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  And finally I got it, that Eureka moment. My microprocessor was running, and I was well on my way.

  But there were still other things to fix. I was able to debug— that is, find errors and correct them—the terminal portion of the computer quickly because I’d already had a lot of experience with my terminal design. I could tell the terminal was working when it put a single cursor on the little 9-inch black-and-white TV I had at HP.

  The next step was to debug the 256-byte monitor program on the PROMs. I spent a couple of hours trying to get the interrupt

  version of it working, but I kept failing. I couldn’t write a new program into the PROMs. To do that, I’d have to go to that other building again, just to burn the program into the chip. I studied the chip’s data sheets to see what I did wrong, but to this day I never found it. As any engineer out there reading this knows, interrupts are like that. They’re great when they work, but hard to get to work.

  Finally I gave up and just popped in the other two PROMs, the ones with the “polling” version of the monitor program. I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen!

  It is so hard to describe this feeling—when you get something working on the first try. It’s like getting a putt from forty feet away.

  It was still only around 10 p.m.—I checked my watch. For the next couple of hours I practiced typing data into memory, displaying data onscreen to make sure it was really there, even typing in some very short programs in hexadecimal and running them, things like printing random characters on the screen. Simple programs.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but that day, Sunday, June 29, 1975, was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.

  Chapter 10

  The Apple I

  I was never the kind of person who had the courage to raise his hand during the Homebrew main meeting and say, “Hey, look at this great computer advance I’ve made.” No, I could never have said that in front of a whole garageful of people.

  But after the main meeting every other Wednesday, I would set up my stuff on a table and answer questions people asked. Anyone who wanted to was welcome to do this.

  I showed the computer that later became known as the Apple I at every meeting after I got it working. I never planned out what I would say beforehand. I just started the demo and let people ask the questions I knew they would, the questions I wanted to answer.

  I was so proud of my design—and I so believed in the club’s mission to further computing—that I Xeroxed maybe a hundred copies of my complete design (including the monitor program) and gave it to anyone who wanted it. I hoped they’d be able to build their own computers from my design.

  I wanted people to see this great design of mine in person. Here was a computer with thirty chips on it. That was shocking to people, having so few chips. It was like the same amount of chips on an Altair, except the Altair couldn’t do anything unless you bought a lot of other expensive equipment for it. My com

  puter was inexpensive from the get-go. And the fact that you could use your home TV with it, instead of paying thousands for an expensive teletype, put it in a world of its own.

  And I wasn’t going to be satisfied just typing Is and Os into it. My goal since high school was to have my own computer that I could program on, although I always assumed the language on the computer would be FORTRAN.

  The computer I built didn’t have a language yet. Back then, in 1975, a young guy named Bill Gates was starting to get a little bit of fame in our circles for writing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. Our club had a copy of it on paper tape which could be read in with a teletype, taking about thirty minutes to complete. Also, at around the same time a book called 101 Basic Computer Games came out. I could sniff the air.

  That’s why I decided BASIC would be the right language to write for the Apple I and its 6502 microprocessor. And I found out none existed for the 6502. That meant that if I wrote a BASIC program for it, mine could be the first. And I might even get famous for it. People would say, Oh, Steve Wozniak, he did the BASIC for the 6502.

  Anyway, people who saw my computer could take one look at it and see the future. And it was a one-way door. Once you went through it, you could never go back.

  • o •

  The first time I showed my design, it was with static RAM (SRAM)—the kind of memory that was in my Cream Soda Computer. But the electronics magazines I was reading were talking about a new memory chip, called “dynamic RAM” (DRAM), which would have 4K bits per chip.

  The magazines were heralding this as the first time silicon chip memory would be less expensive than magnetic core memory. Up to this point, all the major computers, like the systems from IBM and Data General, still used core memory.

  I realized that 4K bytes of DRAM—what I needed as a minimum—would only take eight chips, instead of the thirty-two SRAM chips I had to borrow from Myron. My goal since high school had always been to use as few chips as possible, so this was the way to go.

  The biggest difference between SRAM and DRAM is that DRAM has to be refreshed continually or it loses its contents. That means the microprocessor has to electrically refresh roughly 128 different addresses of the DRAM every one two-thousandth of a second to keep it from forgetting its data.

  I added DRAM by writing data to the screen—I held the microprocessor clock signal steady, holding transitions off, during a period called the “horizontal refresh.”

  You know how a TV scans one line at a time on your TV, from top to bottom? It takes about 65 microseconds (millionths of a second) to scan each line on a U.S. TV. Well, it turns out that about 40 of these microseconds are visible and the other 25 microseconds are not. During this 25-microsecorid time, the so-called refresh period, I inserted 16 unique addresses to the DRAM. (I got these addresses for free, using the counters of the terminal, which were generating video signals.)

