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

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton  · 11 May 2023  · 401pp  · 113,586 words

money as they delved their hands into a glass jar of chips. One of the people waiting in line was a young computer designer called Steve Wozniak, whose Apple I machine was released the following year featuring the 6502. The Apple Seed When Steve Jobs saw what his best friend had come

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up with, he was convinced he was on to something. Jobs and Steve Wozniak had met in 1971, united by pranks and electronics even though they were four school years apart. The pair were polar opposites: Jobs, charismatic and

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phone book, Jobs’ chosen title put the new firm ahead of his employer, Atari. It sounded ‘fun, spirited, and not intimidating’, he said.17 The Apple II quickly followed, one of a ‘trinity’ of computers launched in 1977, the same year that Star Wars brought futuristic excitement to cinemas. Just like Commodore

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’s PET and Tandy’s TRS-80, the Apple II had consumers in mind, featuring colour graphics and a handful of games. ‘Clear the kitchen table,’ an early advert urged. ‘Bring in the color TV

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. Plug in your new Apple II and connect any standard cassette recorder/player. Now you’re ready for an evening of discovery in the new world of personal computers.’18 Users

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hippy exterior, Rock roped in Henry Singleton, chairman of the US electronics conglomerate Teledyne, to become a third backer.19 Their faith was rewarded as Apple II unit sales leapt from 2,500 in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981, aided by the popularity among business owners of VisiCalc, a spreadsheet software

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PCs or their derivatives. During the dire Christmas 1984 season that severely damaged Acorn Computer and Sinclair Research in the UK, it was actually the Apple II that powered the company through. The older device retained a strong following internally, causing a rift with those that believed the Mac was the future

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the company created an Advanced Technology Group (ATG) to hunt for and incubate cutting-edge ideas. Jobs the visionary was gone, as was a disillusioned Steve Wozniak. ATG looked and felt a lot like ‘AppleLabs’, the mooted development division Jobs could have run if he had opted to stay on, having been

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most powerful personal computer available today will be “invisible”; like a motor; it will fit into a machine the size of a pocket calculator.’ The Apple II chip ‘is already small enough to wear on an earring’, he observed. The idea for Knowledge Navigator fed into a keynote speech Sculley gave later

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no one at Apple latched on to their work. Arm was more fortunate. After some experimentation, Gavarini and Pittard created a device that ran both Apple II and Macintosh code – effectively uniting the two sides of Apple – as well as Microsoft Windows. The so-called Möbius Project was clever, but it was

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the Arm600 chip for what became the Newton and sent Allen Baum, an engineer who incidentally went along to the first Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak, to Cambridge to keep communication lines open. Neither product generated income for Arm, although some consulting work followed, and there was negligible demand externally for

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https://web.archive.org/web/20120721114927/http://www.variantpress.com/view.php?content=ch001 16 Steve Wozniak, iWoz, Headline, 2007 17 Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 58. 18 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#/media/File:Apple_II_advertisement_Dec_1977_page_2.jpg 19 Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip, p

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

Steve Jobs

by Walter Isaacson  · 23 Oct 2011  · 915pp  · 232,883 words

Atari and India: Zen and the Art of Game Design CHAPTER FIVE The Apple I: Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In . . . CHAPTER SIX The Apple II: Dawn of a New Age CHAPTER SEVEN Chrisann and Lisa: He Who Is Abandoned . . . CHAPTER EIGHT Xerox and Lisa: Graphical User Interfaces CHAPTER NINE Going

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’s girlfriend at Reed and early Apple employee. ROD HOLT. Chain-smoking Marxist hired by Jobs in 1976 to be the electrical engineer on the Apple II. ROBERT IGER. Succeeded Eisner as Disney CEO in 2005. JONATHAN “JONY” IVE. Chief designer at Apple, became Jobs’s partner and confidant. ABDULFATTAH “JOHN”

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“I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society to a new level.” One of Steve Wozniak’s first memories was going to his father’s workplace on a weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his

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if it had been produced by grown-ups. The Apple I, on the other hand, appeared as scruffy as its creators. CHAPTER SIX THE APPLE II Dawn of a New Age An Integrated Package As Jobs walked the floor of the Personal Computer Festival, he came to the realization that Paul

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produced anything.” Jobs began to cry, which was not unusual. He had never been, and would never be, adept at containing his emotions. He told Steve Wozniak that he was willing to call off the partnership. “If we’re not fifty-fifty,” he said to his friend, “you can have the whole

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drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough. This passion for perfection led him to indulge his instinct to control.

