iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

  You see, the add-on to color wasn’t just a matter of buying more chips. It was a matter of efficiency and elegance of design. I wanted to design color from the ground up, not just as an addon to an existing computer. That way, the Apple II would be designed with color ability on those chips from the start.

  Another Apple II improvement I thought of was to design the whole new computer around text and graphics, with all of it coming out of the system’s own memory.

  So rather than having a whole separate terminal to do the onscreen stuff and other memory to do the other computations, I decided to combine all the memory into one bank—one section of DRAM. A portion of the DRAM the microprocessor used could also be continually tapped for whatever needed to be displayed on the screen.

  In doing this, I knew I would save some chips. In fact, the Apple II ended up with half as many chips as the Apple I in the end.

  It was also quite a bit faster. Remember how I told you how the Apple I had to constantly keep the contents of its DRAM memory alive by refreshing them? Well, by now I had faster DRAM chips. And instead of the microprocessor being able to access (write from or read to) the RAM once eveiy millionth of a second, these new chips could do it twice every microsecond.

  In fact, it even worked out that the microprocessor could access the RAM in one-half of a microsecond (millionth of a second) while the circuitry that refreshed the RAM could access during the other half. That’s why the new computer I designed, this Apple II, actually ran faster. It was also smaller and cheaper. And that is always the goal with me.

  The Apple II had countless improvements over the Apple I. Some people consider the Apple II to be a second design built from the Apple I, but I want you to know that that is not so. Not so at all.

  The Apple I was not a computer designed from the ground up. It was a quick extension of my ARPANET terminal to a microprocessor, with virtually no electronic innovations except for the DRAM.

  The Apple II, on the other hand, was designed and engineered from the ground up. Also solely by me.

  Looking back now, I could’ve done the Apple II first—color and all—but I chose to go with the design I could come up with most quickly.

  It’s true that both machines brought striking advances to the computer world. The Apple I made history by being the first personal computer that could work with a keyboard and a display. But the Apple II brought color, high-resolution graphics, sound, and the ability to attach game paddles. It was the first to boot up ready to use, with BASIC already built into the ROM.

  Other computers eventually caught up, but it took years for them to match what I’d done. Eventually every one of them would have to offer that same list of features.

  The Apple II was the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.

  • o •

  But no one had seen the Apple II yet. I was still finalizing it, and we were still working in our houses at this point. I was working out of my apartment and Steve was working the phones in his

  bedroom. We were still testing computers in his garage. I was still building calculators at HP, and I still thought this was just a hobby. I was still planning on working at HP forever.

  But it was very soon after delivering the Apple I boards to Terrell that I had a working Apple II. And like I said, it wasn’t just twice as good. It was like ten times better.

  By August 1976,1 had completed it—the board, I mean, which was the center of the Apple II. I remember that so well because that was the month Steve and I flew out to the PC 76 show in Atlantic City.

  • o •

  We got on the plane in San Jose, and Steve and I sat together with the Apple I and II with us on board. And the funny tiling was, a bunch of the people we knew from Homebrew, who now worked at all these little competing computer companies, were seated around us on the same plane. We could hear them talking in advanced business talk—you know, talking about proposals and using businesslike acronyms we’d never heard before. We felt so left out of these discussions.

  But inside, we knew we had a secret. A big secret. Maybe we weren’t part of the business-type groups, but we knew we had a better computer. Actually, we had two better computers. The Apple I and the Apple II. And no one in the world knew about the Apple II yet.

  When the show started in Atlantic City, I was lucky because I didn’t have to hustle the Apple I at the booth. I’m not a sales type. Steve Jobs and Dan Kottke did that. I was upstairs getting the very last BASIC sequences finished up.

  The show was full of young, barely financed companies like Apple. The proprietors looked like us. I mean, there weren’t any nicely dressed company executives, company owners, or company managers really attending the show. It was a pretty sloppy group of people, come to think of it.

  They were in our business and most of them were competitors. We were all friends, but we were still competitors.

  Even though we didn’t let the Apple II out of the bag at that show, there was one guy not associated with any of these companies or businesses who saw it. He was a convention guy setting up a projection TV for the convention goers. Steve and I went down the first night, after everyone else had left, and met with this projector technician. I think we had told him to stay. It was probably about 9 p.m. You see, I had this different method of generating color and I was still amazed at how many TVs it worked with. In fact, I never found a TV that it didn’t work with. But I figured that a projector might have different color circuitry that would choke on my color method. I wanted to see if the Apple II would work with it.

  So I hooked the Apple II prototype up to this projector and it worked perfectly. That technician, who was seeing every low-cost computer in the world as he was setting up the show, told me that of all of them, this was the only computer he would buy.

  I only smiled. The Apple II wasn’t even announced yet.

