Apple II

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher  · 9 Jul 2018  · 611pp  · 188,732 words

the sheen of legend. Doug Engelbart’s 1968 demonstration of his new computer system is known as the Mother of All Demos. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have become archetypes: the Genius Entrepreneur and the Genius Engineer. Collectively, these tales serve as the Valley’s distinctive folklore. They are the stories

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MacNiven: And that allowed us to turn switches on and off even faster, faster-faster-faster. In the binary world, on/off is very important. Steve Wozniak: William Shockley invented the transistor and that was going to be the growing industry. Andy Hertzfeld: In some ways Silicon Valley itself was an accident

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that an operator has. Steve Jobs: It was miraculous. Blue boxing, it was called. R. U. Sirius: It was an idea that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Lee Felsenstein at the Homebrew Computer Club loved. That’s the connection between the hacker culture and the counterculture going all the way back

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Brad Templeton: As a personal computing nerd, I think of Nolan Bushnell as the first round. Yes, there was much stuff before: There was Fairchild. Steve Wozniak: Engelbart! When you get to computers, Engelbart is great. Brad Templeton: But I count Atari actually as the beginning. Don Valentine: Steve Jobs was the

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. A lot of Steve’s original thinking came from Nolan. Steve Wozniak: Atari, yes, they started an industry of arcade games, but what was the first arcade game ever that was software and what was the first time it was color? The Apple II. That was a huge, huge step. Larry Brilliant: Steve

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one of the backbone models for the internet. These guys around here invented the new world. John Battelle: They also gathered around science fiction, right? Steve Wozniak: Science fiction leads to real products, but first you’ve got to deal with the laws of physics, and ask, “What’s it going to

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other lifers there, and disrupt their opportunities to advance in the organization. Those are the people that gravitate to and stay at the larger companies. Steve Wozniak: That turns me off a lot. Now your importance is measured by what company you are in and what you do. I don’t like

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of thing that grew out of hippie ethics and the Whole Earth Catalog to a mainstream belief system shared by young entrepreneurs around the world. Steve Wozniak: And they are usually young people. Look at the people who started Apple, look at the people who started Google and Facebook—very young

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end. Breakout Jobs and Woz change the game When Xerox PARC and Atari were both just getting started, so were two Silicon Valley whiz kids: Steve Wozniak and his best buddy and sometime business partner, Steve Jobs. In the spring and summer of 1972, they built and sold “blue boxes” door-

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making much money, and besides, Silicon Valley had just spawned something even more exciting than phone phreaking—Atari had just invented the video game industry. Steve Wozniak: I had a friend that worked at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, so I’d ride my bike over there and it was just open. You

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they knew that I did it. Al Alcorn: Here was Breakout in, like, forty integrated circuits. I couldn’t do Pong in less than seventy! Steve Wozniak: Atari was getting tired of their engineers designing games with 150 chips, 160 chips, 190 chips in them. Al Alcorn: And Nolan had said, “If

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get together. The first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held in 1975, and no one was more excited about it than Woz. Steve Wozniak: I realized that finally the day had come when you could buy low-enough-cost memory chips, low-enough-cost microprocessors that did enough to

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and-go around microcomputing. But the Altair was a pretty shoddy design. Steve Jobs: You didn’t even type; you threw switches that signaled characters. Steve Wozniak: A bunch of switches and lights and you can push a button and some ones and zeros go to memory? That’s geeky computer stuff

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was changing: Mainframes were not the future, and even minicomputers were just continuing to shrink very quickly. And that’s why everybody was so excited. Steve Wozniak: I’d already built a terminal that talked to faraway computers. And I just did it for fun; it was a hobby. Lee Felsenstein: The

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wasn’t like you could read Popular Electronics explaining how it worked. Steve Wozniak: I knew the analog world of color televisions well, but I had crossed over to the digital world. Andy Hertzfeld: Woz just kind of tuned the Apple II to the frequencies that the television worked on, such that it was

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Randy Wigginton: When he first started showing it at the Homebrew meetings people were amazed, because it was like this little tiny board running things. Steve Wozniak: Color in those days was very complicated analog stuff—hardware circuits with feedback and resistors and capacitors and inductors. Andy Hertzfeld: It was an incredible

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as the rest of the computer pretty much. But Woz designed it to use a standard color television set, which could be gotten very cheaply. Steve Wozniak: It made it possible for a little one-dollar chip to generate color instead of a thousand-dollar color-generation board. Lee Felsenstein: Nobody had

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hardware to do all that vector generation and phasing and so forth. Andy Hertzfeld: It was the single cleverest thing in the Apple II. That was one of the first revolutions. Steve Wozniak: And then I thought, I wonder if I can write a game that’s playable with my slow BASIC? Dan Kottke

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gave you the feeling that anything was possible, if you were just clever enough. That’s what the main lesson of the Apple II is: that it had infinite horizons. Steve Wozniak: So I programmed Breakout, and in half an hour I had tried a hundred variations that would have taken me ten years

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processors looked like hell. Alan Kay: But Apple was starting to get interesting. Not because there was anything interesting about the Apple II. The thing that was really interesting was the spreadsheet. Steve Wozniak: VisiCalc was the killer app. Alan Kay: We had almost invented the spreadsheet at Xerox PARC, but none of us

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productivity of people who did who use that kind of tool—enormously. Butler Lampson: It was a success of the Apple II and VisiCalc that created the whole personal computer industry, really. Steve Wozniak: The Apple II was the only one of those computers, the three of them that existed, that had enough memory to run

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Hawkins: We were not complete strangers to bitmapped graphics, because Apple II had them. It’s just what you could do with them on an Apple II was kind of limited. Trip Hawkins: What PARC had was completely innovative thinking about the entire user experience. Steve Wozniak: Multiple windows on the same computer screen? When I

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Tesler: And Apple ended up getting all this technology, improving on it. Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs felt that Xerox had this great technology, but Apple was the one who could make it cheap and affordable—like Woz had done with the Apple II. Dan Kottke: The graphical interface with the mouse and windows? That

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except Jef Raskin. Dan Kottke: Jef’s outlook on the world was tiny, friendly machines—like a home appliance. Jef was completely obsessed with that. Steve Wozniak: Jef is the one who brought that idea to us. Andy Hertzfeld: The Mac was initially a skunkworks. At the time it was not an

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board says, “Well, then we will run an Apple II spot.” So they went to the vault and looked at them but none of them were relevant. So reluctantly they said, “All right, run it.” And it was shown on the Super Bowl. Steve Wozniak: And there’s Big Brother on the television saying

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death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail! Andy Hertzfeld: It was clearly an allegory. Most commercials aren’t allegorical. Steve Wozniak: You know, kind of like IBM World: “Everybody has to have the identical thought. Contrary thoughts will not be tolerated.” And then the young track

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’t want anyone fooling with that. I don’t want anyone hacking into that product and changing it—because then it won’t be mine. Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Hackers frequently want to look at code, like operating systems, listings, and the like, to learn how it was done

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: Wozniak made the point that there’s a whole bunch of work creating a piece of software that does something useful and actually works well. Steve Wozniak (at the Hackers Conference): Information should be free—but your time should not. Stewart Brand: So, putting these things out for free is kind

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was to sell fifty thousand machines in the first hundred days, and it exceeded that. But then starting in the fall, sales started dropping off. Steve Wozniak: It just didn’t have any software at first. Fred Davis: MacPaint and MacWrite were like demo programs. They weren’t real tools that you

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what they were calling the Advanced Technology Group. It was really an R&D group, a lab. Steve Perlman: We were building a color Macintosh. Steve Wozniak: The Mac wasn’t ever really selling until we introduced the Macintosh II in ’87. It had color. Larry Tesler: One of the things that

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ll go on the board, and eventually the board will recognize that I’m a better CEO than Gil Amelio and I’ll become CEO.” Steve Wozniak: We bought NeXT because they had a real operating system and we desperately needed an operating system. Steve didn’t understand what an operating system

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put “a thousand songs in your pocket”? Where are you getting a thousand songs? Jon Rubinstein: People were stealing music, yes, no question about it. Steve Wozniak: Then Steve did a strange thing. Ron Johnson: Several members of the executive team, most notably Phil Schiller, and probably Jon Rubinstein, convinced Steve to

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Music crosses cultures, and operating systems, and everything that was limiting the growth of Apple. It was a big thing. Steve Wozniak: Apple didn’t grow in size ever over the Apple II days until the iPod. And it didn’t grow in size when he introduced the iMac. It all started with the

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that when we’re not competing with a monopoly, Apple could win, because we got up to almost 90 percent market share on music players. Steve Wozniak: The openness made our revenues double, our profits double, our stock double—and the board gave him billions of dollars in stock and eight jet

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Google came along and said, “We’re doing Android.” So what’s the difference? Android was going to allow people to download third-party apps. Steve Wozniak: The first iPhone did not have the App Store. Guy Bar-Nahum: Steve panicked, and literally all of a sudden everything clicks through his head

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-Nahum: And then because of Google, Apple was pushed into putting apps on the iPhone. And then apps became the way people touched the web. Steve Wozniak: People ask me, “What Apple product has changed your life the most?” There were times when I said, “The iPhone,” but it’s definitely

