An Evening with Steve Wozniak

um and if you go back in time the vision of what the computer history museum was all about um with gordon bell and gwen bell who actually are here over 25 years ago when gordon would you raise your hands please let's give them a great hand and then this thing happened on the west coast uh len shustick emerged as as a person that said gee why aren't we preserving the artifacts and stories of the information age and he's going to tell you a little bit about our museum a little bit about why we exist before he introduces waz this evening but i want to introduce len schustek who really has been a motivator for all of us myself a great friend founders of companies but more fundamentally a love passion and desire of computing history and you're going to see that strong tonight so len let me turn it over to you uh thank you john and uh welcome you all here and for those of you who are watching on the web or watching later on delayed broadcast i'm sorry you couldn't get in we turned away i think 150 people who wanted to be here and couldn't fit but the fire marshal wouldn't budge i want to thank matthew ives of morgan stanley who is an underwriter of this event thank you matthew and your firm for participating and supporting us i'm always surprised that the number of people who knew about the computer museum in boston or who knew about the east west coast computer bowl which the computer museum used to run and who don't know that it no longer exists and in fact that's the case that it's the sad truth gwen and gordon bell founded it 25 years ago the good news is that we are its reincarnation and starting in 1996 we filled up tractor trailers and moved them west and filled up many of the warehouses that surround us here at moffett field with computer artifacts and the collection now is probably twice what it was in boston it is the largest collection of computer artifacts in the world and that's not just hardware and iron that's also software and paper got tons and tons of paper of manuals and program listings and software on all different forms and formats and photographs and videos and films and basically everything you need to tell the story of a revolution which is what the computer industry is our mission is to preserve and to present for posterity the artifacts and the stories of the information age we're the only collecting museum in the world of this scale devoted solely to that effort we've been living in these world war ii vintage warehouses since 1996 and patching the leaky roofs and dealing with it because nasa has been a wonderful benefactor to us but the wonderful news which of course i can't avoid talking about is our new facility for those of you who don't know we have bought a building and land for our permanent home it's at 1401 shoreline it's a corner of 101 and shoreline expressway it's a former sgi building 120 000 square feet on seven and a half acres if you know where the big movie theater complex is on shoreline it's right opposite the entrance to the movie theater it's a wonderful location it's a stunning building it's one of the few office buildings that happens to look like a museum and we're moving in the staff moved in yesterday so we're starting to occupy the building we have we have some structural retrofit to do before we can open it to the public but that's going to go on in the next two or three months we're going to move in a much expanded version of visible storage which many of you have seen over in the 126 warehouse probably twice that size we're going to have a 400 seat auditorium and we're going to continue to plan for an even better and finer museum one of the things we do uh is public outreach and our ultimate public exhibits will be part of that but right now we have no museum quality exhibits one of the things we do is this lecture series and karen matthews and her volunteers and staff have put together an amazing lecture series just this year some of the names john warnock and chuck geschke six of the pioneers of venture capital mitch waldrop talking about jcr lick lighter al sugar regis mechanic carver mead slug russell with nolan bushnell and stewart brand charlie bachmann doug engel bart the palm group donna dobinski jeff hawkins ed culligan just goes on and on charlie spork coming up next year are john hennessey and dave patterson in january talking about computer architecture and mips and other such things a database panel on february 10th judy estrin on march 5th on january 21st not a lot of people know about this we are co-hosting with stanford the west coast premiere of a new documentary film on ada love lace and babbage called the dream tomorrow and that will be held over at stanford it's a spectacular film we're doing a an april world event in the spring um visit calc dan brinklin bob frankston who's here today and mish kapoor with charlie simone we'll be talking about visical we are creating history by doing these events this was started by gwen and gordon back in the old days and they were recording computer pioneers to educate people but also to preserve that history because every one of the lectures we do gets recorded and that videotape becomes part of the historical archive of the museum we're the only people doing this and here comes the commercial because if you think that this is an important thing to be doing we need your help to do it we need you to come to these events thank you for coming today please tell your friends about it come to the other events participate you'll enjoy it be a volunteer there are lots of volunteer activities we probably have 120 active volunteers who magnify many fold our hard-working staff of about 20. look in your attics a lot of the people who come to these lectures are pioneers themselves and they have things in their attics and basements that we would like to put in our collection so talk to us about that and of course give us your money we do not get any government money we are entire we are nonprofit we are entirely funded by voluntary donations we get a little bit of corporate support but most of it comes from individuals our annual campaign is in full swing right now you'll see cards and opportunities to donate we make it very simple please think about us this is the great time of the year to get an end-of-year tax donation it's to a good cause we need your support in addition to the annual campaign of course we're also running a quiet phase of a capital campaign we've got to pay for that marvelous new building that we just bought we have a 100 million dollar capital campaign we are 53 million dollars on the way toward 100 million dollars and that last 47 million dollars is going to be very hard so we'll need your help there too before i introduce waz i should point out that because we are in an overflow situation here the way to ask questions later on is to fill out these three by five cards that are at your seats with the pencils and about 40 minutes from now people will begin to collect them and we'll ask the questions for the podium that way the people in the overflow room can participate as well steve wozniak the first time i saw steve wozniak in action was march 5th 1975. and the date is memorable not only because i got to meet steve wozniak but because that was the day in gordon french's garage where 32 of us got together to talk about building personal computers and that was the first meeting of what then became the homebrew computer club and frank rotheker and i worked at slack and managed to get the slack auditorium to be the venue for that homebrew computer club for many many years as it turns out and i have most of the old newsletters and i was looking back at them and this is newsletter number two from the home view computer club and one of the sections is a bunch of little wanted personals that people put in describing what they're doing in relationship to personal computing what projects they were working on and of course the one last because it's in alphabetical order was steve wozniak at 2800 homestead road number 36 i assume you still live there anymore i just didn't give out your personal address tonight that says this is a sort of in in a telegraph style have tvt my own design 65 characters per line 28 lines 40 chips have my own version of pong a video game called breakthrough it's really breakthrough breakout a nursery reader for cassettes very simple working on a 17 chip tv chest display includes three storage boards a 30 chip tv display skills personal skills digital design interfacing i o devices short on time have schematics have schematics will travel the humber computer club was an unusual event and what happened at the end of the meeting was that people would set up these card tables in the back and display things that they were working on and i remember when steve and steve came in with the apple one board and displayed the 6502 6800 uh version of the of the apple one board where you could change a jumper and choose which microprocessor it used um they got a year later though a bunch of uh high profile press coverage here's an article from the now defunct palo alto times that talks about the homebrew computer club and one of the discussions is about the great software debate about hobbyists who are sometimes accused of stealing programs and talks about william gates a software writer who said in an open letter is this fair but but really the more important article was one that was titled microcomputer fans form firm and it talks about two young computer enthusiasts steve and steve who couldn't afford to buy a microcomputer last year instead decided to put together on their own one of their own and they it was so successful they decided to market it and they went on the palo alto times was not a paragon of journalistic authenticity i mean the the techies in the crowd will will uh be amused at this statement that jobs is quoted as saying that that the advantage of this computer was that it used dynamic memory whose contents can be controlled by users in contrast to static memory but the tagline for the for the the pitch for the company was that despite competition from larger established firms jobs in wozniak see bright market outlook more and more people are buying computers and even those who already have a computer want another job says it's like a car people use them don't use them just to go places they're used for other reasons like to impress other people now with all due respect to the other steve i think this steve had a little bit more in mind when he designed his computers he was really out to make computers available to the rest of us to allow us all to participate in what is probably the biggest intellectual revolution of this century and there's really not much i need to say to introduce steve wozniak he's a silicon valley icon he's a philanthropist he's an educator he's an engineers engineer and he's an all-around great guy i give you the the one the only was thank you i'm humbled by the good response and nice audience met a lot of nice friends here from boston and the like and glenn i still remember the best the lobster i ever had in my life and view of some calculating equipment when i grew up okay this story is going to be a story of kind of a lot of like events that kind of lead up through and some design decisions things like that to the apple ii and it starts way back and way back this place was santa clara valley i mean i took my first pictures with a brownie camera right here at moffitt field and we had to ride our bikes through orchards to get to schools and the schools we went to were very new it had a newness and you know an open feeling about the whole place where we grew up um and it's not like that anymore but i have good memories of it initial spark you know where things like you get a crystal radio and you build it with your dad and you know what you never listen to it or use it very much but you tell everybody i built the crystal radio i built a crystal radio and you start to become proud of such things well about third grade my mom tested me on some flash cards you know and i went into school and i beat the girls and that's that's when i knew i was going to be good at mathematics okay so um in third grade i have that down um my parents were giving me kids that had lights and switches and wire them up in different configurations and make buzzers go and the like and so that that was also kind of given me a direction not a direction towards computers per se but an interest in electronics and my dad was an engineer a lot of