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Valentine, but a highly polished gold Corvette convertible. “When I arrived at the garage, Woz was at the workbench and immediately began showing off the Apple II,” Markkula recalled. “I looked past the fact that both guys needed a haircut and was amazed by what I saw on that workbench. You

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Homebrew surveyed its members and found that, of the 181 who owned personal computers, only six owned an Apple. Jobs was convinced, however, that the Apple II would change that. Markkula would become a father figure to Jobs. Like Jobs’s adoptive father, he would indulge Jobs’s strong will, and like

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Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The First Launch Event The introduction of the Apple II was scheduled to coincide with the first West Coast Computer Faire, to be held in April 1977 in San Francisco, organized by a Homebrew stalwart

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passion for product perfection.” Mike Scott, on the other hand, never let a passion for the perfect take precedence over pragmatism. The design of the Apple II case was one of many examples. The Pantone company, which Apple used to specify colors for its plastic, had more than two thousand shades of

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sided with Scott. Jobs also insisted that Apple be different in how it treated customers. He wanted a one-year warranty to come with the Apple II. This flabbergasted Scott; the usual warranty was ninety days. Again Jobs dissolved into tears during one of their arguments over the issue. They walked

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the company was doing so well. Ben Rosen, the analyst whose newsletters shaped the opinions of the tech world, became an enthusiastic proselytizer for the Apple II. An independent developer came up with the first spreadsheet and personal finance program for personal computers, VisiCalc, and for a while it was available only

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on the Apple II, turning the computer into something that businesses and families could justify buying. The company began attracting influential new investors. The pioneering venture capitalist Arthur Rock

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“Woz designed a great machine, but it would be sitting in hobby shops today were it not for Steve Jobs.” Nevertheless most people considered the Apple II to be Wozniak’s creation. That would spur Jobs to pursue the next great advance, one that he could call his own. CHAPTER SEVEN CHRISANN

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consumer electronic device.”1 Texaco Towers A few days after Raskin left, Jobs appeared at the cubicle of Andy Hertzfeld, a young engineer on the Apple II team, who had a cherubic face and impish demeanor similar to his pal Burrell Smith’s. Hertzfeld recalled that most of his colleagues were afraid

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in good enough shape to hand it over to someone. “You’re just wasting your time with that!” Jobs replied. “Who cares about the Apple II? The Apple II will be dead in a few years. The Macintosh is the future of Apple, and you’re going to start on it now!” With that

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intricacies of various cars. So from the beginning at Apple, he believed that great industrial design—a colorfully simple logo, a sleek case for the Apple II—would set the company apart and make its products distinctive. The company’s first office, after it moved out of his family garage, was

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the Macintosh into a low-cost competitor to the Lisa, one with incompatible software. Making matters worse was that neither machine was compatible with the Apple II. With no one in overall charge at Apple, there was no chance of keeping Jobs in harness. End-to-end Control Jobs’s reluctance

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of Sony’s 3½-inch disk drive manufactured by a smaller Japanese supplier, the Alps Electronics Co., which had been supplying disk drives for the Apple II. Alps had already licensed the technology from Sony, and if they could build their own version in time it would be much cheaper. Jobs

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absentmindedly playing with the toes of his bare feet. Sculley tried to impose an agenda; he wanted to discuss how to differentiate their products—the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa, and Mac—and whether it made sense to organize the company around product lines or markets or functions. But the discussion

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When the Macintosh was first being developed, Jobs went up to visit Gates at his office near Seattle. Microsoft had written some applications for the Apple II, including a spreadsheet program called Multiplan, and Jobs wanted to excite Gates and Co. about doing even more for the forthcoming Macintosh. Sitting in Gates

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wanted Microsoft to write a version of BASIC for the Macintosh, because Wozniak—despite much prodding by Jobs—had never enhanced his version of the Apple II’s BASIC to handle floating-point numbers. In addition, Jobs wanted Microsoft to write application software—such as word processing and spreadsheet programs—for the