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fundamentally guided every hardware design, every software design; his fingerprints were all over everything that was done. These were his products; we were his tools. Steve Wozniak: He made sure every little detail was right for the phone that he himself used. He had a really good mind for elegance and simplicity

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his inner circle, but I was in the next ring, and we had an incredible relationship and had many intimate, deep conversations about spiritual issues. Steve Wozniak: Near the end of his life he seemed very changed and he really, he was going back in his mind thinking about those early times

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there. People that Steve had butted heads with. They were there. Dan Kottke: I was not invited. Alvy Ray Smith: I wasn’t invited. Steve Wozniak: I did not go. John Markoff: The crowd was really kind of stunning. It was sort of an affair of state, a Silicon Valley affair

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living food because the planet would be better off in the long run if you only ate living food. And it was a great conversation. Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs was very different before we started Apple. Personality settles in around age twenty. So, going to India was before that. When we

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and preemptory and harsh. But seventeen thousand people worked for him and would have killed to continue working for him, because he made them better. Steve Wozniak: But people close to Steve had to deal with just wrong behavior. Jon Rubinstein: Steve had all kinds of issues, but he had a bunch

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mixed reality. Nolan Bushnell: All of this is on a continuum, and right now augmented reality is a little bit harder than virtual reality, technically. Steve Wozniak: Because of Moore’s law, we always have more bits and more speed to handle those more bits on the screen. Well, we now have

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there’s going to be all kinds of societal and philosophical and governmental and ethical issues that are going to arise, just like with AI. Steve Wozniak: Hundreds of years downstream machines will be a superior species, but what will we humans be doing? Can a human be satisfied just being taken

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in the seventies. Crunch was a phone phreak, a hacker that specialized in breaking into AT&T’s phone network. His bravado inspired a young Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to go into business together selling blue boxes—illegal gizmos that could turn anyone into a phreak. Eddy Cue is the Apple

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on, it created a firestorm of controversy over the ethics of downloading copyrighted music. Lee Felsenstein ran the Homebrew Computer Club, the place that inspired Steve Wozniak to build his own computer and where Apple got its start. The club spawned dozens of computer companies, and Felsenstein designed the hardware for two

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Later he joined Apple to help launch the original iPod. Today he’s an executive at Facebook, living in London. Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple, the company most responsible for bringing the personal computer to the masses. Jobs didn’t manage to gain full control of his company

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a new calling as one of the first-ever computer animators, eventually cofounding Pixar with Ed Catmull. Burrell Smith was to the Macintosh what Steve Wozniak was to the Apple II—the hardware genius who made the machine fast, cheap, and sexy. After the Macintosh launched, Smith founded a company, Radius, with Andy

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Alan Kay, left for Apple. Later she, too, went to Apple in order to run Apple’s research project in multimedia. Steve Wozniak, aka Woz, was the technical genius behind the Apple II, the everyman machine that launched the personal computer revolution in 1977. At the time the two Steves—Jobs and Woz—were

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His Early Video Game Spacewar!”Larry Tesler’s quotes in this chapter and others are from the Computer History Museum’s 2013 oral history. Breakout Steve Wozniak’s quotes in this chapter and others are drawn from an in-depth personal interview that he gave to me, as well as two archival

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Atkinson’s quotes are from an August 2012 Berkeley Cybersalon event on the creation and legacy of Hypercard. Doug Carlson’s, Robert Woodhead’s, and Steve Wozniak’s quotes from the Hackers Conference are as reported in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link Ram Dass’s quotes

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee  · 13 May 2025  · 377pp  · 138,306 words

cost and better distribution for every computer they sold. Apple’s survival was testament to the twin and somewhat contradictory forces of its founders. The Steve Wozniak–led Apple II computer, released in 1977, was the first personal computer to define a standard for others to follow, and it would be Apple’s number

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Apple. Or rather, Microsoft had. The small software start-up had been a critical partner in the late 1970s, writing a programming language for the Apple II. But Microsoft spent a decade mimicking the Macintosh OS for IBM and other PCs, culminating in Windows 95. It hardly mattered that Windows was less

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misunderstood what he saw. In the months before, at just five years old, Apple was an early leader in the nascent personal computer market. The Apple II desktop had carved out a sizable market share and had a reputation for simplicity and elegance. IBM, forty times larger than Apple, didn’t make

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both software and hardware. Apple itself could have played this dominant role; in fact, it had played this role. At the behest of Steve Wozniak—overruling Jobs—the Apple II featured an open architecture with eight expansion slots and a floppy drive. This allowed third-party software and hardware companies to build applications for

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tool, VisiCalc, the first “killer app” for personal computers. Along with EasyWriter, an early word processor, VisiCalc helped transform the Apple II from a plaything to a workhorse. The openness of the Apple II was a unique feature and proved critical to its success. Big Blue wouldn’t release its first home computer, the

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for their computers, while RadioShack, a retail leader, barred developers from selling competitors’ software in its stores. As historian Laine Nooney puts it in The Apple II Age, “Apple’s robust system and hands-off approach” created a market “for the very nontechnical customers Apple would need in order to dominate the

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industry.” By the end of 1983, the Apple II “had the largest library of programs of any microcomputer on the market—just over two thousand—meaning that its users could interact with the fullest

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conversation with Mike Markkula, Apple’s chairman, where the two expressed their frustration at the rise of hardware and software groups building businesses around the Apple II. They asked each other: “Why should we allow people to make money off of us? Off of our innovations?” An attendee of the meeting would

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little gold legs and setting the stage for future short circuits—but she was cheap, methodical and, most of all, available.” For the more popular Apple II, a small team took all the parts and separated them into little kits. Every few days they gave the kits to a Los Altos housewife

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undocumented Mexicans. “No one ever mentioned minimum wage, or Social Security, or workplace safety laws,” Malone writes. “And thus, for more than a year, the Apple II, promoted as the machine to liberate people from the slavery of bureaucracies and office work, was in fact being partially assembled in sweatshops.” IBM, by

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, its relationship with one Japanese company had saved the Macintosh from what might have been an embarrassing failure. When Apple launched what it viewed as Apple II’s successor, the Mac, on January 24, 1984, its graphical user interface—a way of interacting with visual icons, windows, and drag and drop rather

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building of a $20 million state-of-the-art factory in Fremont to produce one Mac every twenty-seven seconds—versus six minutes for the Apple II. But when components didn’t come in on time, production shut down for weeks. And Mac volumes didn’t reach the levels needed for the

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took some weeks to realize that Macs were piling up across retail channels, unsold. Customers had instead purchased half a billion dollars’ worth of the Apple II. Demand for the Mac was so underwhelming that Jobs and Sculley declined to break out sales by product line when they delivered earnings to Wall

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furious. For years he’d dealt with Jobs’s antics that treated anyone working on the Apple II as a “bozo.” So when the company kept secret the dominant role the Apple II was now playing in its earnings, Woz called up Sculley and accused him of deceiving shareholders. If the Mac was going

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capacity than it would ever need. The poor decisions highlight the difficult-to-grasp nature of his peculiar genius. Whereas the brilliance of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was tangible—he could disassemble a computer, then rebuild it to work faster and with fewer parts—Jobs lacked such practical skills. But through instinct

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.fm/episodes/microsoft. His fear was that IBM: Malone, Infinite Loop, 225. “killer app”: Malone, Infinite Loop, 223. “Apple’s robust system”: Laine Nooney, The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. third-party developers as freeloaders: Malone, Infinite Loop, 197. a dollar for every

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at, 150–52 Super Bowl ad of, 383–84 Think Different campaign of, 49–50, 68, 94, 212, 384 Apple I, 23 Apple II, 19, 20, 22–24, 27–29 Apple II Age, The (Nooney), 22 Apple Intelligence, 379–81 Apple Pay, 293 Apple product production, 2, 9, 19, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

by Emmanuel Goldstein  · 28 Jul 2008  · 889pp  · 433,897 words

be using their special software. This means that you can’t even subscribe unless your computer is one of the popular series that they support (Apple II, Atari, Commodore 64, Compaq, and IBM compatible). On top of that, there’s your personal password that you have to fork over each time you

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switch. An example of a simple War Games program is listed at the end of this article. This program was written for use with an Apple II+ and a Hayes Micromodem. The operation of the program is very slow but other faster versions of this are available to the system hacker. Other

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outcry over the hacker raids this spring has been the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Founded by computer industry giants Mitch Kapor and Steve Wozniak along with writer John Barlow, the EFF 501 94192c13.qxd 6/3/08 3:34 PM Page 502 502 Chapter 13 sought to put an

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were no visible computers and the government still decided who had ARPANET access. Around then, the first ads started appearing for Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s Apple II—a useful configuration cost the same as taking a family to Europe (or the United States if you’re European). A real physical computer like

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kind of person I am, or what kind of employee I am. Many youths do stupid things that aren’t necessarily injurious to anyone. Before Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer, they “cheated” the phone company with a device called a “blue box” while in college at Berkeley, CA

Apple: The First 50 Years

by David Pogue  · 10 Mar 2026  · 686pp  · 216,944 words

also some fantastic origin stories, which did. I learned, along the way, a few eyebrow-raisers: Apple didn’t start in a garage. Apple was Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs’s fourth business venture. There was a third founder. Steve Jobs was not Apple’s first CEO—nor its second, third, or