  • o •

  After the show, the biggest, earthshaking Eureka moment ever was the day I got Breakout, the Atari game, working on the Apple II.

  I had put enough capability in BASIC that you could read where the game paddles were. It could sound the speaker as needed, and it could plot colors on the screen. So I was ready.

  I sat down one day with this little blank board with chips on the top side of it and little red and blue wire-wrapped wires all soldered underneath and connected it with some wires to transformers and then connected it all to my color TV.

  I sat down and started typing in BASIC the commands I needed to make one row of bricks—just like the ones in Atari’s arcade game—and it worked! I had a row of bricks. I played

  around with different color combinations until I had the brick color that worked.

  I made eight rows of bricks lying side by side. I figured out the right colors, I figured how the bricks should be offset to look more realistic. Even and odd rows. And then I started programming the paddle. I made the onscreen paddle go up and down with the game control knob. And then I put in a ball. I started giving the ball motion. Then I started telling the ball when it hits bricks, here’s how it gets rid of the bricks and here’s how it bounces. And when it hits the paddle, here’s how it bounces and here’s how it changes direction vertically and horizontally.

  And then I played with all these parameters and it only took a half hour total. I tried dozens and dozens of different variations of things until, finally, I had the game of Breakout completely working on the Apple II, showing the score and everything.

  I called Steve Jobs over. 1 couldn’t believe I’d been able to do it, it was amazing. I sat him down and showed him how the game came up with the paddle and the bricks. And then I said, “Watch this.” And I typed a couple of BASIC statements, changed the color of the paddle, and the color of the bricks, and where the score was.

  I said, “If I had done all these varieties of options in hardware the way it was always done, it would’ve taken me ten years to do. Now that games are in software, the whole world is going to
change.”

  That was the exact moment it sank in. Software games were going to be incredibly advanced compared to hardware games— games that were hardwired into arcades and systems like that.

  These days, the graphics are so great in games. They have gotten incredibly complicated and huge in size. If they had to be in hardware, there wouldn’t be enough time in the universe to design them.

  I thought, Wow. Nobody in the club is ever going to believe

  that an arcade game could be written in BASIC. It was a first in the world. I put a secret into my Breakout game for the Apple II, too. If you hit CTRL and Z on the keyboard, the game went into a mode where the paddle would always jiggle but could never miss the ball.

  What a great feature. It tricked people into thinking they were just really lucky in hitting it. The paddle was so shaky and jiggly that a person could never tell it wasn’t really because of their own skill and their own movements that they were hitting it.

  One day I sat down with John Draper (Captain Crunch, remember?). We were at Homebrew right after the main meeting, the time people could demo stuff.

  John had never played an arcade game before.

  I said, “Here. Play this game.” I showed him how you turned the dial so the paddle went up and clown. And he sat there and played it. Everyone in the room watched him for about fifteen minutes. The ball was going so fast, and he, even though he didn’t really know what he was doing with the control, kept hitting it. People just thought he was a superior game player.

  After about fifteen minutes, he finally won the game. And all of us were congratulating him like he was the best game player in the world. I don’t think he ever knew it was a setup.

  • o •

  In the spring of 1976, as I was working on the Apple II, Steve and I got into our first argument. He didn’t think the Apple II should have eight slots. Slots are connectors you can plug extra circuit boards into in case you want to expand the functionality of the computer. Steve wanted only two slots—one for a printer and one for a modem. He thought that way you could build a cheaper, smaller machine that was good enough for today’s tasks.

  But I wanted more slots, eight of them.

  I had the idea that there would be a lot of things people would want in the future, and no way did we want to limit people.

  Usually I’m really easy to get along with, but this time I told him, “If that’s what you want, go get yourself another computer.” There wasn’t a single chip I could save by reducing the number of slots from eight to two, and I knew people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any computer.

  I was in a position to do that then. I wouldn’t always be. A couple of years later, Apple went on to design the Apple III, which was just a disaster, and it had fewer slots.

  But in 1976 I won that argument, and the Apple II was designed and eventually came out the way I wanted it to.

  • o •

  I remember coming in one day to HP—where I was still working—and showing the other engineers the Apple II. I demoed it doing color swirls. The other engineers would come up to me and say this was the best product they’d ever seen. And yet HP still couldn’t find a way to do it right, a way to do this kind of project.

  One day my boss, Pete Dickinson, told me that some people in my calculator division had created a new project that had gotten through levels of corporate approval to build a small desktop machine with a microprocessor, DRAM, a small video screen, and a keyboard. They even had five people assigned to write BASIC for it.

  The awful thing about this was they all knew what I had done with the Apple I and even the Apple II. Yet they had started up this project without me! Why would they do that? I don’t know. I think they just saw what they wanted to do as a project was what I’d done.