engineers had moved to sunnyvale to work at lockheed a lot of the kids in the neighborhood were into electronics they had parents that had bottles full of resistors and stuff and you know we had a lot of like electronics friends in the neighborhood in science fairs i did some projects they were mostly electronic in nature so the student the teachers started praising me think somehow acting like i was the good one in the class at science i was the smart one it's science and math and of course that had positive feedback you know i thought of myself as good and wanted to be good at these things that i was good at used to love to sit you know we had a little light that came in i had a curfew but we had a street light that came in through my window and i could sit there and read tom swift junior books late into the night used to love to read those about a lot of you have read them about this guy that you know um owned a company with he and his father owned it and he was an engineer and they'd go into the lab he and his friend and hook up some contraption to you know hold some alien plasma or build a submarine or a spaceship and oh wow man he's an engineer he designs these things and he goes out of space and solves all these problems boy wouldn't it be neat to be like that you know just like a television hero about fifth grade it didn't eat signs for a project it was a large 92 electrons you know painted on a big large structure this wasn't you know an afternoon project it was you know many many weekends of work and wiring up and lots of switches and got to take the step to double pole switches where if one switch is on it makes the other switches work a little differently and then that wasn't enough to do all the various electron orbits so you can flip a switch for each possible atom and see what electrons are on so it had to get to some relays and if this switch is on the relay flips and makes a whole bunch of other switches work differently that was kind of neat to get up to a relay that had an on and off state and so that was like kind of getting really into some good little closeness to logic and learning about logic didn't have any books or guidance didn't know about all the computers that are here in this museum so you know it was like i had a whole story of accidentally trying to discover what was a computer what makes a computer what is this thing they call a computer what's it about around fifth grade i read a book called sos at midnight and a ham radio operator solved the day and won everything at the end of the book it said anybody of any age can be a ham radio operator i said oh my gosh you know i can't drive a car but i could be a ham radio operator ordered the manuals found a class in my neighborhood and got my ham license in sixth grade and it was like you know gosh these little feelings you can actually do that it's like some of the amazing things we hear about computers and we just want to be able to do it because we see it and it's you know something amazing that takes us somewhere deeper in the world well as in my ham radio boy i sure learned i had a father that stressed a lot of ethics you know and i was going to be a protector of the airwaves we protected the airwaves and we tracked down you know bad transmitters and the like you know my dad my dad also taught me something nervous he said the radio waves are free you know because anything anything comes to you on the radio you're allowed to tune in and listen to on communications receivers and the like and there's no channels you can't listen to you could listen to every frequency back then see this was up until cell phones but i had this kind of pure concept that overrides you know the reason you know it's sort of like it's a right that human beings have and i sort of feel like why did we give up such an important right just for cell phone frequencies anyway um a lot of things that you know a lot of the values that i have now i look back and they come to you very early ages you're not pre-10 years old even talking to your parents talking to friends thinking for yourself you know my dad would also talk about your freedom of speech in this country you can say what you feel about anybody and you can tell them that the government is bad and it's okay to say that you know your opinion well now my dad helped me out with electronics when i needed a little help he'd go on a blackboard and he'd show me how it eventually you know as we worked up how transistors worked and how tubes worked and would help me learn these things he said that you know what the most important thing in your life is school because we adults have made this world a really messy awful place it's really you kids go to school and you learn from our mistakes and you'll be able to make a much better world boy that was neat to hear as a 10 year old you know feel like we're so important even the parents respect us so i said wow man the teachers i bet they get more than engineers huh for salary my father said well no they don't you know i said well elementary school teachers get more than college teachers right well no but you know so i felt oh bummer should have been the other way around but you know my father really didn't realize didn't explain to me back then that schools are paid for by the government which is paid for by voters the larger chunk of voters in one area the more money gets allocated there and that's how schools get their money well schools support kids but kids don't get to vote for the monies so of course schools teachers aren't going to get paid much um anyway i got my transit first transistor radio in my life oh boy i used to love to listen that little blue radio right next to my head every night in bed i leave it on all night long every night oh what important thing in my life you know my dad started showing me some of the stuff he was working on at lockheed to make very tiny tiny circuits smaller than transistors and ships were coming he took me to a westcon show and i got to see the first picture of six parts on one piece of silicon and wow that was just so lucky looking back to have been you know seen these things that were the start of chips and all and transistor radio i said they're going to make better and better smaller transistors to make better radios and things for people right and he said well no they really design the better circuits for the military and for big businesses and they just sort of filter out and eventually people get them and i thought bummer you know i think people what people want nice life in their homes and electronics to help them i think that that's you know more important just sort of sat with that feeling inside all my life now my direction started heading a little into computers when i discovered a manual that my father had at home some journal that only goes to certain kinds of engineers back then there were no such things as computer manuals you didn't ever hear the word said anywhere and it had some computer articles it showed a big screen of memory where the dots on the screen were the actual memory bits and explained how it worked it showed it talked about boolean algebra and showed the basic concepts and showed a little bit of working in it and i started working on a piece of paper like this is a neat little puzzle it's like doing crossword puzzles man that was just the most interesting thing in the world and boy that was so my direction was getting pretty you know gonna wind up in computers i didn't know it i mean i went all the way through high school thinking i'm designing computers right and left but i don't think they ever have jobs designing computers i mean engineers which i want to be you know they design tvs and radios and things so in sixth grade my science fair project was a tic-tac-toe computer because tic-tac-toe is logic that's what we think in other words if there's an x in a corner an x in a corner and the side isn't taken that's where you go right it's logic logical moves to protect and whatever if you play every game of tic-tac-toe which you can do you can kind of figure out all the patterns and write down little logic circuits and or gates build them with transistors built mine on a big three by four piece of plywood pounding tons of nails and tons of transistors and diodes that my father got because he was using the early semiconductors closer to the semiconductor companies they'd give us re um cosmetic rejects so i soldered all this thing together and it and almost got it working but but you know the mistake was tic-tac-toe isn't a game of logic it's a game of psychology you know what and everyone i tell this to says no no take a close game a lot you can't lose it so i say yeah i'll beat you and every time i've ever pulled that on someone i beat them so far probably a couple dozen times there's a psychology to it um i can't explain that now but anyway it's not it's not so don't let anybody tell you every game is logical um every game is really kind of psychology if you got some an opponent you're trying to figure out how they're going to play you know so by a couple years later took these transistors and diodes i had learned how to make gates i had come across in my dad's that one manual that we still had in the house that i had discovered in a closet had a circuit that showed how the logic gates added up to make a little adder one bit adder and how one bit adder with a carry can lead to any number of bits you want and then there was another page a subtractor and the circuits were so similar and i looked at them figured out a way to put in a couple gates on my own and a switch and make it an adder or a subtractor so i built this thing up hundreds of transistors on little little boards and i built the first adder and it didn't work and i'm testing with my scope looking at the voltages and figured out a resistor isn't two resistors isn't really the best or gain because you attach that to a bunch of other things and they feedback need diodes so i actually solved that one myself my dad didn't even solve it so i was real proud of myself and um got that that computer all done for a junior high school project but then while i was down to that science fair i noticed a ninth grader had a project and i'm trying to get closer and closer to what a computer is i know how to build something that can add and subtract you toggle in a 10-bit binary number and another 10-bit binary number and you see 10 lights light up and it's a binary answer but that's not a computer and i don't know what a computer is yet i don't really i'm kind of shy and quiet i don't really know way to say to people how to what is a computer i stumbled on a project and it was built based on a stepping relay a stepping motor and well you set up a bunch of switches or dial in an instruction just like you know instruction add these two registers and then you dial in another instruction on another set of switches and another another another they had a stepping clunk and it could go back on a loop clone clunk loop loop oh my god that made so much sense to me you know when you're learning on your own by accident you learn things real you know real deeply it has more meaning than if you just read it in a book so that's what a computer does a bunch of things and then it goes back and redoes them so um anyway so that was really cool the next one i tried to design took me you know about 10 sheets of paper trying to design an adder with logic and some flip-flop type techniques that i'd learned that would somehow do over and over repeated stuff to be able to do a square root kind of like you learn as a kid to do a square root you know subtractions and division type stuff and so that was just theoretical on paper but i was kind of proud of it because it was so huge in high school i was good at math and science and um i was also interested in electronics and very often you go into an electronics class back in those days when electronics was more popular or common and you'd find a lot of like shop type people it was a vocational course and you didn't find that many really bright people but the combination of math and electronics is engineering and boy our teacher was so good mr mccollum he wrote his own courseware he wrote all the courses and the tests we do in the experiments and he had his students in the early years build up test equipment so we had lots of signal generators and scopes and volt meters we had a much better equipped high school electronics class in 1965-ish 66-ish than anywhere you could find even like in local colleges and he was so good