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unlimited potential for the Apple II. Jobs, on the other hand, couldn’t see why anyone would need more than two: one for a printer, one for a modem. More slots, he said, would add size, cost, and complexity. What ensued was the Steves’ very first argument. Ordinarily, Steve Wozniak was, as many have

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Chuck Peddle, whom Woz had met two years earlier at WESCON. Peddle, now working for Commodore, invited the Steves to present the Apple II to his bosses. They, too, declined; the Apple II seemed too similar to the company’s own upcoming machine, the Commodore PET, a computer without color, sound, or graphics. (

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at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire was MITS—the maker of the Altair computer that had ignited the hobbyist movement in the first place. Steve Wozniak thought MITS’s absence was odd—and the perfect setup for a prank. Following the success of the Altair, a chipmaker called Zilog had been

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easy to reach (left). The box included simple paddles for controlling games: one button, one knob. Staffing Up Apple was doubling the number of Apple II’s it manufactured every three months. Every computer shop in America wanted to become a dealer. For Mike Scott, the challenge was hiring enough people

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.” Apple’s tiny engineering team now included Woz, Rod Holt, and Fairchild veteran Wendell Sander. They threw themselves into designing optional add-ons for the Apple II’s slots: printer cards, communications cards, ROM cards, and so on. Bandley 1 By the end of 1977, the company could no longer squeeze

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constructing its own new buildings, it would occupy what it called Bandley 1 through Bandley 6—numbered in order of acquisition, not location. Apple II Evolves By 1978, the Apple II had become a cultural phenomenon: hailed in the press, available even in department stores, and adored by the public. It was the bestselling

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“007” on his badge, so he designated himself Employee #7. In the end, then, the first ten Apple employee badges were: 0. Steve Jobs 1. Steve Wozniak 3. Mike Markkula 4. Bill Fernandez 5. Rod Holt 6. Randy Wigginton 7. Mike Scott 8. Chris Espinosa 9. Jim Martindale (manufacturing manager) 10. Sherry

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, however, wouldn’t accept zero as an employee number. To Bank of America’s computer, Jobs would always be Employee #2. Dealers regularly complained. Apple II owners complained. And most important, Markkula complained. He was, after all, a coder himself. Every time he wanted to use the checkbook program he’d

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pocket radios, the VCR, and the CB radio had all made their debuts at CES. Unfortunately, CES was only four weeks away. Disk II Neither Steve Wozniak nor Rod Holt had any meaningful experience with disk storage. But Woz was no ordinary engineer. This challenge was his favorite kind: a ridiculously big

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single, uniform set of commands). Best of all, the Apple III would be backward-compatible with the Apple II. Four slots would handle Apple II cards, and an emulation mode (simulator) would run any of thousands of Apple II programs. From the beginning, though, project leader Wendell Sander had to confront two colossal engineering and design

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bought the chips from National Semiconductor, which failed to conduct standard burn-in tests.) The Apple II emulator was an amazing achievement, capable of running thousands of Apple II programs. But in Apple II mode, you couldn’t use many popular Apple II cards, you couldn’t run any games that relied on quirky disk formats and hardware

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interaction conventions over three years, detail by detail, establishing the modern computer interface of every Mac and Windows machine that followed. 68000 People adored the Apple II, but few would say it was intuitive to use; you still had to type out commands. Jobs intended the Lisa to be revolutionary in

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It didn’t seem especially revolutionary to Jobs—nor to Jef Raskin. Raskin, a writer, artist, opera conductor, and computer-interaction expert, had written the Apple II user manual in 1976. Now, as Apple’s director of publications, he remembered having seen something inspiring a few years earlier during a visit to

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another shock—one that shook its employees on a much more personal level. Steve Wozniak hadn’t been a big player on the Apple III or Lisa projects. His baby had always been the Apple II—and its June 1979 descendant, the Apple II Plus. It came with a full 48 KB of memory, Microsoft’s

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size in 1983,” Jobs would say. “We went from $583 million in 1982 to something like $980 million in sales. It was almost all Apple II–related.” The Apple II was now six years old. Apple had spent five of those years—and $110 million—trying to design its successor. Twice, Apple thought it

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as the average person’s amanuensis, meaning personal assistant. Raskin wasn’t the first person to think small, simple, and cheap. At Markkula’s suggestion, Steve Wozniak had already begun designing a $500 game machine code-named Annie, to compete with Atari’s products. But Woz never finished designing Annie. The plane

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date for the Macintosh—January 1982, a year away. He needed a team of superstars—a small team. He started with some heroes of the Apple II project, including Rod Holt, Dan Kottke, Randy Wigginton, industrial designer Jerry Manock, and programmer and writer Chris Espinosa. Joanna Hoffman had been working on

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University of California, Berkeley Apple: 1979–1984 After Apple: Radius, General Magic, Eazel, Google As a grad student, Hertzfeld wrote a program that gave the Apple II lowercase letters. Apple nearly bought it—and then hired him instead. But Black Wednesday, CEO Mike Scott’s unexpected round of firings, so rattled Hertzfeld

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the driver’s side, head in the passenger side. An ambulance took Atkinson to Los Gatos Community Hospital. Eventually, he regained consciousness, but—much like Steve Wozniak the previous year—he developed amnesia. “So I’m inside this brain, and I’m feeling retrograde amnesia come on,” he says. “You know the

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November, Microsoft had announced its own graphic interface software for IBMs and compatibles, something called Windows. IBM PCs and clones were greatly outselling even the Apple II. BusinessWeek’s October 1983 cover bore the devastating headline “And the Winner Is… IBM.” “It is now 1984,” Jobs continued. “IBM wants it all,

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sustain me through the realities of actually working on the 128K Mac.” Apple Fellows In 1983, Apple’s leadership was seeking a way to honor Steve Wozniak, who’d returned to Apple after two years away. They made him an Apple Fellow: a prestigious title to acknowledge important work for the company

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of $17.2 million—the first quarterly loss in Apple’s history—and then announced a new organizational chart. No longer would there be separate Apple II and Mac divisions, each with its own sales, marketing, manufacturing, and product-development infrastructures. Now it would be two divisions: a newly merged marketing

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absolute disaster,” Sculley says. Part of the problem was that Sculley had reorganized the company along functional lines (sales, marketing, product) instead of product lines (Apple II, Macintosh), and the changes affected every single employee. Everyone was being moved into new buildings, reporting to new bosses. In 12 months, Apple had experienced

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Mac functions), HyperCard (software construction kit for nonprogrammers), PlainTalk (speech recognition), and the Newton’s handwriting software (another story). Apple IIgs By 1986, three million Apple II’s occupied desks in homes and schools all over the world. Its design was now ten years old. Sculley had learned his lesson about letting

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it was dangerous business. How do you incorporate all the advances in processors, color, and sound without breaking the quirky circuitry that 10,000 existing Apple II programs relied on? How do you move forward while maintaining backward compatibility? The answer turned out to be the Mega II. Apple IIgs Sold: September

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compared with the similarly equipped Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Then there was the awkward fact that the IIgs was only mostly compatible with existing Apple II software (95 percent) and hardware (80 percent). Bill Gates, after seeing a demo, announced that Microsoft would be making no new programs for it.

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, 10 percent engineer—yet he’d now been handed the reins to Apple’s engineering organization. He found himself stepping in between two warring divisions: Apple II and Macintosh. The street that separated their buildings earned the nickname “the DMZ.” “You ventured across it only at your peril,” Sculley remembers. “The

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hidden in software, buried by the programmers in such a way that only the savvy know how to trigger it. Since the day Steve Wozniak buried “Woz” in the Apple II’s first ROMs, Apple’s engineers have been brilliant Easter eggers. In 1982, after a company called Franklin Computer had illegally produced an

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team, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, and Joanna Hoffman. From the System 7 team, Phil Goldman, Bruce Leak, and Darin Adler. From the Apple II and III projects, Wendell Sander and Walt Broedner. General Magic would create a prototype, then license the software, called Magic Cap, to other companies, much

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Independence Day star Jeff Goldblum! Broadway legend Gregory Hines! Comedian Sinbad! Celebrity airplane designer Burt Rutan! Rock star Peter Gabriel! And then, at the finale: Steve Wozniak! The two Steves would be onstage together for the first time in years. Chahil would then unveil the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, a stunningly thin, vertical

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back to Apple had been a good idea. Jobs began by acknowledging some of Apple’s original leaders in the crowd: Mike Markkula, Mike Scott, Steve Wozniak, plus Andy Hertzfeld and many of the original Mac team. Then he recapped for the audience Apple’s progress in the ten months since he

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responsible for.” Finally, it was time. The 4,000 Expo attendees were stoked. Among them: the entire iPhone crew, along with Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team. Jobs looked thin, a result of the cancer surgery and subsequent medications. “Today, we’re introducing three revolutionary products,” he

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days after that, hundreds of special and famous friends attended a memorial service at a Stanford University church. Some, Jobs had held close: Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, Larry Ellison, Pixar’s John Lasseter. With others, he’d had a spikier relationship: Bill Gates, Google founder Larry Page, Michael Dell, Adobe’s

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, Jobs always argued, offers a better experience, greater security and reliability, and tighter integration of features. But the evidence was mostly against him. The Apple II, with its slots, was a mega-bestseller; the closed Mac was not. The iPhone became a culture-changing hit only after Apple opened it up