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so they hugged. But the biggest news that month was the departure from Apple, yet again, of its cofounder, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was then quietly working as a midlevel engineer in the Apple II division, serving as a humble mascot of the roots of the company and staying as far away from management and

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Wozniak had openly answered the reporter’s questions when he called. Yes, he said, he felt that Apple had been giving short shrift to the Apple II division. “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for five years,” he said. Less than two weeks later Wozniak and Jobs traveled together to the

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little cooperation among the divisions; for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were different from those being developed by the Apple II division. The debate, according to the minutes, took a full hour. Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would

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than three hours after the show began, Amelio brought it to a close by calling Jobs back onstage and then, in a surprise, bringing up Steve Wozniak as well. Again there was pandemonium. But Jobs was clearly annoyed. He avoided engaging in a triumphant trio scene, arms in the air. Instead

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he told her. “I was totally taken in by Steve,” she said, “and I really feel like an idiot.” “Join the crowd,” her husband replied. Steve Wozniak, who was himself now an informal advisor to the company, was thrilled that Jobs was coming back. (He forgave easily.) “It was just what we

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be up front in the audience. He had become estranged from all of them, but now he wanted them rejoined. “I started the company with Steve Wozniak in my parents’ garage, and Steve is here today,” he said, pointing him out and prompting applause. “We were joined by Mike Markkula and

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we feel a tiny bit more whole.” For the unveiling at the January 2007 Macworld in San Francisco, Jobs invited back Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, and the 1984 Macintosh team, as he had done when he launched the iMac. In a career of dazzling product presentations, this may have been

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, and have content and apps that were compatible with a variety of devices and operating systems. The young Wozniak was in that camp: The Apple II he designed was easily opened and sported plenty of slots and ports that people could jack into as they pleased. With the Macintosh Jobs became

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so by mastering details. Jobs did both, relentlessly. As a result he launched a series of products over three decades that transformed whole industries: • The Apple II, which took Wozniak’s circuit board and turned it into the first personal computer that was not just for hobbyists. • The Macintosh, which begat the

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another store with a similar name, Halted. When asked, Jobs says he can remember working only at Haltek. CHAPTER 2: ODD COUPLE Woz: Interviews with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs. Wozniak, 12–16, 22, 50–61, 86–91; Levy, Hackers, 245; Moritz, 62–64; Young, 28; Jobs, Macworld address, Jan. 17, 2007.

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The Blue Box: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. Ron Rosenbaum, “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” Esquire, Oct. 1971. Wozniak answer, woz.org/letters/general/03.html; Wozniak, 98–115. For slightly varying

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accounts, see Markoff, 272; Moritz, 78–86; Young, 42–45; Malone, 30–35. CHAPTER 3: THE DROPOUT Chrisann Brennan: Interviews with Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tim Brown. Moritz, 75–77; Young, 41; Malone, 39. Reed College: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Elizabeth Holmes. Freiberger and Swaine, 208; Moritz,

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Hunter, “But What Would His Guru Say?” (Toronto) Globe and Mail, Mar. 18, 1988; Moritz, 96, 109; Young, 56. . . . Drop Out: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak; Jobs, Stanford commencement address; Moritz, 97. CHAPTER 4: ATARI AND INDIA Atari: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Al Alcorn, Nolan Bushnell, Ron Wayne. Moritz, 103–104

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with Steve Jobs, Daniel Kottke, Elizabeth Holmes, Greg Calhoun. Young, 72; Young and Simon, 31–32; Moritz, 107. Breakout: Interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Al Alcorn, Steve Wozniak, Ron Wayne, Andy Hertzfeld. Wozniak, 144–149; Young, 88; Linzmayer, 4. CHAPTER 5: THE APPLE I Machines of Loving Grace: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bono

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Jobs, Stanford commencement address; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago, 2006). The Homebrew Computer Club: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak. Wozniak, 152–172; Freiberger and Swaine, 99; Linzmayer, 5; Moritz, 144; Steve Wozniak, “Homebrew and How Apple Came to Be,” www.atariarchives.org; Bill Gates, “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” Feb. 3, 1976

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. Apple Is Born: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, Ron Wayne. Steve Jobs, address to the Aspen Design Conference, June 15, 1983, tape in Aspen Institute archives; Apple Computer Partnership Agreement, County