he had this big slide rule up there and boy i did so much sidewall calculation and electronics and of course you do slide rule calculations in chemistry and physics too but boy i got so good at using the slide rule because i had it all over the place and loved loved being real fast and tricky on the slide rule well i'd go to bed sometimes at night with a problem a math problem a design problem something i was trying to design or a class problem in those days go to bed thinking about it thinking about thinking about it wake up in the middle of the night and have a solution it happened frequently um happened actually for a couple decades after that doesn't happen to me anymore but it was kind of neat because i must have been dreaming about it or something and one time i woke up and i went back to sleep in the morning i woke up and i knew that i'd waken up in the middle of the night with a solution but i couldn't remember what it was so i started having this rule wake up write it down and then i woke up in the morning once and i looked at what i'd written down and it was some stupid thing i've thrown out before anyway so you don't necessarily dream good solutions and we had we had an electronics club in the school you know we were kind of non-social types you know pretty nerdy and you know even though i was kind of like in sports and track but um still more a nerd than anything else couldn't really talk to people well didn't feel comfortable talking to all the people that were out doing things i wasn't doing partying and drinking and that kind of stuff so we were kind of non-social in our club and all the other clubs at carnival day had a standard place they would buy little dinky you know five cent gifts to give out as prizes at the carnival we didn't even know how it worked so we just went down to a local department store and bought a whole bunch of really great gifts you know and we had man we we sold the most tickets and made the most money and had all these great gifts and we i built this little device that had a little counter that counted up a number and you push a button and what the number comes up would determine what price you got if any so um so that was kind of neat it was like chance it was like a game of gambling but we just did it you know you don't think about these things when you're young also in our booth we put a little couple little wires and hook a battery and release it to a coil and shock people whose clothes were even you know sitting it'll go right through the pants so we used to have fun shocking people around our booths you know we were it was that kind of a world so electronics hey electronics it was for fun we'd make little funny noise makers and put them on the tvs of the school and the teachers wouldn't know what they were and the fact they had 27 batteries and would last for months didn't matter this is the electronics was a way to have fun it was an extra way to have fun if you didn't have a lot of the normal social outlets a little way to have pranks pranks is good for that so one time i built a little metronome electronic metronome and put it in a friend's locker it's going tick tick tick it had these big battery cells look kind of made to look like a bomb but um it was just a friend's locker you know as a joke unfortunately he didn't hear the principal heard it so i and i had to laugh when the principal told me how he opened up the locker clasp it to his chest and ran out and dismantled it because i had rigged it with a resistor so when you open the locker the ticking sped up whenever whenever i kind of you know go out and you come up with a funny idea let's do something funny i always try to take it one step further and have one extra little step of precision and i could give tons of examples we don't have time for that um anyway playing with electronics me and the electronics kids we wired up and down our fences in the neighborhood and across the light poles we found ways to get wires across we have this big network intercom system you know we buy batteries and and microphones and speakers and that kind of stuff and uh one time it cut off from my friend way down the block the signal it cut off it went away walked the fence and found that this one neighborhood cut the wire in about a hundred places on the fence so we ran it on the other side of the fence we didn't know anything about property rights you don't think about that you just think there's a fence you can run a wire so you know life was a lot easier back then a lot of things i did back then i'd probably be put in prison for a few years now um anyway my electronics teacher saw that i kind of knew all the electronics in the school and he said well you know what there's um you could go down to this company an engineer will let you go down on fridays and program a computer whoa i mean this was like this is like the most prestigious thing could ever happen to a student i got to go down to sylvania and i got a fortran book and started learning fortran first program was the night's tour and it never solved and the next week i figured out it was working right it just wasn't going to solve for 10 of the 25th years the way i wrote it and that's when you know well it kind of leaves a little message that you know the fact that a computer can do a million things a second doesn't mean it's as powerful as a person that has a better approach um while i was down at sylvania i saw a book the small computer handbook and many many of us remember that one and a small computer handbook you know was a description of the pdp and i liked it and they said oh you can have this i took it home and i went through every page just in awe it's mesmerized oh my gosh this is what a real computer is i finally got a full formula and meanwhile my dad had some chip books that had the early chips which were pretty much they just gotten up to one bit um adder on a chip and maybe you could get two gates in a package and it cost a hundred bucks so things were kind of expensive back then but i looked at the two and started working on paper all silently all on my own not with friends or parents or teachers just started trying to figure out how i would design a computer and i managed to design that computer and then um found out that i could get manuals to other mini computers of those days and friends and i we would drive down to stanford linear accelerator center because on a sunday because there's a lot of bright people there and wherever there's bright people they leave doors open and we'd all we'd be able to find a door open and get into the library and get computer computer magazines and i would take out the cards to order the manuals and they would send you manuals on computers and thrown instruction sets and you know just about down to schematics and it was um and showing little program examples and it was just so incredible so every mini computer i could get the hewlett packard ones on the deck ones and varian and other companies just sit down and i would design them and then better chips came out my dad gave me some better chipmans wow and now i can do it in fewer chips than before so i'd sit down some weekend and redesign a computer i'd already designed trying to use fewer chips and for some reason in doing this for a couple of years in high school i just got to the point that i always measured myself by how few chips i used eventually i compared some signets chips versus some synchronous fairchild ttl chips and the fairchild chips took more chips in my design but they were smaller chips and there were fewer connections so i changed my rule to the smaller the board space the better the design and um without that when you're competing with nobody but yourself you have to force yourself to say i want to do a design better than i've done before you come up with the most far-out tricks you'll work for sometimes a week and come up with one little dinky trick that saves a chip you know or just uses the gates a little different order and saves one chip in the end so that sort of became a goal of mine no reason i didn't have anyone telling me this is what you should do it just seemed like natural thing to do for fun on your own time totally is a pastime well um so as i worked on this all the mini computers back then they were all i mean i saw a couple examples tonight that are almost in different category but they were generally rectangular boxes with a bunch of switches and a bunch of lights and it looks pretty impressive and scary but they're all just numbers if you think of it and they would look industrial they look like something that goes inside of a company you know and it doesn't look like little hi-fi's and things that you have in your home well the data general nova came out you know and i look it's kind of interesting when they came out with a brochure introducing who was starting this company really promoting the company and not the product it was interesting back in those days 1970 maybe 69 68 the back page had an instruction set of the computer oh my god this was my my life this is my bread you know wow man i've got to try and design one of those so one day i finally got down to designing it and their instruction was weird instead of having 50 different instructions they had one long instruction word with a couple bits meant this and a couple of bits where this register and a couple bits told that whether which way to shift and how to use the carry and in the end it broke it into a lot of little chunks and in my design the instruction register had a couple little wires going to select a register here and a multiplexer a couple little wires to another reflector and three wires down to the outer and it turns out that it turns out that it just fit the chips perfectly and the design was half as many chips as i was used to okay half as many chips for just as good a computer so that means the architecture of a machine matching the chips can do the job a lot more efficiently i fell in love with that computer i told my dad i'm gonna own a 4k nova someday so i can run fortran 4k nova he said steve it cost about as much as a house and i said well i'll live in an apartment someday i was going to have a computer many others of us decided those along other routes of their own headed off to my first year college boy that was a lot of fun because there were very few colleges in those days that had computer science as a curriculum undergraduate curriculum so the courses were the introduction of computers was a grad course at the university of colorado and um and i as a freshman i was in engineering i was allowed to take it so i took it and i got my a plus but i also wound up getting put on probation for computer abuse actually they called it abuse of computer time and it turns out that all i've done is run so many programs i had run programs and programs and programs to calculate numbers because i thought wow i finally get to program a computer for real i'm going to open up my handbook of chemistry and physics and find some tables and i'm going to write programs to calculate the first 60 pages punch out some cards so i can run it again and calculate the next 60 pages and the next 60 pages and i'll never overflow the time limit of the computer and so i three times a day i could turn around my punch card programs with 60 pages per seven times seven programs times three times a day piling up rooms of outputs in my dorm room unbelievable and then i found out well there was one thing i didn't know which is um it's called accounting i ran the class five times over its computer budget so i was really meek back then and the teacher scared me into thinking that if i went back to the campus they were gonna try to bill me the computer department was gonna build me this like a year's tuition for computer use and i was too scared to tell my parents so i didn't want to pop back there the next year but at the university of colorado i had a lot of fun had a little um friend of mine his father designed a tv jammer so i buy these little transitions at radio shack and wind a coil and transit capacitor a little nine volt battery and hold it in my hand he tuned in and jams a tv so there was one color tv on campus it was over in a girl's dorm so i went downstairs in libby's hall one night and sat in the back and i turned on my jammer a little and it only fuzzed the picture up a little it didn't totally jam it and so the friend of mine oddly enough in the front row decides to hit the tv and i made it go good so yeah everybody thinks we fixed it that was fun that was fun and