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Bill Hambrecht, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Guy Kawasaki, Larry Kenyon, Daniel Kottke, Dan’l Lewin, Jerry Manock, Jeff Moffatt, Mike Murray, Charles Pfister, Paul Terrell, Steve Wozniak, Del Yocam. Interregnum: Gil Amelio, Fred Anderson, Robert Brunner, Satjiv Chalil, Gary Davidian, Hugh Dubberly, Hartmut Esslinger, Jean-Louis Gassée, Peter Hoddie, Jon Krakower, Carlos

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Horn, Dan’l Lewin, Jerry Manock, Mike Markkula, Regis McKenna, Ike Nassi, Rich Page, Chuck Peddle, Caroline Rose, Bertrand Serlet, Larry Tesler, Avie Tevanian, and Steve Wozniak. Books Amelio, Gil, and William L. Simon. On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple. HarperBusiness, 1998. Carlton, Jim. Apple: The Inside Story of

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letters/general/91.html. CHAPTER 2: APPLE I Wozniak, ch. 10. WESCON: Charles Ingerham “Chuck” Peddle, CHMOH, June 12, 2014. Conversor 4000: Young, ch. 6; “Steve Wozniak: The Homebrew Computer Club and the Apple I,” ComputerHistory.org; Macintosh Anniversary, “Mac@30 Rod Holt, Daniel Kottke and Woz Discuss Early Apple,” YouTube, Jan

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in Koa Wood Case Fetches $500,000 at Auction,” MacRumors, Nov. 10, 2021. Ron Wayne Bows Out: Wayne, pp. 105–7. CHAPTER 4: APPLE II Wozniak, ch. 13; Apple Archive, “Apple II Forever—Apple,” YouTube, May 24, 2023; Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview (video), 2012. The Power Supply: Ray Holt, CHMOH, May 26, 2023

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Apple to Byte,” Byte, March 1978, 18. Staffing Up: Jay Yarow, “Exclusive: Interview with Apple’s First CEO Michael Scott,” Business Insider, May 24, 2011. Apple II Evolves: Wozniak, ch. 14. Badge Numbers: Yarow, “Exclusive: Interview with Apple’s First CEO Michael Scott”; Isaacson, ch. 6. Disk II: Wozniak, ch 14.

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, 136, 217, 233; Mike Markkula, CHMOH, May 1, 2012. The Plant in Fremont: Isaacson, ch. 17. Volatility: Interviews with Fred Anderson, Guy Kawasaki, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak; Sculley, p. 283; Chafkin, ch. 5; Kocienda, ch. 1; Glenn Reid, CHMOH, Nov. 9, 2022; Ray Holt, CHMOH, May 26, 2023; Triangulation 235: Bill

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Book: Interview with Hartmut Esslinger; Hartmut Esslinger, A Fine Line: How Design Strategies Are Shaping the Future of Business (Jossey-Bass, 2009). Apple IIc: Eware, “Apple II Forever,” YouTube, Oct. 14, 2007; Thomas C. Hayes, “Apple Is Banking on New Portable: The IIc Computer,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 1984; Thomas

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Association), 451 flash memory, 374, 377, 378 Flash video format, 440 flat screens, 192, 288, 289, 386–87 Flextronics, 519 Flint Center shareholder meetings Apple II vs. Macintosh teams, 163 Apple Watch demo, 483–85, 484 cloning announcement, 259–60 iMac demo, 325, 327–29, 548 iMovie demo, 331–34 Macintosh

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advertising, 31, 133 Annie project, 86 Apple I creation, 13–15, 23–6, 16, 36 Apple II add-on design, 43, 46–47, 49 Apple II creation, 26–29, 36, 42, 50, 53 on Apple II and III, 59 on Apple II programs, 44 as Apple Fellow, 146 badge number, 45 childhood and adolescence, 5–6 departure from

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might mean “review the past” and “scan ahead to the future”—exactly what this book attempts to do. Chapter 1: Two Steves Eighth-grade Woz: Steve Wozniak. Bill Fernandez’s Cream Soda: Bill Fernandez. Jobs’s boyhood home: Turtix / Shutterstock. Jobs in high school: Archivio GBB / Alamy. Woz with blue box

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: Steve Wozniak. Breakout game: Atari. Chapter 2: Apple I MOS flyer and chip: Public Domain. Apple I: Apple. Steves at Homebrew: Joe Melana / Apple / Computer History Museum

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Manock Collection. Chapter 5: In Business Apple’s first office: Google Maps. Mike Scott: Apple. West Coast Computer Faire: CHM. Apple II (left): Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried. Apple II (right): FozzTexx / Wikimedia Commons. Apple II keyboard: © Mark Richards. Courtesy of the CHM. Drive II stacked: Interfoto / Alamy. VisiCalc: apple2history.org / Wikimedia Commons. Chapter 6:

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

company of the period called itself the Itty-Bitty Machine Company (an alternative IBM); another was Kentucky Fried Computers.” Apple’s cofounder and chief engineer Steve Wozniak debuted his original Apple 1 design to a group called the Homebrew Club. Part engineering in spirit, part countercultural, the Valley nurtured a vibrant demimonde

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green lines streak across whatever important matter he is charting on his monitor. Only three words are printed across the top of the image: “Introducing Apple II.” Up to this point, computers had been synonymous with massive mainframes. The size of the machines matched the scale of the activities they modeled and

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

by Simon Sinek  · 29 Oct 2009  · 261pp  · 79,883 words

revolutionaries did not throw stones or take up arms against an authoritarian regime. Instead, they decided to beat the system at its own game. For Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, the cofounders of Apple Computer, the battlefield was business and the weapon of choice was the personal computer. The personal computer revolution

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personal computer could level the playing field and change the way the world operated. Woz designed the Apple I, and improved the technology with the Apple II, to be affordable and simple to use. No matter how visionary or how brilliant, a great idea or a great product isn’t worth much

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cause of freedom, but it was Rollin King who came up with the idea for Southwest Airlines. Steve Jobs is the rebel’s evangelist, but Steve Wozniak is the engineer who made the Apple work. Jobs had the vision, Woz had the goods. It is the partnership of a vision of the

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old friend. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy both preached in Birmingham, long before the civil rights movement took form. And Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were best friends in high school. The list goes on. To Run or To Lead For all the talented HOW-types running today’s organizations

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types who shared their beliefs, but they saw a different way to change the world that didn’t require protesting or engaging in anything illegal. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs came of age in this time. Not only was the revolutionary spirit running high in Northern California, but it was also the

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, one person could take on a corporation simply because they had the ability to use the technology.” Wozniak engineered the Apple I and later the Apple II to be simple enough for people to harness the power of the technology. Jobs knew how to sell it. Thus was born Apple Computer. A

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Bethune, Ben Comen, Randy Fowler, Christina Harbridge, Dwayne Honoré, Howard Jeruchimowitz, Guy Kawasaki, Howard Putnam, James Tobin, Acacia Salatti, Jeff Sumpter, Col. “Cruiser” Wilsbach and Steve Wozniak. Long before there was even an idea of a book, there were all the people and early adopters who wanted to learn about the WHY

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freedom: Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg, Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success. New York: Broadway, 1998. 142 Steve Wozniak is the engineer who made the Apple work: Steve Wozniak, personal interview, November 2008. 143 Bill Gates and Paul Allen went to high school together in Seattle: Randy Alfred, “April 4

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?s=WMT. Chapter 13: The Origins of a WHY 209 “The Apple gave an individual the power to do the same things as any company”: Steve Wozniak, personal interview, November 2008. 210 the two Steves made something they called the Blue Box: Nick Cantlay, “Biography: Stephen Wozniak,” The Apple Museum, http://www

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer

by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger  · 19 Oct 2014  · 459pp  · 140,010 words

, Don Tarbell, George Tate, Paul Terrell, Larry Tesler, Glenn Theodore, John Torode, Jack Tramiel, Bruce Van Natta, Jim Warren, Larry Weiss, Randy Wigginton, Margaret Wozniak, Steve Wozniak, Larry Yaeger, Greg Yob, and Pierluigi Zappacosta. Thanks to Steven Haft, producer of Pirates of Silicon Valley, for seeing the movie possibilities in the book

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hobbyists and seat-of-their-pants entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Lee Felsenstein, Alan Cooper, Steve Dompier, Gary Kildall, Gordon Eubanks, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak working after hours in garages, basements, and bedrooms. These revolutionaries fueled the revolution using their own fascination with this technology. Their story is as strange

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Commodore’s PET, a more serious machine than the MOS/Commodore KIM-1 and a formidable competitor to the Altair machines; also, Apple introduced its Apple II amid fanfare that signaled a change in the market. Selling the Company On May 22, 1977, Roberts sold MITS to Pertec, a company then specializing

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Park. Others came from towns farther south, deep in the heart of Silicon Valley—Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and San Jose—people like Allen Baum, Steve Wozniak, and Tom Pittman. Pittman had worked with Intel developing software for the company’s microprocessors and was a self-described microcomputer consultant, perhaps the first

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to be a sixer. The attendees of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley were mostly eighters, with some notable exceptions, such as the young Steve Wozniak, a clearance-sale-shopping sixer who had recently taken a job at Hewlett-Packard. Although the chips weren’t all that different in their capabilities