  I had selection chips that selected the address to come from the horizontal and vertical counter chips of the terminal during this period. Amazingly, it only took two of these selection chips and maybe another chip or two worth of logic to do the whole thing. So I actually stole some cycles away from the microprocessor to refresh the DRAM.

  I would Ve had no idea how to get a DRAM chip, but luckily, right around this time someone at the club who worked at AMI offered some 4K-bit DRAM chips for sale at a reasonable price. This was before they were even on the market. I see now that someone must’ve ripped them off from AMI, but I didn’t ask any questions.

  I bought eight of them from the AMI guy for about $5 each and

  modified my design. I added some wires to the memory connector on the Apple I board so it could accommodate either an SRAM or DRAM board. I plugged the new DRAM board in, and it worked the very first time.

  • o •

  I had been showing off this exciting design of mine to Steve Jobs. He’d gone with me to Homebrew a few times, helping me carry in my TV. He kept asking me if I could build a computer that could be used for time-sharing—like the minicomputer a local company called Call Computer used.

  The year before, Steve and I had sold my ARPANET terminal to Call Computer in Mountain View, giving them the rights to build and sell it.

  “Sure,” I said. “Someday.” It could be done, I thought, but it was ages off.

  Then he asked if 1 could add a disk for storage someday. I said, again, “Sure. Someday.” This all seemed a long way off.

  Then, a few days after I got the AMI DRAMs working, Steve called me at work. He asked me if I’d considered using the Intel DRAMs instead of AMI’s.

  “Oh, Intel’s are the best, but I could never afford them,” I told him.

  Steve said to give him a minute.

  He made some calls and by some marketing miracle he was able to score some free DRAMs from Intel—unbelievable considering their price and rarity at the time.
Steve is just that sort of person. I mean, he knew how to talk to a sales representative. I could never have done that; I was way too shy.

  But he got me Intel DRAM chips. Once I had them, I redesigned around them. And I was so proud because my computer looked smaller yet. I had to add a couple more chips to my computer to make it work with the Intel DRAMs. But the Intel chips were physically so much smaller than the AMI chips.

  I have to stop here and explain what the big deal about having a smaller-sized chip is. Remember when I said my goal since high school had always been to have the fewest chips? Well, that isn’t the whole story. One time in high school, I was trying to get chips for a computer I’d designed. My dad drove me down to meet an engineer he knew at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that invented the semiconductor. I told him I’d designed an existing minicomputer two ways. I found out that if I used chips by Signetics (a Fairchild competitor), the computer had fewer chips than if I used Fairchild chips.

  The engineer asked me which Signetics chips I’d used.

  I told him the make and model number.

  He pointed out that the Signetics chips I’d used in the design were much larger in physical size, with many more pins and many more wires to connect, than the equivalent Fairchild chips. That added complexity.

  I was stunned. Because he made me realize in an instant that the simpler computer design would really have fewer connections, not simply fewer chips. So my goal changed, from designing for fewer chips to trying to have the smallest board, in square inches, possible.

  Usually fewer chips means fewer connections, but not always.

  Back to the Intel DRAM design of the Apple I, switching from AMI to Intel DRAM memories meant I could reduce the total size of the board, even though I had to add a couple extra chips to do it.

  And looking back, what a great, lucky decision it was to go with Intel’s chips. Because that chip design eventually became the standard for all memory chips, even to this day.

  • o •

  By Thanksgiving of 1975, Steve had been to a few of the Homebrew meetings with me. And then he told me he’d noticed something: the people at Homebrew, he said, are taking the

  schematics, but they don’t have the time or ability to build the computer that’s spelled out in the schematics.

  He said, “Why don’t we build and then sell the printed circuit boards to them?” That way, he said, people could solder all their chips to a printed circuit (PC) board and have a computer in days instead of weeks. Most of the hard work would already be done. His idea was for us to make these preprinted circuit boards for $20 and sell them for $40. People would think it was a great deal because they were getting chips almost free from their companies anyway.

  Frankly, I couldn’t see how we would earn our money back. I figured we’d have to invest about $1,000 to get a computer company to print the boards. To get that money back, we’d have to sell the board for $40 to fifty people. And I didn’t think there were fifty people at Homebrew who’d buy the board. After all, there were only about five hundred members at this point, and most of them were Altair enthusiasts.

  But Steve had a good argument. We were in his car and he said—and I can remember him saying this like it was yesterday: “Well, even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.”

  For once in our lives, we’d have a company. That convinced me. And I was excited to think about us like that. To be two best friends starting a company. Wow. I knew right then that I’d do it. How could I not?

  Chapter 12

  Our Very Own Company

  To come up with the $1,000 we thought we’d need to build ready-made printed circuit boards, I sold my HP 65 calculator for $500. The guy who bought it only paid me half, though, and never paid me the rest. I didn’t feel too bad because I knew HP’s next-generation calculator, the HP 67, was coming out in a month and would cost me only $370 with the employee discount.