  But I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell.

  Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I

  and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measely printer interface engineer. Something tiny.

  I told him, “My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators.”

  After a few days, I was turned down again.

  I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive. Where he’s happy. The only thing I can figure is there were managers and submanagers on this computer project who felt threatened. I had already done a whole computer. Maybe they bypassed me because I had done this single-handedly. I don’t know what they were thinking.

  But they should’ve said to themselves, “How do we get Steve Wozniak on board? Just make him a little printer interface engineer.” I would’ve been so happy, but they didn’t bother to put me where I would’ve been happiest.

  • o •

  Like I said before, we needed money. Steve knew it and I knew it.

  So by that summer of 1976, we started talking to potential money people about Apple, showing them the Apple II working in color in Steve’s garage.

  One of the first people we showed it to was Chuck Peddle. Remember him? He was the guy from MOS Technologies who’d sold me the 6502 processor I designed the Apple I around the year before at the WESCON show.

  By this time Chuck was working at Commodore, a consumer electronics company rumored to be shopping around for a personal computer to sell. I remember I was so impressed to meet him after the role his chip, the MOS 6502, had played in the Apple I. We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight that day, and he came walking in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat. Wow, I was excited to see him and couldn’t wait to show him the Apple II. This was a very important person in my mind.

  I typed in a few BASIC programs, showed some color spirals

  onscreen, showed him how many chips and how it worked and everything. Just to show him what we were doing. Chuck was in good spirits throughout the meeting, laughing and smiling. He told us we should make a presentation to the company bigwigs, which we did a few weeks later.

  I’ll never forget how, in that conference room, Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement. He said, “You might just want to buy this product for a few hundred thousand dollars.”

  I was almost embarrassed. I mean, there we were, we had no money, we had yet to prove to anybody there was going to be any money in this thing. Steve added, “A few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working on this project.”

  Well, we left and heard back a few days later that, no, they’d decided they would build their own machine, it was cheaper. They didn’t need to support fancy things like color, sound, and graphics, all the cool things we had. Chuck Peddle, in the garage, had told us he thought it was possible for them to do their own computer in four months. I didn’t see how anyone could, but I guess after he saw the Apple II, it would be a lot easier to design something like what he wanted.

  I saw the Commodore PET, the computer they came up with so quickly, a few months later at the West Coast Computer Faire, by the way. It kind of sickened me. They were trying to do something like what we’d shown Chuck in the garage that day, with a monitor and programming and a keyboard, but they made a real crappy product by doing it so quick. They could Ve had Apple, you know? They could have had it all if they’d had the right vision. Bad decision.

  It’s funny. I think back on it now—the Apple II would turn out to be one of the most successful products of all time. But we had no copyrights or patents at all back then. No secrets. We were just showing it to everybody.

  • o •

  After Commodore turned us down, we went over to AI Alcorn’s house. He was one of the founders of Atari with Nolan Bushnell, and he was the one who’d hired Steve to do video games there two years before.

  Now, I knew Al knew me.
He knew I had designed Breakout, the one-player version of Pong. I remember that when we went to his house I was so impressed because he had one of the earliest color projection TVs. Man, in 1976, he would have been among the first people to have one. That was cool.

  But he told us later that Atari was too busy with the video game market to do a computer project.

  A few days after that, venture capitalists Steve had contacted started to come by. One of them was Don Valentine at Sequoia. He kind of pooh-poohed the way we talked about it.

  He said, “What’s the market?”

  “About a million,” I told him.

  “How do you know?”

  I told him the ham radio market had one million users, and this could be at least that big.

  Well, he turned us down, but he did get us in touch with a guy named Mike Markkula. He was only thirty, he told us, but already retired from Intel. He was into gadgets, he told us. Maybe Mike would know what to do with us.

  • o •

  The very first time I met Mike, I thought he was the nicest person ever. I really did. He was this young guy. He had a beautiful house in the hills overlooking the lights of Cupertino, this gorgeous view, amazing wife, the whole package.

  Better still, he actually liked what we had! He didn’t talk like a guy who was hiding things and thinking about ripping you off. He was for real. That much was obvious right away.

  What a major thing this was.

  He was truly interested. He asked us who we were, what our backgrounds were, what our goals were with Apple, where we thought it might go. And he indicated some interest in financing us. He was talking about $250,000 or thereabouts to build 1,000 machines.

  Mike was just talking in normal commonsense terms about what the future of a new home computer industry might be like. Now, I had always thought of the Apple computer as being something for a hobbyist who wanted to solve a work simulation or play a game.

  But Mike was talking about something different. He talked about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing at home things like keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook. This was what was coming, he said. He had a vision of the Apple II as a real home computer.