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assemble in fairly predictable clusters. Up front, performing for everyone, was Lee Felsenstein. Bob Marsh and the Proc Tech group usually assembled along one wall. Steve Wozniak and his protégés and the other 6502 processor fans sat in the back. Jim Warren of Dr. Dobb’s Journal sat on the aisle three

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demonstrate the capabilities of a machine. The kaleidoscopic images and changing patterns of John Horton Conway’s game of Life were popular for that reason. Steve Wozniak’s Breakout and Steve Dompier’s Target were two real games that showcased the computers well. A clever programmer such as Dompier could easily make

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hoped to succeed financially with MITS. At that point, Heiser began making plans to go his own way and started stocking other computers, including the Apple II and the PET. Dick Heiser watched the computer retailing scene change dramatically over the coming years. Discounters entered the market. They employed salespeople with no

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said. At one Homebrew meeting, a longhaired youth approached him and asked Terrell if he might be interested in a computer that a friend named Steve Wozniak had designed while working out of a garage. Steve Jobs was trying to convince Terrell to carry the Apple I. Terrell told Steve Jobs he

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expelled. At the time, the principal showed his appreciation of the joke by suspending Woz for two days. The Cream Soda Computer Soon after that, Steve Wozniak’s electronics teacher, John McCullum, decided to take him in tow. Woz clearly found high school less than stimulating, and McCullum saw that his pupil

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going to build computers himself one day—he hadn’t the slightest doubt of that. But he wanted to build them now. During the years Steve Wozniak attended Homestead High, semiconductor technology advances made possible the creation of minicomputers like the PDP-8. The PDP-8 was one of the most popular

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least for the moment. Woz laughed the incident off and went back to his paper designs. The Two Steves Meet * * * Figure 54. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak Jobs and Woz look over an early Apple I circuit board. (Courtesy of Margaret Kern Wozniak) Besides assisting with the Cream Soda Computer, Bill Fernandez

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choice of processor, but no one argued with the processor’s $20 price tag. He called his machine an Apple. * * * Figure 57. The Apple I Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I was a circuit board. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) The Apple I had only the bare essentials. It lacked a case

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the fall of 1976, Woz had already made progress on the design of his new computer. The Apple II would embody all the engineering savvy he could bring to it. It would be the embodiment of Steve Wozniak’s dream computer, one he would like to own himself. He had made it considerably faster

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lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order…lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.” * * * Figure 61. The Apple II This is the product that launched Apple as a serious business. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) McKenna also decided to run a full-color ad

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The Debut The young company faced a more modest challenge than tackling the company that had defined computer for generations: they had to finish the Apple II design in time for Jim Warren’s first West Coast Computer Faire in April and get it ready for production shortly thereafter. Markkula was already

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for a phone in one of Apple’s early offices. (Courtesy of Margaret Kern Wozniak) Steve Wozniak is justly credited with the technical design of the Apple I and Apple II. Nevertheless, an essential contribution to making the Apple II a commercial success came from Jobs. Early microcomputers were typically drab and ugly metal boxes. Steve

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. He arranged to have the biggest and most elegant booth at the show. He brought in a large projection screen to demonstrate programs and placed Apple II computers on either side of the booth. Jobs, Mike Scott, Chris Espinosa, and Randy Wigginton manned the booth while Mike Markkula toured the auditorium

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company. Woz walked around checking out other machines. All in all, the Computer Faire was a big success for Apple. Everyone seemed to like the Apple II, although Computer Lib author Ted Nelson complained that it displayed only uppercase letters. Woz couldn’t resist playing one of his practical jokes. MITS was

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Zaltair to other microcomputers—including the Apple. * * * Figure 63. From Altair to Zaltair One of Wozniak’s practical jokes; this one fooled Jobs. (Courtesy of Steve Wozniak) Jobs, knowing nothing of the joke, picked up one of the brochures and read it in dismay. He took a quick, nervous scan of the

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design a digital telephone card for the Apple II. No one understood telephone technology better than Captain Crunch. Scott had granted Woz a separate office in which to work, hoping that it might encourage his creativity, and soon John Draper was working there, too. * * * Figure 65. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs Wozniak at the

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1978, Woz worked on a number of accessory products that were necessary to keep Apple on stable ground during its formative years. To make the Apple II appealing to customers outside the hobbyist realm, add-on peripherals were needed. These devices enabled the machine to work with different kinds of printers and

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Sander and Rod Holt contributing their share of the development duties. Business was building. More and more dealers signed on, and Apple began manufacturing the Apple II. By the end of 1977, the company was making a profit and doubling production every three months. An article in Byte helped to further popularize

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the Apple II. Mike Markkula had also attracted investment capital from the successful New York—based firm of Venrock Associates, which was formed by the Rockefeller family to

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But at Apple, the hobbyist spirit was being channeled by a few sharp executives who understood how to build a company. The Red Book The Apple II desperately needed a good technical reference manual. When the company started shipping the computer in 1977, the instruction manual wasn’t much better than any

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with computers since he was 13. And he had done some programming for Fylstra’s company, converting a bridge game program to run on the Apple II. Shortly thereafter, Bricklin and Frankston founded a company, Software Arts, and started coding the financial-analysis program. Throughout the winter, Frankston worked on the

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hired Chuck Peddle that summer, with undefined responsibilities. As the designer of both the 6502 microprocessor and the Commodore PET computer (which competed with the Apple II), he just seemed like a good person to have around. Peddle had seen possibilities in Apple even before it had emerged from the garage, and

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engineering department in order to begin designing new products. In late 1978, several new computer projects were started. The first, an enhanced version of the Apple II with custom chips, was code-named Annie. Woz worked with another engineer on it but didn’t complete the project. Moreover, he didn’t pursue

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for such emulation is the microprocessor, and Apple decided to simplify this aspect of the emulation problem by using the same processor found in the Apple II, the venerable and underpowered 6502. The emulation-layer edict that came down from the Apple executive offices was not without controversy. Apple engineers and

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programmer returned, it took him more than a few minutes to figure out why his Apple was squeaking. Meanwhile, without the singular vision of a Steve Wozniak, the Apple III project was floundering. Delays in the Apple III were soon causing concern in the marketing department. The young company was beginning to

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pains at last. When Apple was formed, the Apple II was already near completion. The Apple III was the first computer that Apple—as a company—had designed and built from scratch. The Apple III was also the first Apple not conceived by Steve Wozniak in pursuit of his personal dream machine. Instead the

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amnesia, Black Wednesday and its aftermath, and Scotty’s resignation, Apple continued to prosper. As always, Woz’s labor of love, the Apple II, carried the company. Net sales of Apple IIs had more than doubled during fiscal 1980 and continued to climb through the first half of 1981. By April 1981, Apple employed

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was going to use a single very powerful CPU, the Motorola 68000. And programming whiz Bill Atkinson, instrumental in getting the Pascal language on the Apple II, was spearheading the software-development team. Lisa was to be a potent machine with novel features. Atkinson envisioned a “paper” paradigm—the screen background

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into a large company, Apple’s enormous annual sales increases, and the proliferation of smaller companies writing software and making add-on hardware for the Apple II convinced skeptics that the personal computer was not another hula hoop. * * * Figure 78. Bill Gates and David Bunnell Just a few years after working

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Ward were thinking about producing a personal computer. Some companies, like Hewlett-Packard, had started much earlier, though. Project Capricorn Hewlett-Packard hadn’t rejected Steve Wozniak’s Apple I design because it didn’t believe in the idea of a personal computer. It did. HP built large computers as well as

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-85 appeared three years later, some Capricorn programmers were privately conceding the general and business market to Apple. There was real irony here because the Apple II’s 40-column, lowercase display was clearly inappropriate for basic applications like word processing and report generation, and its 6502 processor was no number cruncher

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lowercase display capabilities, but only because Wozniak left the architecture open and others created the necessary boards and software. Third parties were continually improving the Apple II, whereas they were shut out of the HP-85. HP soon concluded that the closed architecture had been a mistake. Still, HP had beaten

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success. Gates had reason to appreciate openness because the SoftCard, Microsoft’s only hardware product, was a cornerstone of the corporation. Because Estridge owned an Apple II, he had leaned toward an open architecture at the outset. With Gates’s encouragement, IBM defied its tradition of secret design specifications and turned its

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while, reality matched the image in Steve Jobs’s head. Then Apple ran out of zealots. * * * Figure 89. Andy Hertzfeld After Jobs pulled him off Apple II development, Hertzfeld wrote the key software for the Macintosh. (Courtesy of Andy Hertzfeld) * * * Figure 90. The Mac design team Left to right: Andy Hertzfeld, Chris

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was not really competitive with the PC and compatibles, particularly when IBM began introducing new models based on successive generations of Intel processors and the Apple II was locked into the archaic 6502. But the Macintosh graphical user interface, or GUI, gave Apple the edge in innovation and ease of use,

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the same year, Personal Computing asked its readers to pick the most influential people in computing from a list that included Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Adam Osborne, and the historical Charles Babbage. Only billionaire Bill made everyone’s list. There was a lot of money being made, and that meant