there was no planning this so i jammed it again he'd hit again eventually he'd have to get it a little harder but it would always fix it and then finally someone else started hitting it for the next two weeks it was kind of fun like a psychology class psychology research and they'd stationed one person in a chair next to the tv and whenever it went bad it was his job to bang it and fix it and after a while they would fine-tune it and it would go good and they pull their hand away and it goes bad so i started i started getting a little finer with the technique sometimes they they tuned some controls in the back and impairment have to come in they said well hey the repairman said it's the antenna so went bad they held the antenna up and it went good put the antenna down and it went bad okay so then eventually holding it up it was it went bad so they climbed up on a chair a guy held it way up and then finally i made it so the tv would work if he stood on his toes but not on his heels and i guess i was i could i know that i wouldn't have the dexterity to do that well enough today but i never got caught another time three of them are up trying to fix the tv and a guy had his hand on the middle of the screen so i made it go good and then they said okay it's good you know relax so we got it and they pulled they all pulled their bodies away and it went bad and one guy in the back says hey get your bodies back where they were because by by then they kind of knew that your body position mattered and eventually the guy put his hand back on the screen and it went it went bad it went good and they pulled his hand away and it went bad and he had a foot up in the air on a chair resting on his chair he put his foot down on the ground with his hand on the screen put his foot down on the ground and it went bad and he put his foot back up on the chair and it went good he turned to the audience he must have been engineer he said it's a grounding effect so they watched the last half of mission impossible with a hand on the middle of the tv screen i wish we had small camcorders like we have today um took that tv jammer built built it into a magic marker and took it to my class because in the class some people got to see the class live and the rest of us had to watch it in an overflow room on a tv set so i took it in and i kind of turned on the jammer and it didn't jam the sets very well because they were cable tv jammed one over on the right more than the others and the one under above me didn't even get jammed hardly at all weird three guys big guys in the front of class stood up and i said oh my god i didn't think there were any teachers in here i was just going to turn it on and turn it off now i was too scared they started saying turn off the transmitter yeah i'm going to reach over and turn it off and get caught right so i'm sitting here thinking they're watching us the whole class like like hawks and i'm thinking how am i gonna ever you know turn it off i said well i'll just walk out with everyone else they won't know finally near the end of class a guy under the tv that was jammed the worst starts gathering his books to leave a little early so as he's walking to the door i made the tv's flutter and he walked out the door they went perfect and one of the tas points like that and later later i heard that he said there he goes so i learned it's really funny if you do prank and you make it look like someone else did you get two for one next and next year i didn't want to pay that big bill or tell my parents about it at the the computer center invest colorado on their 6600 um so i went to de anza and my friend larry platzik had somehow had a key to the computer room and we would go in at midnight or one and open it up and start up the computer and the printers and the disk drives and the different parts and run program through on decks of cards and sit there with printouts and correct them and re-run them all night long we did that for a long time and took a lot of classes at the end that didn't even count towards my transfer credit to berkeley because um because i like computers so much just like programming anything having to do with them no real reason um didn't really think i'd be doing that as a job but maybe okay so i'm still designing mini computers and my designs are getting better and better and i'm competing with myself still now i took a year off from college and i went to work for a year programming for a company it was i was enjoying it so much i just took a year off from college and the company went broke and it went broke they had a neat medium-sized computer in those days and disc drives and they had an operating system and they had several languages working and it was like a beautiful system and oh and the assembly language was gorgeous and i'm thinking how can you have a good computer and go bankrupt you make a good product you sell it you make a lot of money that's how it's done it was a recession and it's like the investors didn't want to put the money into it and trust it and all that i could never understand that how a company could have a successful product and still go out of business so that was a tough one anyway around that time one of the guys at that company knew some people in the silicon industry and i even though i did a lot of designs on paper of many computers i could never get the parts to build one so he said design a computer i'll get you some parts from signetics so i sat down and designed a very minimal computer almost like your first com computer design class where you go into what's the minimum computer you can make that actually computes designed a very very simple one with very few chips on one little tiny board and needed eight rams he came up with eight rams he got the parts given to me this is the first time in my life so built this little computer and took a couple weeks building it drinking cream sodas at night and we called it the cream soda computer and bill fernandez who helped wire it up in his garage and it worked had switches and lights and that kind of input and you could toggle the and bite into the switches and push a button and it goes into an address register and toggle the bytes and push a button and it gets stored into that memory location so it was really a computer that was all it mattered it couldn't do anything useful he introduced me to steve jobs steve jobs you know was a little he was interested in pranks and electronics that's what we had in common he'd done some pranks at the high school and he understood electronics and counters and that sort of thing and those kind of signals and appreciated it he was a little more of a hippie than i you know my dad kind of taught me about the extremes of politics and i always wanted to be in the middle and he was just you know kind of have nothing and just a few um nuts to eat and you know bare feet and wander you know and a lot of people are like that at that age so um so it was but it was kind of interesting but when we got together and we talked pranks we talked music too we loved the same kind of music for the same reasons i headed off to my year my third year college at berkeley taking all computer courses boy did i have a schedule nobody could compare to i i got i had two classes on monday and wednesday and two classes on tuesday and thursday all four of those classes were in the same room they all followed each other so i'd go to the room and sit through it for two classes every day of the week all those four days and i had no class before i think two in the afternoon so beat that one um the day before a couple of days before i left for berkeley i picked up an esquire magazine it had this little article about another technical device called the secrets of the little blue box fiction by ron rosenblum this was turned out to be the most accurate ever truthful article ever written but it was called fiction halfway through it i'm reading about these guys like captain crunch that somehow know each other and set up networks on telephone lines for free all over the country and bring other people into their networks and they take over cities and they run this whole thing because they're so smart and they run it out of racks of equipment in vans that drive around switching equipment these guys are the brightest engineers there are i'm halfway through the article and i called steve jobs up and i started reading the sessions that described people like captain crunch and some of the techniques they used to make free phone calls and then i said the trouble is this is just too real it just doesn't sound like fiction why would they give these exact frequencies so we went down to slack library the next day and we started pulling out books and we finally found a book and had a list of frequencies that matched the ones in the article and now we had the whole list so that took us into a fun year of some rather astounding discoveries anyway the night we had we actually much much harder to do than learn how to build a little blue box and play with it i had this this principle that i would we both did we would only tell our parents what we did we both told them they said don't make any of those calls from our phone when we finally got beyond an analog box to a digital that the frequencies were stable enough um and it worked we made one call on his phone then we drove up to the dorm from then on we wouldn't use them at home we paid our parents rules i told my parents about it you know they didn't like it but they appreciate the fact that at least i told them what i was doing that i felt it was right and even if we got caught we were young enough to get it kind of a wrist slap and all this other thinking so we had these devices and i i never used them to save money on phone calls i felt i was going to be an ethical hacker i just like to build these things to show off the fact i could build them but looking back i helped other people that just used them to make free phone calls so i wasn't that pure but i called myself an ethical hacker anyway um so so we had yeah we had quite a fun year doing that at berkeley and the phone but the night i met captain crunch before the fbi even knew who he was this was amazing to run into him through a couple of connections and people passing some words on and some radio station interviews he'd done in our area that night he gave us so many codes late at berkeley and then had to drive back home with steve jobs so we got a blue box and the first time we're ever going to try it on a pay phone because his car broke down in hayward and we got a call back to the dorm and get a ride with crunch back to his house and all this stuff so we're sitting the paper and trying to make a blue box call the operator comes back on the line and we're all scared we try it again this bruise about a data call and she comes back on the line we're all scared so we put in money and then a cop card pulls up and steve was shaking you know and he got the blue box back into my pocket i got it he got it to me because the cop turned to look in the bushes for drugs or something you know so put the box in my pocket the cop passed me down says what's this it says electronic music it synthesizer too musical second cop says what's the orange button for it's for calibration says steve you know well yeah we were caught we were caught so the cops said what's what's the problem our car broke down where is it on the freeway so we got in the cop car and the cops are holding the blue box cop cop in the passenger seat turns around and hands me the box and he says a guy named moog beats you to it you can't you know what you can't make up stories like that good so anyway i crashed my own car that night fell asleep on the freeway driving back and crashed totaled my car so the next year i decided i'll take another year off from college to earn the money for my fourth year i've taken a year off to earn money for my third year i'll take a year off to earn money for my fourth year and that's when my career started going up and up and never got back for 10 years but at least i did go back and get my degree finally anyway after about half a year at a very fun job as an electronics technician you know and i was up to just about the point of helping the designers out solving their most difficult problems in the place a friend of mine worked in the hp calculator division allen who's here and he got them to interview me and oh man they hired me to design calculator chips my god this was the most incredible product in the world the hpc 35 the one that put