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Wozniak, 179–189; Moritz, 152–163; Young, 95–111; R. S. Jones, “Comparing Apples and Oranges,” Interface, July 1976. CHAPTER 6: THE APPLE II An Integrated Package: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Al Alcorn, Ron Wayne. Wozniak, 165, 190–195; Young, 126; Moritz, 169–170, 194–197; Malone, v, 103. Mike Markkula: Interviews

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with Regis McKenna, Don Valentine, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula, Arthur Rock. Nolan Bushnell, keynote address at the ScrewAttack Gaming Convention, Dallas, July 5, 2009; Steve Jobs, talk at the International Design Conference

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Interviews with Regis McKenna, John Doerr, Steve Jobs. Ivan Raszl, “Interview with Rob Janoff,” Creativebits.org, Aug. 3, 2009. The First Launch Event: Interviews with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs. Wozniak, 201–206; Moritz, 199–201; Young, 139. Mike Scott: Interviews with Mike Scott, Mike Markkula, Steve Jobs

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, Steve Wozniak, Arthur Rock. Young, 135; Freiberger and Swaine, 219, 222; Moritz, 213; Elliot, 4. CHAPTER 7: CHRISANN AND LISA Interviews with Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth

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367–370; Malcolm Gladwell, “Creation Myth,” New Yorker, May 16, 2011; Young, 178–182. CHAPTER 9: GOING PUBLIC Options: Interviews with Daniel Kottke, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Markkula, Bill Hambrecht. “Sale of Apple Stock Barred,” Boston Globe, Dec. 11, 1980. Baby You’re a Rich Man: Interviews with Larry

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Horn, Andy Hertzfeld, Mike Scott, Mike Markkula. Hertzfeld, 19–20, 26–27; Wozniak, 241–242. CHAPTER 11: THE REALITY DISTORTION FIELD Interviews with Bill Atkinson, Steve Wozniak, Debi Coleman, Andy Hertzfeld, Bruce Horn, Joanna Hoffman, Al Eisenstat, Ann Bowers, Steve Jobs. Some of these tales have variations. See Hertzfeld, 24, 68, 161

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“Apple Pitch,” Fortune, Apr. 15, 1985; Linzmayer, 145. Thirty Years Old: Interviews with Mallory Walker, Andy Hertzfeld, Debi Coleman, Elizabeth Holmes, Steve Wozniak, Don Valentine. Sheff. Exodus: Interviews with Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Wozniak, Bruce Horn. Hertzfeld, 253, 263–264; Young, 372–376; Wozniak, 265–266; Rose, 248–249; Bob Davis, “Apple’s Head, Jobs

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Mike Barnicle, “Roadkill on the Info Highway,” Boston Globe, Aug. 5, 1997. Exit, Pursued by a Bear: Interviews with Ed Woolard, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, Steve Wozniak, Fred Anderson, Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell. Privately printed family memoir by Ed Woolard (courtesy of Woolard); Amelio, 247, 261, 267; Gary Wolf, “The World According

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“No CEO in Sight for Apple,” San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 12, 1997; Carlton, 437. Killing the Clones: Interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Ed Woolard. Steve Wozniak, “How We Failed Apple,” Newsweek, Feb. 19, 1996; Linzmayer, 245–247, 255; Bill Gates, “Licensing of Mac Technology,” a memo to John Sculley, June 25

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2011; Richard Waters, “Apple Races to Keep Users Firmly Wrapped in Its Cloud,” Financial Times, June 9, 2011. A New Campus: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ann Bowers. Steve Jobs, appearance before the Cupertino City Council, June 7, 2011. CHAPTER 41: ROUND THREE Family Ties: Interviews with Laurene Powell, Erin Jobs

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition

by Steven Levy  · 18 May 2010  · 598pp  · 183,531 words

. The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to figure out what to do with it. Apple II. Steve Wozniak’s friendly, flaky, good-looking computer, wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry. Atari 800. This home computer gave great graphics

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made him violent. Mark Duchaineau. The young Dungeonmaster who copy-protected On-Line’s disks at his whim. Chris Espinosa. Fourteen-year-old follower of Steve Wozniak and early Apple employee. Lee Felsenstein. Former “military editor” of the Berkeley Barb and hero of an imaginary science-fiction novel, he designed computers with