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occasional presidential candidate Ross Perot. In April 1989, Inc magazine selected Steve Jobs as its “entrepreneur of the decade” for his achievements in bringing the Apple II and Macintosh computers to market, and for the promise of NeXT. NeXT targeted higher education as its first market, because Jobs realized that the machines

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, check the commute traffic on Highway 17 coming up from the Santa Cruz beaches into Silicon Valley, or monitor the waves along the California coast. Steve Wozniak set up a Wozcam so friends could watch him work. The Web was a wave and Clark and Andreessen were riding it. They hired Eric

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facing Apple. He could have said anything. He had the crowd in his hand. Later, Amelio called Jobs back to the stage, along with cofounder Steve Wozniak. The packed house rose to its feet again, and again there was thunderous applause. It was a moment. For Steve Jobs it was also a

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now worth real money). And both Jobs and Apple were simply older; the company was now as old as the man was when he and Steve Wozniak founded it. What followed was not quite what Amelio expected. The correct word for it is coup. Within weeks, Jobs had his chosen managers in

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. It supported the ideas of open source software and nonproprietary architectures, a collaborative perspective that John “Captain Crunch” Draper had called “the Woz principle” (for Steve Wozniak). How have these ideas—the Woz principle and computer power for the people—fared with the deconstruction of the personal computer? The Woz Principle There

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Foundation (EFF). They put out the word to a few high-profile computer-industry figures who they thought would understand what they were up to. Steve Wozniak kicked in a six-figure contribution immediately, as did Internet pioneer John Gilmore. Merely fighting the defensive battles in the courts was a passive strategy

The Big Score

by Michael S. Malone  · 20 Jul 2021

. HP not only survived these mistakes but prospered. There was a sense that while the company might never produce a market monster like Pong or Apple II, it also would never fail horribly, either. Simply, HP was the best. It would continue to grow year after year; solid, dependable, and usually quite

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the future of the industry. CP/M and VisiCalc are as much landmarks in the creation of the huge personal computer industry as are the Apple II and the Radio Shack TRS-80. As we know people as much by their personalities as by their appearance, we come to know our computers

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the center of the company compound, Sporck asks about these young whiz kids, what they’re like. It is a week after Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s latest rock concert. Sporck says he doesn’t know any of these people, having only met Steve Jobs at some political event for Jerry

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the early seventies, or with the first hobby computers (such as Altair) in the mid-1970s, or with the Apple I in 1975, or the Apple II in 1977. Some might even argue that history will recall only one event: IBM’s introduction of the PC personal computer in 1982, which coalesced

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and his infatuation with movie stars. Shockley is another case, with his racial theories and genius sperm banks. The latter-day case, of course, is Steve Wozniak, with his rock festivals and Datsun commercials. For the most part, these occasional bouts with pixilation in the ranks were overwhelmed by the predominating soberness

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with tape at the bridge, messy hair, a shirt pocket stuffed with pens, and an Alfred E. Neuman grin. The young man sat at an Apple II computer while two beautiful models looked over his shoulder, tousling his hair and playing with his pens. The caption read: “Remember me? I’m one

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, officially founded in January 1977. The Apple I was Woz’s machine, a technological wonder for which Jobs had played the role of salesman. The Apple II would be different. Jobs was president now, and his experiences flogging the first model had given him an unparalleled insight into the changing tastes of

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the new consumer market in computers. The Apple II would be the one true Woz-and-Jobs computer, a synthesis of each of their skills, the milestone product that would usher in the age

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of the personal computer. But the Apple II would not be merely a board stuffed with chips like the Apple I. With the penetrating vision that characterized much of Jobs’s work during

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to the top, the computer that he demanded, begged, and tricked out of Wozniak, was a departure from anything that had come before it. The Apple II was the first true personal computer. It remains the best-selling (in terms of units) computer of any size ever built, and so much a

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keyboard, in a sleek, classy-looking, taupe-colored plastic box. Even for someone who knew exactly nothing about computers (at the time, almost everyone), the Apple II, with its sensuous lines and recognizable IBM-based keyboard and its cute name and logo emblazoned across the top, looked about as intimidating as a

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granola bar. Brilliant as it was, the Apple II would have gone nowhere without the financial backing and the support Silicon Valley provided. Although the Valley was set up to take just about any

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to keep the assembly lines running. Meanwhile, as Jobs was undergoing the transition to adulthood, Apple continued to grow at a frantic pace. The finished Apple II was a magnificent machine. Inside was Wozniak’s masterful design, which required only 62 chips (compared with hundreds in other personal computers). This made the

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Apple II, at 12 pounds, remarkably light—almost too light; the company even considered adding lead weights to make the machine seem more “serious.” Outside, the design

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of the Apple II enclosure was equally splendid. Jobs had turned down several Star Wars designs prepared for him by Atari industrial designers in lieu of a smooth, visually

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calming, textured plastic box, in gentle earth tones. Jobs knew what his market wanted; The Apple II design wasn’t going to turn any heads, but it was a design one could sit before for many years without growing tired of it

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a 1955 Chevy rather than a 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, a classic design that would grow more admired with time. As demand for the Apple II skyrocketed, Apple found itself strapped for manufacturing capabilities. As with the rest of the systems business, the biggest drain on overhead was “board-stuffing,” the

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had expanded from $775,000 in the first year (1977) to more than $100 million by 1980 and were continuing to triple every year. The Apple II, of course, was the key. It had not only started the personal computer boom but now was its greatest beneficiary. The machine that had an

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was now being shipped at a rate of more than 25,000 per month. At the time this is being written, more than 750,000 Apple IIs (and the souped-up Apple IIes) have been sold. By 1980, Apple had a new president, Michael Scott (he of the Long Knives), an engaging

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getting along with Jobs): first, to build the company up fast enough to keep up with sales; and, second, to create a replacement for the Apple II. The life-span of the first product can be extended for a while through modifications, peripherals, price cuts, and all the other fan dances. But

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to take it on directly. Instead, the company stumbled badly—and in trotted the most fearsome competitor of all. The follow-up product to the Apple II was designated—remarkably enough—the Apple III. It seemed ill starred from the beginning. Despite a beautiful physical design and some impressive internal advancements, the

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Apple II at the time of its introduction in November 1980 was a bust; in the words of company employees, a “fiasco,” an “abortion,” a “camel” (from

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computer industry in 1980, but symptomatic. What made this tardiness ironic was that the additional time didn’t seem to improve the quality of the Apple II one iota. It was a design nightmare. Apple IIIs started appearing at dealers dead on arrival. In a frenzy to get the firm on track

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’s Law to lower prices, greater power, and smaller size. The last was so important because it increasingly atomized the market. No longer could the Apple II and the TRS-80, as one-size-fits-all computers, effectively monopolize the entire market. By 1980, falling costs for microprocessors and memory chips, keyboards

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family. Frankly, Apple needed the grace period the boom brought. Sales were still incredibly strong, but with the Apple III an apparent dog and the Apple II growing old and ripe for dethroning, Apple needed a wild time like this for its new competitors to go through their own growing pains, as

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then-president Scott and, according to Business Week, quoting an Apple insider, “Steve was furious and went off and started the Mac [Macintosh computer, the Apple II replacement] project. He was determined to prove that Mac could be a bigger success.” As the Lisa team heroically struggled away in its corporate microcosm

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personal computer—presumptuously entitled precisely that. The “PC” wasn’t an earth-shattering machine technically, but it was more than a match for the aging Apple II, particularly when the software began to appear in abundance. The PC didn’t have to be a great machine because what it really had going

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PCs. By the end of 1982, PCs were selling at 20,000 per month, approaching the 30,000 per month of that old workhorse, the Apple II. By then, Apple’s share of the personal computer market was down from 29 percent to 24 percent and falling. With the Apple III fixed

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but still less than a star seller, the burden lay on the Apple II, with its enormous installed base of 600,000 machines, unequaled software library, and large support network of independent hardware and software suppliers. That was enough

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important, in 1983, Apple, of all places, was slow to realize that the pace of technological innovation had changed. No longer could one build an Apple II and have it command a market for a half decade. Lisa was a magnificent machine (unless you wanted to do word processing, the most common

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that IBM had purposely failed in order to escape antitrust action.) With Mac and the Apple IIc (a portable version of Wozniak’s apparently immortal Apple II design), Apple appeared to have triumphed—or at least earned a stay of execution. The momentum, at least for now, was back. To celebrate its

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’s Ice Cream Parlor, a Velvet Turtle restaurant, a renowned Szechuan restaurant, a video cassette store, and a thriving computer store owned by Apple founder Steve Wozniak’s brother. The fourth corner contains a bank and the only two-story building around: an office complex that holds, among others, the West Coast

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of EST and Scientology and Marriage Encounter and a host of other “scientific” faiths in search of the Holy Grail of human perfection. Didn’t Steve Wozniak spend millions on rock concerts designed to build a perfect world of people and computers? Along those rectilinear streets and in those precisely laid-out

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Markkula and, 403–4, 417 name of, 400–401 public stock offering by, 409 See also Jobs, Steven; Wozniak, Stephen Apple I computer, 400–401 Apple II computer, 401–2, 405–8, 410, 413, 414 Apple IIc computer, 417 Apple III computer, 408–9, 411, 414–15, 428 Askansas, Charles, 308 ASK