slide rules out of business and i got to work designing these products now my favorite product in the world i actually owned one i think it was paid for with blue box monies because it was pretty expensive 400 bucks back then for a college student um but um i actually got to design the product that i loved and the company that i loved my father had always taught me how hewlett-packard made the finest engineering equipment you know with better standards than other companies had and this was just like how could you believe that it must be like people who just love an apple computer and get to work for apple someday so i'm working at hewlett packard and i pretty much got out of computers you know calculators were just a was a different world so my interest in computers lapsed a bit but i still loved electronics on the side so normally you come home from work at engineering and you just want to sit down the tv you know and watch watch the world series i would just come home and work on more electronics projects of my own one of my favorite things i started the first dialogue in the whole bay area because i always appreciate humor a lot got a lot of values from my dad but my mom and my sister me humor humor so i started the first owl joke back before you could buy an answering machine before you could buy a telephone so it wasn't very easy to do it was like much harder to do than starting a company um and i ran this number and anybody who had a similar number got 100 wrong calls a day so i'd switch the number and then more people would be complaining about getting all these wrong numbers wrong calls every day because i got 2 000 calls a day on one line number with one answering machine short little jokes i tried to make them real short like 15 seconds so i could get that many through i said the kids got to dial an easy number phone company can you give me two five five five five five five and cupertino no we don't assign on five bank can you give me two five five six six six six i checked it out it's free i said yeah we'll give it to you so i got my first good number with repeating digits two five five 255 666. and basically it was getting into this interest in phone numbers with repeating digits is why we priced the apple one at 666.66 and we've never heard of 666 in the bible so so one of my side projects was starting dial a joke and boy that was amazing i even met my first wife there you know it was like you had a chat room where you were anonymous i was stanley zebra zuskanitsky heard a good one lately hello thank you for dialing dial a joke probably somebody in this room called the thing um i i also got into designing a home pinball game for a guy in one state and got to designing you know got into the karcher vision vcr this was before betamax incredible vcr and they had had a duplicating factor in san jose and they had thousands of these machines and they were selling for 60 bucks each color vcrs back when a black and white cost a school a thousand bucks for 60 bucks you run down with some engineers you buy this doesn't have a case on it like a wooden case or anything but but it's of color vcr and even had a little button for a dial for a timer unbelievable to lock into this thing i would take groups of engineers down from your packard we'd buy a bunch of these and start studying them and you know going through and repairing a few of the the power supplies transistors when they burned out and so i got a little reintroduction back to my high school television and how vcrs worked and you know the various circuitry involved with video stuff um then one day i saw a i got involved in the first hotel movie systems doing the digital part of it so that was real lucky break too and these were just all accidents that came my way but i was in a bowling alley and i remember which bowling alley and exactly where i was standing with my fiance and there was a pong game and this little game is on a tv screen with a ball bouncing back and forth and it oh my god and just i was mesmerized and i said i can design one of those because i know how to design digital logic and i know how television signals work from high school so i sat down and designed my first pong and eventually um steve jobs was working at atari um sometime and i they brought me in looked at my pong game i had a little switch so if you missed the ball it gave a little four letter epithet if you wanted well we had we didn't have very big proms in the lab back then we had four bit by 256. so you had to have two of these prom ttl prom chips to make 256 bytes these were earlier days so it was hard to have a little program in something but that's where i programmed the words anyway i got this job to design breakout had to do it in four days and deliver a working prototype four days a night steve and i spent up all night long down to atari i designed it as fast as i could and we if we get paid a certain amount of for 50 chips or 40 chips and we're there late at night we both got mononucleosis we finished it up by the last day i think they couldn't understand my design and uh and why it worked and what they'd have to do to extend it a little so they didn't quite go ahead and use it but shortly after that i walked into my old friend captain crunch i don't know if he'd been i think he'd been like arrested a couple of times by then but not to prison yet you know so i went to his basement cupertino and he's sitting there typing on a big teletype machine you know teletypes are real expensive a thousand bucks could never afford one of those he's typing away and he says i'm playing chess checkers or chess on a computer in boston at mit and then he says watch this i'll switch computers to stanford and he was on the arpanet and this was like one of those little insights you can do that that was just so amazing i said oh my god well you know what well i know how to put characters on a screen and i'll just design a circuit to be a terminal i got to get a keyboard search magazines and they had a terminal available for 60 bucks okay 60 bucks in 1974 whatever that's like how many dollars today it's a 300 just for a keyboard a keyboard i need a keyboard 60 bucks and it was uppercase only but it worked it was a teletype replacement and i designed this little term this little terminal and i said i don't have an output device i can't afford a thousand dollar teletype i can't afford a video monitor but i have a tv set i have a sears tv and back in those days tv sets came with schematics so you open it up you open it up and you find out where to tap into wires you look the signals on a scope and they're inverted and you put a transistor inverter circuit way so use the home tv and i had this little terminal and i could borrow a modem at first then design my own modem and we'd dial into stanford my gosh i'm on the arpanet never really used it for much but it was so neat to know that you could get around the world on a computer network well my friend came by and you know i've been a few years away from my mini computer background i hadn't really known that microprocessors had even happened really hadn't heard the word and alan came by and said there's a club starting up and he didn't say it's a computer club or a microprocessor club because i would have been too scared to go tell you the truth he said it's for people that have terminals and things and i had just built this great terminal i said oh my gosh i can show it off so how cool um so i went to the first meeting of the homebrew computer club and i felt very out of place they had this little computer kit on the front of a magazine cover and it was it was a square rectangular box with a bunch of binary switches and lights just like the old mini computers but it was kind of affordable it was like cheap like 400 bucks and then if you want to get more than 256 bites you start paying more money it's like a human can actually afford to buy these things you build it yourself it was called the altair been on a magazine cover i hadn't heard the first thing about it i hadn't heard about the mark 8 that had been on a magazine cover so i felt very awkward like oh boy this is not my place uh i've got to get out of here and then they passed around a data sheet for a microprocessor the intel 8080 or the 8008 from a canadian company or something and i went home that night and i studied what a microprocessor was and i said wait a minute that's just like the processor of a mini computer i know this stuff oh i'm back in business i'm back with the thing i love i'm gonna actually have that computer i want some day in my life okay next next problem was what kind of microprocessor do you use intel had high prices it's gonna oh my gosh 370 bucks for a microprocessor uh i could never think of affording that very easily i found out that hp employees could buy a motorola 6800 for 40 bucks so i designed my circuit on the vellum i designed it for the 6800 with some some ram and and to attach to my terminal that already existed because it had a keyboard and had a television set for display and then the 6502 microprocessor got introduced by a company in pennsylvania and this was like the newest latest greatest and it had all these neat tricky addressing modes and it was missing things like increment instructions is it better is it worse is it the same it's about a wash and it was 20 bucks they were going to sell it at westcon show in san francisco over the counter walk up see how could you buy a microprocessor back in those days if you were a person you couldn't buy one there were no stores there were no electronic stores that carried microprocessors or chips or that kind of stuff you had to go to some distributor and fill out all these forms that made it sound like you had credit you know you had to fill out a credit reports and it was very awkward and uncomfortable so they were going to sell one for cash over the counter so i went to westcon a lot of people did paid 20 bucks over the counter got a 6501 paid 25 bucks you got a 6502 which had a little bit of clocking circuitry built in you didn't need to have your own clocking um transistors and paid five more bucks got a manual took it home and boy that was my chip it was pin for pin compatible with the 6800 and that's what my design had been finally sat down go down to my cubicle night after night after night at hewlett packard and plan out where each chip would be and then solder every wire exactly the right distance between pins no spare wire no no um wire wrap stuff didn't want it to look ugly and got this whole board down and it was working and i plugged in a memory board i plugged in some static ram that i bought and it worked okay and well to make it work i said well hold on every computer in the past that i've seen has been this big rectangular box with a bunch of binary switches and binary lights and somehow they have ways you can attach tele types to them not that you could ever afford one and i said but you know hewlett packard we got our calculators the calculators are human and they got buttons that say one two three four five you know and you push the and there's a little program running saying wait for a key to get press and you press the five button and the five program runs and does the right thing and you press another key the plus key and it goes and runs a routine for plus i said why don't i just write a little program for this microprocessor that powers up saying wait for a key to get pressed and when the user presses a key it starts it has to do three things the things that all these switches and lights would do on the big commercial mini computers they would store data into memory they would examine what's in a memory location and they would run a program at a certain address had to do those three things so wrote a little 256 byte program to do just that much and it worked called a monitor so just you power up this computer it starts reading from a human keyboard not switches and lights a human keyboard and you type in in hexadecimal what you would have set switches for so it has to be just as good as any other computer but it's a lot slicker and it's smaller and it has almost no parts and it has a human keyboard and a person can really use it and so this was the computer that i was developing and i got it working and started showing it off at the club a little and then steve jobs came to the club and he saw said whoa there's a lot of people interested in this this what you got you know people come up and ask me questions i'd be sitting there with my sears tv on a table demonstrating