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7090. Batch-processed and intolerable. Jerry Jewell. Vietnam vet turned programmer who founded Sirius Software. Steven Jobs. Visionary, beaded, nonhacking youngster who took Wozniak’s Apple II, made lots of deals, and formed a company that would make a billion dollars. Tom Knight. At sixteen, an MIT hacker who would name the

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first editor of hippie-styled Dr. Dobbs Journal, later started the lucrative Computer Faire. Randy Wigginton. Fifteen-year-old member of Steve Wozniak’s kiddie corps, he helped Woz trundle the Apple II to Homebrew. Still in high school when he became Apple’s first software employee. Ken Williams. Arrogant and brilliant young programmer

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.” In any case, as Dompier later recalled, “they had to drag Tom Snyder off the computer to have him finish the show.” Chapter 12. Woz Steve Wozniak did not sit near the front of the SLAC auditorium along with Lee Felsenstein during Homebrew meetings. His participation in the mapping sessions were infrequent

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no great social scheme, did not incubate plans for a Community Memory-style assault on the foundations of the batch-processed society. Meeting after meeting, Steve Wozniak would be at the back of the room, along with a loose contingent of followers of his digital exploits—mostly high school-age computer nuts

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of shaving than to enhance appearance, and his clothes—jeans and sports shirts, with little variation—never seemed to fit quite right. Still, it was Steve Wozniak, known to his friends as “Woz,” who would best exemplify the spirit and the synergy of the Homebrew Computer Club. It was Wozniak and the

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stored boards); a 30-chip TV display. Skills: digital design, interfacing, I/O devices, short on time, have schematics. The Homebrew atmosphere was perfect for Steve Wozniak; there was activity and energy focusing on the experimentation and electronic creativity which were as essential to him as the air he breathed or the

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Chicken Hawk, his home terminal would inexplicably begin printing out these semi-obscene Polish jokes, and he never did figure out that somewhere miles away Steve Wozniak was doubled up in laughter. Woz also met Randy Wigginton, an athletic, blond-haired fourteen-year-old computer kid who had managed to get a

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later said. But when Sokol put the blue box together it didn’t work; he let Draper know and that next Saturday, Draper, accompanied by Steve Wozniak, came over. They looked over Sokol’s box. “Looks OK,” said Draper, and began adjusting the tones by ear. This time, when Sokol tried the

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cassette tape player to the board, you would have a working computer with video display, mass storage, and input/output. You could then load in Steve Wozniak’s “Integer BASIC” and write programs. There were several amazing things about his computer, not the least of which was that he had delivered the

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. The Apple ad even said, “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.” While the selling was going on, Steve Wozniak began working on an expanded design of the board, something that would impress his Homebrew peers even more. Steve Jobs had plans to sell many

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design, and he started getting financing, support, and professional help for the day the product would be ready. The new version of Steve Wozniak’s computer would be called the Apple II, and at the time no one suspected that it would become the most important computer in history. • • • • • • • • It was the fertile atmosphere

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of Homebrew that guided Steve Wozniak through the incubation of the Apple II. The exchange of information, the access to esoteric technical hints, the swirling creative energy, and the chance to blow everybody’s mind with

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a well-hacked design or program . . . these were the incentives which only increased the intense desire Steve Wozniak already had: to build the kind of

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flow that Bob Marsh and Lee Felsenstein had when they designed the Sol, the first computer terminal combination and one of many inspirations for the Apple II. But he had a vision of what he wanted his computer to be, and could draw on help from Homebrew and other experts in the

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Sears color TV. Years later, the people attending that Homebrew meeting would recall different versions of the reaction to Stephen Wozniak’s presentation of the Apple II. Wozniak, and the other fans of the 6502 chip, came out with the impression that the computer had thrilled everyone. Others thought it was simply

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Sol itself, both of which were products which did their job cleanly, in a not overly flashy manner, and with a proletarian lack of sentimentality. Steve Wozniak’s Apple was another story. Growing up in a conventional family in the sheltered, suburban California world of single homes, science fairs, and McDonald’s

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the Apple II was just super was Chris Espinosa, a young acquaintance of Randy Wigginton. Espinosa was a skinny, pale fourteen-year-old high school kid who loved computers and flunked math classes because he felt that doing homework was a nonoptimal use of time. He was enthralled by this computer of Steve Wozniak