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–58, 63, 79, 83, 87, 143, 146, 224, 225 Wozniak, Stephen, 66, 259, 356, 395–403, 409, 417, 418 Apple I computer and, 400–401 Apple II computer and, 405–6 blue box built by, 399 personal characteristics of, 397 as a teenager, 397 X Xerox Corp., 336, 337 Y Yarnowski, Adam

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

MITS appears. Paul Allen and Bill Gates write BASIC for Altair, form Microsoft. First meeting of Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launch the Apple I. 1977 The Apple II is released. 1978 First Internet Bulletin Board System. 1979 Usenet newsgroups invented. Jobs visits Xerox PARC. 1980 IBM commissions Microsoft to develop

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the digital age, the two approaches went together. Creative geniuses (John Mauchly, William Shockley, Steve Jobs) generated innovative ideas. Practical engineers (Presper Eckert, Walter Brattain, Steve Wozniak) partnered closely with them to turn concepts into contraptions. And collaborative teams of technicians and entrepreneurs worked to turn the invention into a practical product

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the digital age paired people with different skills and personalities, such as John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But occasionally the partnerships worked because the personalities and enthusiasms were similar, as was the case of Bushnell and Alcorn. Both were burly and fun

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APPLE Among those in Gordon French’s garage at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was a socially awkward young hardware engineer named Steve Wozniak, who had dropped out of college and was working at Hewlett-Packard’s calculator division in the Silicon Valley town of Cupertino. A friend had

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field, he was able to stare unblinkingly at Woz and convince him he could do the job in four days. Steve Jobs (1955–2011) and Steve Wozniak (1950– ) in 1976. Jobs graphic on the original Macintosh in 1984. Richard Stallman (1953– ). Linus Torvalds (1969– ). The March 1975 first gathering of the Homebrew

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enthusiasts, not TV terminal people like I thought.” They went around the room introducing themselves, and when Wozniak’s turn came he said, “I’m Steve Wozniak, I work at Hewlett-Packard on calculators and I designed a video terminal.” He added that he also liked video games and pay movie systems

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confronted Jobs when he came by the Wozniak house: “You don’t deserve shit. You haven’t produced anything.” Jobs began to cry and told Steve Wozniak that he was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not 50-50,” Jobs said, “you can have the whole thing.” Wozniak, however

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of personal computers. They would not be just for solder-gun-wielding hobbyists anymore. Jobs understood this trend. When it came time to build the Apple II, he did not spend much time studying microprocessor specs. Instead he went to Macy’s at the Stanford mall and studied the Cuisinart. He decided

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launched Processor Technology and come out with a computer called Sol. Other companies included Cromemco, Vector Graphic, Southwest Technical Products, Commodore, and IMSAI. But the Apple II was the first personal computer to be simple and fully integrated, from the hardware to the software. It went on sale in June 1977 for

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homemade ones. Sales of do-it-yourself kits withered away. Hardware hackers such as Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with

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their innards. The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software

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Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware. That integrated model did not become standard practice. The launch of the Apple II woke up the big computer companies, most notably IBM, and prompted an alternative to emerge. IBM—more specifically IBM as it was outmaneuvered by Bill

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For personal computers to be useful, and for practical people to justify buying them, they had to become tools rather than merely toys. Even the Apple II might have been a passing fad, once the excitement of the hobbyists receded, if users had not been able to apply it to a practical

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first decision they made was to develop the program for use on a personal computer rather than on a DEC business computer. They chose the Apple II because Wozniak had made its architecture open and transparent enough that the functions needed by software developers were easily accessible. They created the prototype over

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a weekend on an Apple II they borrowed from someone who would, in effect, become a third collaborator, Dan Fylstra. A recent graduate of Harvard Business School, Fylstra had launched a

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ended with a prediction that came true: “VisiCalc could someday become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.” VisiCalc catapulted the Apple II to triumph, because for a year there were no versions for other personal computers. “That’s what really drove the

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Apple II to the success it achieved,” Jobs later said.88 It was quickly followed by word-processing software, such as Apple Writer and EasyWriter. Thus did

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, make it simpler and more elegant. The GUI was made possible by bitmapping, another innovation pioneered at Xerox PARC. Until then, most computers, including the Apple II, would merely generate numerals or letters on the screen, usually in a ghastly green against a black background. Bitmapping allowed each and every pixel on

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August 1981, Gates was visiting Jobs at Apple, which was a regular occurrence since Microsoft was making most of its revenue writing software for the Apple II. Gates was still the supplicant in the relationship. In 1981 Apple had $334 million in revenue, compared to Microsoft’s $15 million. Jobs wanted Microsoft

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the world. When one of the helicopters used by the Seva Foundation in Nepal had mechanical problems, Brilliant used a computer conferencing system and an Apple II that Jobs had donated to organize online a repair mission. The potential power of online discussion groups impressed him. When he went to teach at

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a deal with Quantum for a service called AppleLink. When it launched a year later, the first live chat forum featured Apple’s lovable cofounder Steve Wozniak. Case went on to make a similar deal with Tandy to launch PC-Link. But he soon realized that his strategy of creating separate private

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-protected. The commons crowd had its roots in the hacker ethic that emanated from the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club and the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve Wozniak was an exemplar. He went to Homebrew meetings to show off the computer circuit he built, and he handed out freely the schematics so that

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, Larry Page, Howard Rheingold, Larry Roberts, Arthur Rock, Virginia Rometty, Ben Rosen, Steve Russell, Eric Schmidt, Bob Taylor, Paul Terrell, Jimmy Wales, Evan Williams, and Steve Wozniak. I’m also grateful to people who gave useful advice along the way, including Ken Auletta, Larry Cohen, David Derbes, John Doerr, John Hollar, John

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’s interview with Steve Russell. 11. Sources for this section include author’s interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Jobs (for previous book), and Steve Wozniak; Tristan Donovan, Replay: The Story of Video Games (Yellow Ant, 2010; locations refer to the Kindle edition); Steven Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games

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. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson, “Crystal Fire,” IEEE SCS News, Spring 2007, adapted from Crystal Fire (Norton, 1977). 117. Author’s interviews with Lee Felsenstein, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Bob Albrecht. This section also draws from the accounts of the Homebrew Computer Club origins in Wozniak, iWoz (Norton, 2006); Markoff, What

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the Dormouse Said, 4493 and passim; Levy, Hackers, 201 and passim; Freiberger and Swaine, Fire in the Valley, 109 and passim; Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be,” http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php; the Homebrew archives exhibit at the

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. Bill Gates interview, Playboy, July 1994. 82. This section draws from my Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), which was based on interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, and others. The Jobs biography includes a bibliography and source notes. For this book, I reinterviewed Bushnell, Alcorn, and Wozniak. This

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section also draws on Steve Wozniak, iWoz (Norton, 1984); Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be,” http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php. 83. When I posted an

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versions. 27. Author’s interview with Jim Kimsey. 28. Swisher, AOL.com, 53. 29. Swisher, AOL.com, 48. 30. Author’s interviews with Steve Case, Steve Wozniak. 31. Steve Case speech, Stanford, May 25, 2010. 32. Author’s interview with Steve Case. 33. Author’s interview with Steve Case. 34. Steve Case

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Mechanics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Gates and Allen: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Fredrica Rice Apple I: Ed Uthman Apple II: © Mark Richards/CHM IBM PC: IBM/Science Source Gates with Windows disc: © Deborah Feingold/Corbis Stallman: Sam Ogden Jobs with Macintosh: Diana Walker/Contour By

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of, ref1 headquarters of, ref1, ref2 Jobs ousted from, ref1, ref2 lawsuits of, ref1 Microsoft’s contract with, ref1 patents of, ref1 Apple I, ref1 Apple II, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 AppleLink, ref1 Apple Writer, ref1 Applied Minds, ref1 Aristotle, ref1 Armstrong, Neil, ref1 ARPA, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6

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, Gates and Allen donated a new science building to Lakeside and named its auditorium after Kent Evans. 33. Steve Wozniak’s unwillingness to tackle this tedious task when he wrote BASIC for the Apple II would later force Apple to have to license BASIC from Allen and Gates. 34. Reading a draft version of

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this book online, Steve Wozniak said that Dan Sokol made only eight copies, because they were hard and time-consuming to

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston  · 14 Aug 2008  · 468pp  · 233,091 words

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii CHAPTER 1 MAX LEVCHIN PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 2 SABEER BHATIA Hotmail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 CHAPTER 3 STEVE WOZNIAK Apple Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 CHAPTER 4 JOE KRAUS Excite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER 5 DAN BRICKLIN Software Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 CHAPTER 6 MITCHELL KAPOR Lotus Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 CHAPTER 7

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. That’s when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100 percent of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak. The striking thing about this phase is that it’s completely different from most people’s idea of what business is like. If you looked

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talk much about it. But Levchin’s software was just as much the reason for PayPal’s success as a more visible product like the Apple II was for Apple. Livingston: Tell me a little about how PayPal got started. Levchin: The company was really not founded to do payments at

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Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II. Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy

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local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent. Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company: the Apple II. He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software—an extraordinary feat even for the time. And what’s more, he did it all while

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working at his day job at Hewlett-Packard. The Apple II was presented to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977. Apple Computer went public in 1980 in the largest IPO since