it and he said you know why don't we make a pc board for twenty dollars and then we'll sell it for forty and it might cost us you know so many hundred dollars to lay out a pc board he has a friend that could do that at atari and you know we're driving along and i thought i don't know if we'll sell enough down at the club to get our money back we'd have to sell 50 of them and he says well what if we never get our money back we still have a company we can say we had a company well of course when you're young you'll do that you know in other words yeah if you go into it not saying you have to justify it by getting your money back you're doing it because it's something you want to do so that's pretty much how we got started now um steve introduced me to this guy ron wayne and he became our third partner ron wayne had 10 of the partnership and steve had 45 and i had 45 and we both trusted ron to solve any any questions ron was just a real absolutist right winger you know read all those books and none there call it treason and those kind of books and boy but he had just real stern answers to every little thing instantly and he would sit down and type out a legal document with all the legal he's writing and he wasn't a lawyer and that's how we formed the company and he drew this beautiful sketch of newton under the apple tree and that became our apple one manual so ron had a lot of talents well um anyway i went to hewlett-packard well first i figured anything i designed belongs hewlett packard so i went to hewlett packard and i wanted them to do this product and we were in the right division i sat down with the division manager three levels above me and my boss and some others and and proposed that we make this 800 machine that will run basic on your home tv and he had a few technical reasons and it was your tv and a hewlett-packard computer and some problems like that and he didn't have the resources available and he turned it down but for weeks and months after that he'd see me in elevators and say steve i haven't been able to sleep since i heard that idea of a little computer that can run basic in your home so it was like a good deal but it wouldn't make a hewlett packard product um well steve we're driving along so we decided we'll start the company and steve said let's call it apple computer he came up with that idea he would go up to oregon and work on orchards you know with his bare feet for a while and then come back home and work for atari for a while very free type existence and i think always assumed i'm not a person that asks questions and steve's not a person that gives a lot of where he gets his ideas from when they're suggested by others but i always assumed that they had apple trees in that orchard my best guess well the biggest financial shock in apple's history was about to hit i'm still working at hewlett packard and we've got this design and we've laid out a pc board and put you know i sold my most valuable possession my hp um 65 calculator but next i sold it for 500 bucks and next month we were coming out with hp 67 and i could buy the employee price 370 bucks so you can't quite call it really a big sacrifice steve called me up and he said he's sitting down i said what he says just got a 50 000 order up till then we were going to sell boards for 40 bucks and if we get if we get a few hundred bucks back we're lucky fifty thousand dollars oh my god i mean that's like business that's scary it turns out there was one store in the whole south bay area in palo alto the bike shop and they wanted to buy a hundred um a hundred computers for five hundred dollars each that's fifty fifty thousand and and they what they did was they were buying kits right now buying kits and people come to the store and wanna buy a completely built computer we had a nice small one board computer that we could get wave soldered for 13 and have it completely build almost at least the board is completely built you know maybe you have to plug on a keyboard and transformers and a case or the store has to deal with that but it's a lot less work than they were used to and they could sell it as a completely built computer to all these people that were coming in i'm interested in buying a computer i'm interested in buying a computer so um now that we had kind of a real order and some real money i felt a little guilty so i contacted hp's legal department and they searched every division to make sure there was no interest in any product like this so i didn't want to step over that bounce um we had this apple one and we started selling it and we'd build it now these were the days you hear about called the garage and we actually had steve's parents house was although i did all my designs in my cubicle at work in my apartment in cupertino we did our final assembly in the garage steve would drive down to a place in santa clara and bring back our finished boards of the apple one and we put them on a bench in the garage and hook them up to a scope i would do this and look at some and it would work or it wouldn't start typing if it doesn't work i'd start looking for you know lines that were shorted or traces that were open because a a pin didn't go into the socket right and that's what we did in the garage we did the final assembly got things working then we take the good boards put them in some white boxes and after we had 25 of them steve would drive them down to the bike shop and get paid in cash the deal that he worked out was we got 30 days credit on the component parts on all the chips and everything 30 days net so as soon as the pc boards got made the chips came out of a closet they got inserted in a few days we drove them back to our garage tested them drove them down the store and got paid cash and we could cycle it in 10 days and we had 30 days credit because we had no money at all and it worked we had no lawyers to slow things down i'm sure disaster would have hit so so we're doing that and then at a certain point ron wayne sort of realized steve jobs had no money and i had no money at all no assets of any sort and ron had his gold nuggets in between his mattresses so and he was afraid that if anything went wrong and we didn't get paid he was the one they were going to collect from so he sold out his 10 of apple for a few hundred bucks for well for a reason could have been a good reason anyway um so i'm still i'm still in hewlett packard while we're selling these apple ones i mean that's just sort of on the side we're not selling too many we might have built 200 of them sold 150 total over a year and we're just get but we're getting our name known in a few of these new little hobbyist journal magazines about little computers and that motivates you you know when people always reckon we were at the top of every list because they were alphabetic order we were apple and and and people always noted the apple had pretty good price we had pretty good price and specs you know and um we had a neat little thing that was really different than the other products well i started work and i designed the apple one with the intent of adding color to it using a little technique that popped in my head when i was down to the atari labs for four days and nights doing breakout i was just thinking you know about this little technique of generating color just by cycling data at color frequency in a register maybe that would work and uh pulled it out and i designed the apple one for it but as i started trying to add chips onto the apple one add a feature came up with an idea to shrink this down and make it smaller and then rather to have the sequence of stuff to generate the ram timing i think i'll just um combine a little state machine with a with a register and a and a prom and then oh no no searching every book i could every book on chips found a little shift register with the feedback control that i could just one chip generate all the timing for the random access memory the dynamic rams by the way the reason for dynamic rams in the apple products was very simple my rule in a product was the fewest chips or the fewest board spaces the better it was well you know what it was every single hobby computer that came out every single one of them go down a list of 30 of them everyone used static rams because they were designed probably not by real engineers as much as by just technicians that like this stuff and you can run the wires the address pins from a microprocessor to the rams and the data pins from the microprocessor to the rams and you're done and it works you know and i sat there and the 4k dynamic ram was about to come out the first ram denser than core memories the first ram cheaper than core memories okay the start of putting core memories out of business the 4k dynamic ram if i had eight of those chips that's 4k bytes which is what i wanted eight chips how many chips would it take with the static rams at 20 104s or whatever they were called they were only 1k chips 1k bits so you'd have to have 32 of them 32 chips i can reduce that down to 8 chips now sure i have to put in a little sneaky multiplexing of some data that came off of my video counters to do some address you know refresh them and keep them alive but it turns out that so you add five chips back in you've already saved 24. so it was so much smaller to use the dynamic rams um the first ones i got were a type from ami there was there were some from mos tech and there were some from intel three types got introduced that year 1975 and the ones from intel were a little better they were ttl compatible they kind of had a little bit of trickier two steps of addressing but they were in a smaller package and steve called me up and said well what about the intel ones and i said well they're the best but you know what i can never afford anything from intel and he said oh let me work on it so he got 16 the next day so that's why we went with the right ram lucky coincidences not not necessarily totally planned well the apple too is i started working on this design to get the color in clever ideas and the ram timing came down and then eventually it wound up being half as many chips with 10 times the capability i mean it had color and whoever thought a color in a day when it wasn't being done anywhere else except you could buy plug-in boards that had 50 chips on them more than our whole apple ii anyway and it had the the um the dynamic ram and it had graphics graphics oh my gosh you know well what can you do with graphics well i don't know break out you can draw color patterns it had high resolution graphics didn't even know this one case i i didn't know if it was going to be worth anything and steve said well what does it cost i said two chips he said we'll put it in you know and i really did want it in there it kind of made sense but then and we wound up with paddles and sound and and the i o back in those days you'd plug a board in the board you would dial in an address it would compare the address to the address line with a whole bunch of chips comparison chips and it was just every board you plugged in had a whole bunch of circuitry and some switches i said wait a minute just pre-decode it one little one little um multiplexer chip or decoder chip just spans out and drives eight sockets with some addresses getting through each socket i think i gave three sets of addresses so had plenty addresses you just plug a board in and it works when it gets the right enable um again the enables were to each each ship so it was such a clever so many clever things happened at once you know it wasn't just one thing um with the apple one the biggest part of the project was once i finished the computer it could sit there and i could tell people it's a computer and i can type hexadecimal on it and type some data into memory and see what's there but instantly i said what do i want to do my whole life i want to run fortran or a higher level language and i sniffed the air and it turned out that basic was the one to go with basic was out for the altair the bill gates basic i mean the homebrew computer club was something else with dan sokol was the guy who copied the their basic tape all those times and got the bad reaction from bill gates but um so so basic but you know what there were books out with basic games and what do people want to do if they have their own computer you want to type in some games and play them now i had two goals i wanted to play games but i also want to type in some simulations for my logic designs at hewlett packard so i had two basic goals and i sat down i had never used basic in my