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, he would earn three dollars an hour. Steve Jobs was concentrating full-time on building up the Apple company to get ready to deliver the Apple II the following year and make a big splash in the marketplace. Jobs was a brilliant talker who, according to Alan Baum, “worked his tail off

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as a planner, someone with vision to see how computers could extend to a point of usefulness beyond that dreamed of by pure hackers like Steve Wozniak. He was also wise enough to realize that as a long-haired twenty-two-year-old whose customary garb was jeans and bare feet, he

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for growth. This real-world activity hadn’t really sunk in as far as Steve Wozniak was concerned. Chris Espinosa and Randy Wigginton would come over to his house from playing with Wigginton’s half-built version of the Apple II, and there, on the living room floor of Woz’s small place, they

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guided in this by the experienced hand of Mike Markkula, who was taking the Apple venture very seriously. One thing he apparently recognized was that Steve Wozniak’s commitment was to the computer rather than to the company. To Woz, the Apple was a brilliant hack, not an investment. It was his

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partner that if Woz wanted there to be an Apple Computer company, he must quit HP for all-out work on pre-production of the Apple II. It was a tough decision for Wozniak. “This was different than the year we spent throwing the Apple I together in the garage,” Wozniak

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to wangle the prime space near the entrance to the exhibit hall. The idea was to take advantage of that break to officially introduce the Apple II at the Faire. Though many around the Homebrew Club did not take Apple as a serious entry in the market (Gordon French came by one

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. They worked frantically down to the last minute before they had to drive the machines up to San Francisco; they had planned to have four Apple IIs running, and those would be the only existing prototypes. On the night of April 15, the cases arrived, fresh from being made out of injection

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molds, As everyone worked to put the innards of the computers into those cases, it was clear how different the Apple II was from the competition (with the possible exception of the Sol). Everyone else’s computer looked like the kind of thing that a combat radio

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, Processor Tech, and Cromemco were too damned busy. And the companies themselves provided the communities around which to share information. Apple was a good example. Steve Wozniak and his two young friends, Espinosa and Wigginton, were too busy with the young firm to keep going to Homebrew. Chris Espinosa later explained: “[After

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feeling and sharing of Homebrew. The company’s formal goals were traditional—making money, growing, gaining market share—and some secretiveness was required even of Steve Wozniak, who considered openness the central principle of the Hacker Ethic he fervently subscribed to. But this meant that the people within the company could be

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wealth is counted in units of tens of millions—John Draper was at home, playing with his Apple. He set the completed board into his Apple II. He connected it to the telephone line. And he set it up so that it would “scan” entire telephone exchanges, looking for telltale tones which

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1982 it boasted one major success story. A company built, in a sense, by the hacker dream, and made possible only by the wizardry of Steve Wozniak and his Apple Computer. A company that symbolized how the products of hacking—computer programs which are works of art—had been recognized as such

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it, it was fairly powerful, especially compared to the big machines of less than a decade ago. (MIT’s Marvin Minsky once estimated that an Apple II had the virtual power of the PDP-1.) And it ran pretty fast, almost comparable to a big machine, because on a time-sharing mainframe

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" to blend the six colors of the Apple, mixing dot by dot, to get twenty-one colors. He was performing stunts on the Apple that Steve Wozniak never dreamed of. Magic stuff. The game’s only problem was the first puzzle, where the adventurer, on his way to rescue Princess Priscilla of

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impossible to go down into the deepest recess of the machine, the 6502 chip, to speak in the Apple’s assembly language. This was changing: Steve Wozniak had recently hacked a brilliant design for a disk-drive interface for the Apple, and the company was able to offer low-cost floppy-disk

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the system at its most primal level. Programmers, would-be programmers, and even users buying Apples would invariably purchase disk drives along with them. Since Steve Wozniak’s Apple adhered to the Hacker Ethic in that it was a totally “open” machine, with an easily available reference guide that told you where

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turn it on shows a special enthusiasm.” Margot Tommervik learned the story of how Apple Computer began, and she marveled at how the machine conveyed Steve Wozniak’s “life-loving spirit into the computer. He had that ability to bite all the big pieces of life and chew it up and savor

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, like any “professional” programmer, probably had to submit code regularly, allow for proper supervision. What Atari’s lawyers did not realize was that Ed Roberts, Steve Wozniak, and even the designers of their own Atari 800 had wrought a Third Generation of hackers, idiot savants of the microprocessor, kids who didn’t