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Ford in 1956, creating more instant millionaires than any other company up to that point. The Apple II was the machine that brought computers onto the desks of ordinary people. The reason it did was that it was so miraculously well designed. But

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myself.” For a lot of entrepreneurs, they see something and they say, “I have to have this,” and that will start them building their own. Steve Wozniak 33 I couldn’t really afford to buy the pieces I needed. I couldn’t buy a teletype, so I had to design my own

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called “address,” and they would hook a wire from one to the other. It’s a very simple job—if your RAMs are static RAMs. Steve Wozniak 35 The dynamic RAMs were going to be one-half to one-quarter the price. The dynamic RAMs meant that instead of 32 chips to

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it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done that thing in my life. Steve Wozniak 37 Livingston: Do you think that that’s a recipe for being good at something: you’ve never done it before and you are trying

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for all of the Apple projects I ever did. Livingston: So where were you when you first realized that you could build the Apple I? Steve Wozniak 39 Wozniak: I got this idea that I was going to have the computer that I had wanted my whole life at the first meeting

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he phoned me at work, if I was at his house, if he was visiting me—I can’t remember. Livingston: How did you know Steve? Wozniak: That computer that was like the Altair that I’d built 5 years before— Cream Soda Computer—I’d told a friend down the block

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talk technology. And then we both agreed on music too. We had very strong music influences in those days, and it was more songs about Steve Wozniak 41 living and life and where we’re going and where we’re from and what’s it all about and what works and what

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across the street that made the Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputers. I was working there for a while getting educated on the HP 3000 . . . for the Apple II, we knew it was so good . . . that was a product that broke ground in every which way. The Apple I, oddly enough, was probably

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display. No computer had done this before that. No small computer was coming with a keyboard yet. The Apple I was the first and the Apple II was the third. Basically every computer since then had a keyboard and a video display. The world has never gone back from that day. Now

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the Apple II was the great design. I designed it very efficiently with very few parts—amazing design. We added color. How could you ever have color and

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color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work? Steve Wozniak 43 Man, when I actually finally put together this little circuit and put some data into memory that should show up as color and it

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type of dynamic memory that could expand almost forever. All sorts of slots with a little mini–operating system that actually worked incredibly well. The Apple II was just one of those designs. Anybody could build things to add on to it, anybody could write programs, they could write sophisticated programs,

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by the garage. I really respected the guy; he designed the microprocessor that I had chosen. He came to the garage and looked at the Apple II, and I put it through all its specs of bringing up quick patterns on the screen and scrolling text and playing games—all the things

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worked, we’d put them in a box. If they didn’t work, we’d fix them and put them in a box. Eventually, Steve Steve Wozniak 45 would drive the boxes down to the Byte Shop in Mountain View or wherever and get paid, in cash. We had the parts on

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chart, on the bottom of the org chart—never once been anything but an engineer who works. 46 Founders at Work Livingston: So you called Steve? Wozniak: I made my decision by that evening and I called Steve and told him I would. Then the next day I came in (to Hewlett

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was too important for this political type stuff. It was sad to see him go because he supported good people so well in the company. Steve Wozniak 47 Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn’t he one of the founders? Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We

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had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I, and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer, Incorporated. Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super-conservative guy. I didn’t

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us for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300— but a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him. Livingston: Way back then, how did you

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place I could save any chips. We had a real argument over slots. Mike Markkula’s coming on and we were going to build the Apple II, and I had designed a clever system on the suggestion of a friend—Allen Baum again—that decoded eight slots you could plug little computer

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. And he wanted just one slot for a printer and one for a modem. Today, we’re sort of in a much different, freer world. Steve Wozniak 49 We got the computer finished up enough. We don’t have much to add on besides a printer and a telecommunications of some sort

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kinds of equipment in the world, to operate your house over your power lines. It was just a world of cards. Many people had their Apple IIs filled up with cards—every single slot. Livingston: When you showed people the Apple computer, were they amazed? Wozniak: Every single time I showed

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one of the greatest products of all time—the HewlettPackard calculator—and one of the greatest companies, and they’re saying things like that. The Apple II had so much intrigue to me, but I knew it intrigued all technical people. And the Apple I just worked. I actually wound up doing

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an awful lot of software by hand (I still have the copies that are handwritten), and all of that went into the Apple II. Every byte that went into the Apple II, it had so many different mathematical routines, graphics routines, computer languages, emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in

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just at home, you play one game on it, and an awful lot of people—adults and children—want a machine to play games. The Apple II really started the whole gaming industry, because it was the first time a computer had been built with sound, paddles, color, graphics—all the things

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of circuits, examples of boards that you would plug in—so that Steve Wozniak 51 anyone could look at this and say, “Now I know how I would do my own.” They could type in the programs on their own Apple II and then see “that’s how that works” instantly, and know how

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to write their own programs. Running cards was the most important thing. All these companies started up making cards that you could plug into your Apple II and write a little software (mostly games at first) on cassette tapes. You’d go to the store and they’d just have all this

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very open. There’s a big world out there for other people to come and join us. In the years 1980 to ’83, when the Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, we didn’t advertise it once. Everybody else who was making products for it was advertising for

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Livingston: That didn’t happen, right? Wozniak: That didn’t happen. I think it was a total fallacy. I think we should have advertised the Apple II. If you’ve got the world’s best-selling computer, keep it going as much as it can. But the company kind of wanted the

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lose. It was really weird because you’d walk into the company and everybody had an Apple III on their desk—nobody had an Apple II. The Apple II was the largest-selling computer in the world, and the only guy working for it in the company was the guy reprinting the price

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list. Then by ’83, the IBM PC took over. It was selling more computers than the Apple II. Livingston: You had left by then, though, so you weren’t part of the Apple III, right? Wozniak: I didn’t exactly leave. I

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normal, but it had this beautiful little 8-bit chip register, and 8 bits is a magic number—it’s a byte. And I had Steve Wozniak 53 thought, “That chip would be beautiful for getting 8 bits of data off of a computer and shift it out to a cassette tape

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data hand-massaged to get it just right. So I stuck it in the floppy and wrote a little program, and I typed in some Steve Wozniak 55 data and I said “read track 0;” stuck in the other floppy and said “write track 0, read track 1, write track 1.”

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did have a venture deal in place from well before we shipped an Apple II. And sometime after we were shipping the Apple IIs, we got, I think, $800,000 or $300,000—some large amount—from one venture capital place. Steve Wozniak 57 Livingston: On the East Coast? Wozniak: I believe that’s where we

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would have enough money to fly to Hawaii or make a down payment on a house. So it was huge deal for me. Steve Wozniak 59 Steve Jobs (left) and Steve Wozniak (right) in 1975 with a blue box Photo by Margret Wozniak C H A P T 4 E R Joe Kraus Cofounder

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in October 1979, it ignited the personal computer software revolution. VisiCalc was the “killer app” for personal computers: Photo by Louis Fabian Bachrach businesses bought Apple IIs just to use it. Unfortunately, VisiCalc was not produced by a company organized like a modern startup. VisiCalc was developed by Software Arts, but distributed

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to do the programming. It was done on a separate computer that you would log into, and then the resulting product was downloaded into an Apple II we borrowed from our publisher, and then it was tested. Dan Bricklin 75 Bob already had equipment. He had an acoustic coupler modem and

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because this was something they would need. And that made them get the personal computer. Dan Bricklin 79 Livingston: Did it drive sales for the Apple II along with VisiCalc? Bricklin: Well, for Apple, yeah. Eventually we could track Apple sales by how many we sold. But the first year we were

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the reference card. It had the ability to lock—because, remember, you had a very small screen, 40 characters by 24/25 lines on the Apple II—it allowed you to lock columns or rows on the screen. They call them panes now, I think, in Excel; you could lock the panes

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Source Applications Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes the development and adoption of open source software. Livingston: How did Lotus get started? Kapor: I bought an Apple II in the summer of 1978 because I had become obsessed with personal computers and just had to have one. I didn’t know what I

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math. Afterwards, we kind of realized, hey, this might actually be useful to other people if we built a statistics and graphics product on the Apple II. It was called Tiny Troll after something called TROLL, which was a time-sharing thing at MIT. At the same time, Dan Bricklin and Bob

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was far and away the most useful piece of software ever done for a personal computer. It was incredibly innovative. It started generating sales of Apple IIs, and it was a cut above everything else. The authors of VisiCalc were Software Arts. The publishers were Personal Software, which then changed its

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name to VisiCorp somewhere along the way. I knew the VisiCalc authors because they came to the meetings of the Apple II user group that I had cofounded, and that’s where I first saw VisiCalc in probably 1979. They introduced their publisher to me—this is

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had gone from writing and rewriting Tiny Troll, which eventually was called VisiPlot, to being product manager for several versions of VisiCalc— not the flagship Apple II version, but the other versions. I worked for the publisher, for Personal Software, with the Software Arts people. And a number of things transpired.

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the programs were tiny and the user data was tiny and people were building spreadsheets that exceeded memory. It was a fundamental limit of the Apple II, because it was an 8-bit microprocessor. IBM used a 16-bit microprocessor and I said, “Ah, this will permit people to build bigger

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2-3 wasn’t the only idea that we had. I had done this thing with some other people called Executive Briefing System for the Apple II that was like a precursor to PowerPoint. We did some other projects; I had hired another group of people and basically had spent down the

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