life so i opened up the hello packard basic manual and started writing down the syntax which parts of it i wanted and which parts i didn't need and i have this goal to get the first basic done for the 6502 because i was real shy and wasn't outspoken couldn't speak to people in those days but god i loved doing things first and there were no basic out for the 6502 yet i'd have the first one if i really rushed on it and i worked and worked and worked and i'd never written a language never really taken a course in it i'd read a few books or parts of books that have been xerox sent to me by my friend alan baum and came up with a clever approach to where in the end i could take every single symbol in my syntax table and write a routine for that so just write a small routine write a small routine write a small routine chunking out the routines day by day by day and the basic language finish itself and i could go down to this computer club and show off a little skinny board the apple two very few chips running basic whoa in text only and then the apple ii we had color well i got this weird idea in my head when i was down to atari doing breakout they were building their first microprocessor game whatever that meant and they're going to program it i guess you program it in assembly language which was you know what i was most familiar with and i said i can program a game like breakout on my apple ii but then i said i wonder if i could write it in basic the easy to use language for anyone this is a goal and really it led a lot to adding the different graphics to adding paddles to adding the sound the things that a game needed in almost no chips every time to the board adding some commands in the basic to set color and draw some little short little segments and do that sort of stuff and eventually you know and so i finally got to the point that i thought i had enough to write it the game i sat down and i wrote this pattern to put some bricks on the screen in color i didn't like the colors and i changed it and you know and then i changed it again and changed it again and kind of changed the position and the size and the placement and then the paddle changed its size and got a ball going around picked out some angles and speeds and just changed the program and in half an hour i had done what would have taken easily five years in hardware back when the designs were hardware like breakout and i was just shaking i called steve jobs over i was just shaking i said steve games are never going to be the same now that they're programs it was just it was a real eureka moment so um anyway so now we've got we've got a real good looking computer this apple ii and what happened was um by the way my company hewlett packard by then had started a small computer project in our lab called capricorn it was kind of on the other half of the side of the lab so i went to the head guy of it and i said look look uh chung my um i'm not really interested in calculators my interest in life is computers and i really want to work on this machine they're building a machine they had guys assigned to develop printer interfaces you know which i'd already done on the apples and they had the cassette interface or tape interface not already done a cassette interface they were doing um you know a dynamic ram and a microprocessor which i've done and they had five guys writing a basic and i just written one and i said i'll do anything i'll do a printer interface i'll do anything i just want to work on that project and two weeks later they turned me down don't ask me why my own lab i've never been able to answer that one to this day but i guess it was lucky sort of um anyway we had a product that looked hot the apple one had been the first one of these small computers at low cost for the real people you know that had a keyboard a human keyboard the second one to come out was from a group in our in our homebrew computer club the processor technology saw computer had a keyboard and a little black and white display and some some little neat capabilities in it and it was now selling like a thousand a month it was the hot product in the country and stores were opening up in cities computer stores were opening up so they were going in they were the big hot winner we knew we could sell a thousand a month of this apple too and each that's you know each one cost 250 dollars to build how do you build a thousand computers you need two hundred fifty thousand dollars and we have nothing we went to commodore and i was quite embarrassed because steve was asking commodore for hundreds of thousands of dollars it sounded like and i'm thinking what do you mean which is just a design and um we went to atari and they liked it but they had their hands full coming out with their first home pong and they turned it down and then eventually we met people in in the garage and they'd say well what's your market for it and i'd say it's a million million units they said how do you know that i said well this is don valentine i told us to i said i said um well computers are bigger than ham radio and there's a million ham radios well you know who could deny that anybody can see that but it wasn't it wasn't really you know it wasn't schooled words so um so anyway we eventually ran into mike marcola and he basically became interested and worked with steve knight of driver night kind of defining what the market was going to be like it was computers for home things basically doing um recipes and keeping tracks of songs on databases and writing your checkbook and these are real things that people do in the home and you know and it was hard to say it was a large market didn't sound you know that big but that's what we were starting he was willing to put in 250 000 and own a third of the company equal to steve and i and i had to leave finally he told me you'll have to leave hewlett-packard and i said wait a minute i've designed two computers i've written a basic designed all these interfaces and peripherals in a year and i worked and i did it moonlighting why can't i keep my secure job for life at hewlett-packard i decided i wanted to be an engineer for life and never get into the political side of companies and and why can't i keep my secure job and just do this on the side no you got to decide you have to leave hewlett-packard and there was a date in february we had to meet in this cabana and give my answer went up to that good money i thought and fought and searched inside and went up to the quanya and i said no i like designing computers i like writing neat software and i can do that anyway but i'm going to keep my job at hewlett packard he says okay and steve went into a frenzy and got all my friends my parents to call me and finally and finally one person called alan actually and one person called and convinced me that it was okay to start a company you didn't have to feel like running it i was too embarrassed i just didn't feel like it i didn't talk the way steve and mike spoke they spoke about you know the the markets and a lot of business terms and and i just want to design products and i would just be swamped and have no place in a company running it i was scared actually of that and i just got conv he convinced me that another person said it's okay to be an engineer and nothing else and just start the company to make money so that's what i did and i quit hewlett-packard that day and it was a big deal to give up my job you know the company that i loved so much back then um in the early days of these personal computers the apple ii came out and we were so different we had color we had good keyboards we had graphics and sound and expandability and we eventually we could add things like floppyness the pet the commodore pet and the trs-80 were the other two completely built out of the box ready for the home user computers and they sold for a lot less they didn't cost a lot less to build especially when they came with a monitor and everything tv monitor built in but um they were out there and eventually it came time that well we wrote a bunch of programs we wrote a flag all our programs were on cassette tapes one program was a flashcard program and largely been inspired by mike markla who had a lot experience with young kids and had nine-year-old daughter at the time and we wrote a checkbook program but it took a couple of minutes to read the checkbook program in off a cassette tape and then it took a couple of minutes to read your checks in and then you modify one and takes a couple of minutes to write them back out it's kind of a long boring procedure that really isn't satisfactory so we needed a couple of things and one of them was we needed a floppy disk drive for speed and i had never been close to a floppy disk drive or a floppy disk controller or any of those designs but you know i kind of knew what sort of signals you got to put into something to you know right onto magnetic tape and get it back out so i sat down you know one weekend started working on an idea i'd had back at hewlett-packard with this new 8-bit shift-register chip and just put this little scheme together to read and write data and it was like five chips and then i called in a friend and we worked every day we had this deal where we could go to ces if we got it done in time and so we came in every day including christmas and new year's day randy wiggins high school programmer was doing this with me and he was doing programming we brought it up and we got it to the point we could actually read and write tracks of data and we had this thing working and then i said well it's not a disk controller it can read and write data but it's not a disk controller because disk controllers have 50 chips and it just doesn't have enough chips to be at this controller i don't know what they do so i bought got a disk controller from a company north star or someone and i went through their manual and i looked at their schematic and started figuring out how their schematic worked and for the end i figured out that mine actually did more than theirs did with fewer parts and and also it was kind of neat to just take the shoeguard board they wanted all these signals coming in in a certain structured way bypassed all their chips and said let's just send the signal straight over to the motor drivers and skip all that skipped like 15 of their chips and cut our board down to eight chips in the end once we had uh track stepping and all now one night you know i went by that time apple was a little larger company we were having a lot of success and i went over to the engineering department i said who lays out the pc boards well that company was kind of busy this week doing another board up you know a serial card or something i said great i'll lay it out myself you know you just want to do that so i got got the the clear plastic and the red tape and started taping together you know putting down chip layouts and putting the tape in place finish the thing i work every night i'd work till two three four in the morning the two houston brother technicians would leave at two and i'd still be there at three and man we went one staff meeting and steve jobs turned to me and said said why you're coming in at noon every day you're coming in late you know yeah um so so anyway uh i got all done with this layout of a pc board the first one i've ever done in my life and i realized by this point in time that i would have had three fewer crossovers where you have to put a hole through the board and cross something over three fewer crossovers on this two-sided pc board if i had only by accident chosen to have the shift register go left to right instead of right to left and all the other pins worked out to just exchange in a couple places so i took it all apart and relayed it out had to have that perfection and save three little feed-through holes you kind of do that when you're you know when you have the right feeling about something hours the hours don't matter and the quality does okay along came visicalc about the same time now okay we've added a floppy disk drive commodore had no way to add a floppy disk drive they had a serial port that was like a modem speed and they could try to talk to a floppy disk through it it was a horrible messy expensive way to go and the trs-80 had no input output ports they couldn't even expand their ram beyond 8k bytes well we we need you know floppy disk comes along you need more than eight kbit just for an operating system so we were the only computer could have an operating system and we and we did and we created a disk operating