me in high school, whose dad designed the TV Jammer, who did the Homestead High prank with Steve Jobs and me, and also the one who helped get me that dream job at Hewlett-Packard.
I still had that HP job at the time. One day at work I got a call from Allen. It was a call that would change my life yet again, the call that introduced me to Homebrew.
Allen called and said something like, “Listen. There’s this flyer I found at HP, it’s for a meeting of people who are building TV and video terminals and things.”
Now, TV terminals I already knew a little about. By this point, in 1975, I’d done all kinds of side projects, and had already learned a lot about putting data from computers onto TVs. Not
More About Homebrew
This Homebrew Club I belonged to since its first meeting in March 1975 led to other computer companies than Apple. It was incredibly revolutionary. Other members who started computer companies included Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein (Processor Technology), Adam Osborne (Osborne Computers), and, of course, me and Steve Jobs, who I later talked into going with me. I once wrote an article on the importance of Homebrew, and you can find it at: http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/home brew_and_how_the_apple.php.
only had I done my version of Pong plus that project at Atari, Breakout, but I’d already built a terminal that could access the ARPANET, the government-owned network of computers that was the predecessor to the Internet. My terminal even let you display a few letters, up to sixty characters a second. I know that sounds slow now, but this was about six times faster than most teletype systems at the time and a whole lot cheaper. Teletype systems cost thousands of dollars, way more than someone on an engineer’s salary could afford, but I built a system using a Sears TV and a cheap $60 typewriter keyboard.
Just like my Pong design and the Cartrivision VCR, I connected my video signal into the test pin of my home TV, the one I found in the schematics.
Now, if Allen had told me that Homebrew was going to be about microprocessors, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I know I wouldn’t have gone. I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers. By this time, I was so totally out of computers. I was just immersed in my wonderful calculator job at HP. I wasn’t even following computers at all. I mean, I hardly even knew what the heck a microprocessor was.
But, like I said, I thought it was going to be a TV terminal meeting. I thought, Yeah, I could go to this thing and have something to say.
I was scared, but I showed up. And you know what? That decision changed everything. That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life.
• o •
About thirty people showed up for this first meeting there in that garage in Menlo Park. It was cold and kind of sprinkling outside, but they left the garage door open and set up chairs inside. So I’m just sitting there, listening to the big discussion going on.
They were talking about some microprocessor computer kit being up for sale. And they seemed all excited about it. Someone
there was holding up the magazine Popular Electronics, which had a picture of a computer on the front of it. It was called the Altair, from a New Mexico company named MITS. You bought the pieces and put them together and then you could have your own computer.
So it turned out all these people were really Altair enthusiasts, not TV terminal people like I thought. And they were throwing around words and terms I’d never heard—talking about microprocessor chips like the Intel 8080, the Intel 8008, the 4004,1 didn’t even know what these things
were. Like I said, I’d been designing calculators for the last three years, so I didn’t have a clue.
I felt so out of it—like, No, no, I am not of this world. Under my breath, I am cussing Allen Baum. I don’t belong here. And when they went around and everyone introduced themselves, I said, “I’m Steve Wozniak, I work at Hewlett-Packard on calculators and I designed a video terminal.” I might have said some other tilings, but I was so nervous at public speaking that I couldn’t even remember what I said afterward. After that, we all signed a sheet of paper where we were supposed to put clown our name and what interests and talents we were bringing to the group. (This piece of paper is public now; you might be able to find it online.) The thing I wrote on that paper was, “I have very little free time.”
Isn’t that funny? These days I’m so busy and people are constantly asking for my autograph and stuff, but back then I was also just as busy: always working on projects, engineering for work and then engineering at home. I don’t feel like I’ve changed much since then, and I guess this proves it, sort of.
Well, anyway, I was scared and not feeling like I belonged, but one very lucky thing happened. A guy started passing out these data sheets—technical specifications—for a microprocessor called the 8008 from a company in Canada. (It was a close copy,
or clone, of Intel’s 8008 microprocessor at the time.) I took it home, figuring, Well, at least I’ll learn something.
• o •
That night, I checked out the microprocessor data sheet and I saw it had an instruction for adding a location in memory to the A register. I thought, Wait a minute. Then it had another instruction you could use for subtracting memory from the A register. Whoa. Well, maybe this doesn’t mean anything to you, but I knew exactly what these instructions meant, and it was the most exciting thing to discover ever. Because I could see right away that these were exactly like the instructions I used to design and redesign on paper for all of those minicomputers back in high school and college. I realized that all those minicomputers I’d designed on paper were pretty much just like this one.
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