  And Steve sold his VW van for another few hundred dollars. He figured he could ride around on his bicycle if he had to. That was it. We were in business.

  Believe it or not, it was only a couple of weeks later when we came up with a name for the partnership. I remember I was driving Steve back from the airport along Highway 85. Steve was coming back from a visit to Oregon to a place he called an “apple orchard.” It was actually some kind of commune.

  Steve suggested a name—Apple Computer.

  The first comment out of my mouth was, “What about Apple Records?” This was (and still is) the Beatles-owned record label.

  We both tried to come up with technical-sounding names that were better, but we couldn’t think of any good ones. Apple was so much better, better than any other name we could think of. Steve didn’t think Apple Records would have a problem since it probably was a totally different business. I had no idea.

  So Apple it was. Apple it had to be.

  • o •

  Really soon after that, we met with a friend of Steve’s who worked at Atari. This guy said he’d be able to design the basic layout of my printed circuit board, based on my original design, for about $600. That was what we needed so we could take it into a manufacturing company that could mass-produce boards.

  We also met with another guy from Atari, Ron Wayne, who Steve thought could be a partner. I remember meeting him for the first time and thinking, Wow, this guy is amazing. He could just sit at a typewriter and type out our whole legal partnership agreement like he’s a lawyer. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he knew all the legal words. He was a fast talker and he seemed so smart. He was one of those people who seemed to have a quick answer for everything. He seemed to know how to do all the things we didn’t.

  Ron ended up playing a huge role in those very early days at Apple—this was before we had funding, before we’d done much of anything. He was really the third partner, when I think of it. And he did a lot. He wrote and laid out the early operation manual. After all, he could type stuff. And he could draw. He was the one who did the etching of Newton under the Apple tree that was on the computer manual.

  Underneath it was a line from a William Wordsworth poem describing Newton. It said: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone.”

  Eventually Steve, Ron, and I figured out a partnership agreement that started Apple and included all three of us. Steve had 45 percent, I had 45 percent, and Ron got 10 percent. We both trusted him as someone who’d be able to resolve arguments. Ron started working on the paperwork.

  • o •

  Where Did That Weird Quote Come From?

  I had to look this one up. It turns out it is from book 3 of The Prelude by William Wordsworth. (A Mind Forever Voyaging is also the name of a video game from 1985. Who knew?) The lines in full read like this:

  The antechapel where the statue stood

  Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

  The marble index of a mind for ever

  Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

  Before the partnership agreement was even inked, I realized something and told Steve. Because I worked at HP, I told him, everything I’d designed during the term of my employment contract belonged to HP.

  Whether that upset Steve or not, I couldn’t tell. But it didn’t matter to me if he was upset about it. I believed it was my duty to tell HP about what I had designed while working for them. That was the right thing and the ethical thing. Plus, I really loved that company and I really did believe this was a product they should do. I knew that a guy named Miles Judd, three levels above me in the company structure, had managed an engineering group at an HP division in Colorado Springs that had developed a desktop computer.

  It wasn’t like ours at all—it was aimed at scientists and engineers and it was really expensive—but it was programmable in BASIC.

  I told my boss, Pete Dickinson, that I had designed an inexpensive desktop computer that could sell for under $800 and would run BASIC. He agreed to set up a
meeting so I could talk to Miles.

  I remember going into the big conference room to meet Pete, his boss, Ed Heinsen, and Ed’s boss, Miles. I made my presentation and showed them my design.

  “Okay,” Miles said after thinking about it for a couple of minutes. “There’s a problem you’ll have when you say you have output to a TV. What happens if it doesn’t look right on every TV? I mean, is it an RCA TV, a Sears TV, or an HP product that’s at fault?”

  HP keeps a close eye on quality control, he told me. If HP couldn’t control what TV the customer was using, how could it make sure the customer had a good experience? More to the point, the division didn’t have the people or money to do a project like mine. So he turned it down.

  I was disappointed, but I left it at that. Now I was free to enter into the Apple partnership with Steve and Ron. I kept my job, but after that I was officially moonlighting. Everybody I worked with knew about the computer board we were going to sell.

  Over the next few months, Miles would keep coming up to me. He knew about BASIC-programmable computers because of his division out in Colorado, and even though they didn’t want my design, he said he was intrigued by the idea of having a machine so cheap that anyone could own one and program it. He kept telling me he’d been losing sleep ever since he heard the idea.

  But looking back, I see he was right. How could HP do it? It couldn’t. This was nowhere near a complete and finished scientific engineer’s product. Everybody saw that smaller, cheaper computers were going to be a coming thing, but HP couldn’t justify it as a product. Not yet. Even if they had agreed, I see now that HP would’ve done it wrong anyway. I mean, when they finally did it in 1979, they did it wrong. That machine went nowhere.

  A few weeks after the meeting, the PC board was finished and working. I was so proud of it. I was at HP showing it off to some engineers when the phone rang at the lab bench.