system for our floppy and then we put visit calc on it the world went crazy all these computer stores small businessmen were coming in and seeing they could line up sets of numbers and do comparisons so fast and it was almost like the feeling i'd had about writing a game in software you could play with so many options that you could never think of trying in hardware it's like they had that ability now and now these little small computers could do more than the big computers at the corporations and that's why they started moving in so overnight oh all the stores people would come in i want to buy an apple ii and visit calc it was the only computer it ran on the apple 2 and visicow so we started getting this mode of thinking that a solution is what people want they really want to solve a problem with numbers they don't care about the hardware they have or software but they need hardware and software together that makes that solution we also saw the market going very much in the business direction and we decided to pursue it with the apple 3 being more designed for business people more of a closed machine with fewer slots the only argument stephen i ever had was over a number of slots he wanted to and i wanted eight so we're going to finally get down to two now the apple iii marketing was getting a lot of prominence in the company and they did some things you know that i still i can understand but i can't understand and one of the things was well we've got to make sure that the world by knows the apple 3 is for business and the apple ii is for games and so in this machine that's going to be the apple 3 that you can boot it up as an apple iii or an apple ii apple ii because you can run multitudes of software that were in all the stores if you booted up as an apple ii we had to put in extra chips to disable as many characters on the screen and to disable the extra ram to make it look like less so we'll put in chips to make it worse and it's i tell it is a funny story um in the end and in the end the apple 3 never really went it was a big failure everybody's using apple twos it had caught on to masses and there were lots of software and it was easy to design peripherals in software four and the ibm pc came out and boy they had into companies they just put the ibm pc on the same same sheets that they they sold their big computers on and um so they have the arm to take over the business market and the the company it's funny because one of the things is we had this big huge successful computer that had made us this huge great company the apple ii and for three years 1980 to 1983 it was the largest selling computer in the world and in those three years we didn't advertise it we had full page ads in newsweek and time and everything and they always advertise the apple iii everybody in the company had an apple three on their desk everybody was working for this product the apple three and it never went and you know a fair accounting would have shown an unbelievably high loss for that one product but the company was just raking in so much money with a successful product that it was easy to kind of hide and cover up um that's over the years okay i don't want to go any further because we've taken so much time i'm not going to lead up into you know macintosh design stories and being around that i think it's time for questions and answers i think you've had enough of me for a while here so anybody let's see what we got thanks as you might imagine there are plenty of questions that have accumulated but i'm actually going to take the mc's prerogative to ask the first question i love your story about building your own computer and starting with the chips and doing the design i spoke to a kid the other day who said he just finished building his own computer and when i pressed them it turned out he bought a motherboard and he plugged in the disk drive and he plugged in the keyboard and that was building a computer he didn't know the first thing about digital design is that a problem is digital design going to go the way of the users of slide rules or should people still learn digital design it's only a problem for it's only a problem for those of us who experienced being for the fun of being able to buy your own parts and build your own computer up and it's getting a little hard to do that now it's getting hard to do all types of electronics now but it's only a problem in our own mind in other words the kids who grow up now they've got their games and their own things they get expert at and their online chat rooms and their their their pdas and their game machines so they've got it they've still got a world uh if you have any other questions by the way continue to fill out your cards and hand them into the collectors and we'll get to as many of them as we can what is the super wozniak integrated machine and what does it do um in in the days of apple that i was trying to describe the early days there were about five of us that ran the company for two years steve jobs and myself and mike markle who joined us and ran marketing we also had a president who took the took us from the start to when the company went public mike scott not very many people hear his name but he had a kind of a rather important role and um and we also and also rod holt was an analog engineer now the first digital engineer we hired was wendell sander okay and wendell sander came in and he designed this thing called the integrated was the super integrated was integrated machine or swim or whatever it was called and um basically it was just an integration of my disk design yeah i don't know why that question comes up a lot um okay are you still friends with the other steve how often do you see each other socially um yes i don't see him socially like all the time maybe you know once a year um as often as i want we talk on the phone more often than that though and it's always yeah always pleasant i've never had an argument with him what except for the number of slots oh except for the number of slots well the number of slots i said okay go get another computer how important were don valentine and sequoia capital to the building of apple i can't remember i didn't pay close enough attention to that hank smith i forget his name his company was the one that we were really pursuing for our first venture money which was three hundred thousand dollars a little ways in to uh running with the apple ii at hp which calculated trip chips did you work on did you write any of the firmware or were you just doing the digital design i did not do any framework here packard i was around the people that did it i did just digital design on the arithmetic and registered ships how long did it take to write the basic for the apple one the basic for the apple one was the hardest project of the entire apple one or apple ii or any of the projects i took on by itself i had no idea i'd never written a language before and it probably took me a six man months but probably happened over about four months do you have any other basic interpreters to look at or were you starting from scratch i had no other interpreters to look at i'd never done one in my life i'd never seen one i just started from scratch and i had actually sat in classes way back in college days and tried to learn how in assembly language on it with nova code to write a fortran compiler some of the starting steps so i thought about it what was your hardest lesson that you learned the hardest lesson that i learned gosh i don't know how to interpret that sorry can't answer that one um what did you mean when you said that by accident you chose the right 4k ram um the intel ram was very very fortunate because it was the it was the only one of the three 4k rams that were introduced that became the same pin out when the 16 came rams came along and the 64k rams so the pin outs you could actually plug 16k or 4k rams into our apple ii boards and we have these little plug-in adapters that you'd plug it in to tell it what kind of rams you had used um we had a huge ram advantage we could expand we had three rows of rams i mean commodore and the pet had no ram expansion they were stuck at 4k or 8k bytes and we could go up to 48k bytes on the motherboard and then we had all these slots what became of your ham radio career are you still in back in back in those days you got a ham radio license let's see and uh a novice license was one year uh wd6 vly wa6 bmd i remember my two codes um and then later in high school i got a five year technician license but these were licenses that expired back and then it was a different world too because built my own transmitter and receiver some um helicrafters real nice gear but that you solder every tube socket in and every transistor and every capacit there are no transistors every capacitor and and you bolt the whole thing together it was a build-it-yourself job so it was real good training what projects are you working on these days oh i gotta i got i'm actually i have not been working in so long i get asked that question all the time and i say not really working on things kind of working with schools so got a company we're developing some technologies i'm not free to talk about it because other people are going to sell products i'd be stomping on them if i started trying to advertise a product that's not really going to be from our own company plus there are other people that own this company and it's not the time to talk about what we're doing it's their money do you have any regrets about your decision to leave apple any regrets about my decision to leave apple um not at all i didn't really leave apple um necessarily i still get a small salary i have never ever been off the payroll just out of loyalty i've never had run-ins i never had what they made it sound like i was upset once the wall street journal wrote an article that got copied because it was a national journal got copied and every book's ever been published that i had some gripes about apple and quit no i one time i had a plane crash and i realized this was the last chance in my life to go to college so i went back to college instead of work and put on some us festivals some rock and roll shows i'm so glad i was here i am so thankful i was here to do that um and then another time another time i want to start a little company with a neat idea because i need a little idea build a programmable remote control that you can press button you can operate several different pieces of equipment and push a button and execute a sequence of of commands in a row a whole bunch of different irs would come out to and it was a neat idea and i just wanted to go do that and i worked showed apple on blackboard what i was going to do got written notes that it wasn't competitive and i still stayed on apple's payroll you know so i don't know i never really i left i'm obviously not there but in my heart i am what do you think are the next big things in technology what comes next um i don't like to be one of these predictor-type people i know some people i'm around others that do it extremely well and they know what's going on i saw when i was in apple that if i tried to predict what was going to happen in our field in the next year i knew it because we were doing it and if i tried to predict two years ahead i was always wrong new things came from left field that i never could have predicted and the world turned out a lot differently and what standards and what ways that people use their computers changed so much two years out i just don't want to predict i mean it's just too scary to try to predict you can predict real general things you know based on based on just assuming that yeah we're going to have a chip that can have 500 movies on it someday and hold it in our hands and what does that mean but you know but i don't like to go into these outer space predictions so i'm sorry you don't need to predict you're already part of history and you've done enough retroactive predicting by creating the personal computer revolution or helping to so uh thank you they didn't predict that thank you for coming thank you i'll be happy to talk to people she said he'd be happy to talk to people if you want to come around and sit down super super bad for the mexican pastor oh what have we got we had a small gift for you to remember your evening here today oh excellent all right

Channel: Computer History Museum

Views: 120,348

Keywords: Computer, History, Steve, Wozniak, Woz, Apple

Id: rJ8IgX8RikM

Length: 90min 56sec (5456 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2007