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Schwader. Perhaps the most significant event in Warren Schwader’s life occurred in 1977, when Warren was eighteen: his brother purchased one of the first Apple II computers. His brother had been paralyzed in a car accident, and wanted the Apple to relieve his boredom. It was up to tall, blond, thick

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had seen since the auto industry. Everybody wanted a piece of it. Apple Computer, which seemed like some questionable venture when Ken first saw the Apple II, was on its way to becoming a Fortune 500 company, more quickly than any company in history had ever done. Venture capitalists were focusing on

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. Hawkins brought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in a coup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors. Electronic Arts had no booth at the Applefest, but its presence was felt. It hosted a

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appeared, some to check things out, others genuinely interested in this newer-than-new-age venture. The center of attention, though, was EA board member Steve Wozniak, cited in a series of speeches as “the man who started it all.” It was an epithet that would have haunted some young genius eager

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and the stifling bureaucracy there were such that he was not sure if he would ever return to the company built on his brainchild, the Apple II. All in all, the party was a success, crackling with the sweet feeling that everybody was riding on the crest of a tidal wave.

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schnapps—large swigs of it from a bottle with a metal drink-pourer attached. Many of the toasts were directed to the guest of honor, Steve Wozniak. Ken had run into him that afternoon, and to Ken’s delight the legendary hacker had accepted the belated invitation to dinner. Ken Williams made

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and just write articles at night. Who knows?” Gates had to stray from the hacker’s rigid moral code to become a mainstream success. All Steve Wozniak had to do was don a pair of dancing shoes. While Woz remains a hacker legend, he has also become an unlikely pop-culture icon

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-marketing work, but I’m also looking at technologies that might be competitive in the future.” But even Woz doesn’t expect to create another Apple II. In 2010, his greatest contribution is as a role model. His universal renown is a continuing reminder that brains and creativity can trump traditional notions

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that makes for a different kind of thrill than Hertzfeld experienced during the early days at Apple. “Do you know what was exciting about the Apple II?” he says. “We could beep the speaker. But we knew it could one day make music. That’s why it was so exciting—when

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Tommervik, Margot Tommervik, Mark Turmell, Robert Wagner, Jim Warren, Howard Warshaw, Joseph Weizenbaum, Randy Wigginton, John Williams, Ken Williams, Roberta Williams, Terry Winograd, Donald Woods, Steve Wozniak, and Fred Wright. I would like to particularly thank those of the above who gave me extraordinary amounts of attention, people who include (but are

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to Teresa Carpenter, who coped magnificently with the book and its author through the long process of research and writing. Finally, thanks to Steve Wozniak for designing that Apple II on which I wrote the book. Had it not been for the revolution which I address in Hackers, my labors might have continued for

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Brotherhood, The Third Generation, Summer Camp, Frogger, Frogger, Applefest, Wizard vs. Wizards, Wizard vs. Wizards Apple Computer Company, Woz, Woz, Secrets, The Brotherhood, Afterword: 2010 Apple II computer, Woz, Woz, The Wizard and the Princess, Summer Camp, Afterword: 2010 design, Woz Apple World, The Brotherhood, The Brotherhood Applefest, Applefest, Applefest Arcade games

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby  · 1 Feb 2022  · 935pp  · 197,338 words

may advance faster than the individual. The fertility of the network was illustrated by the story of Apple, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. On the face of it, Apple was an obvious candidate for venture investment, because scores of insiders already understood that the personal computer would be

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whose time has arrived” and had produced a prototype complete with mouse and graphical interface. Intel and National Semiconductor had considered making a PC, and Steve Wozniak had twice offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard.[1] But all four companies had decided not to build a PC, inhibited

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haircuts.[11] But then he noticed something else—something that other visitors to the garage had not appreciated. Wozniak’s technology was truly impressive. The Apple II prototype lying on his workbench was free from the standard mess of circuit boards strung together with fiddly connectors. The whole machine worked on a

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in someone’s office. At a quarter to seven that evening, Mike Scott appeared again. “Mr. Montagu, you are really a fortunate guy,” he said. Steve Wozniak had decided to buy a house. To raise the cash, he wanted to sell some of his own equity. Montagu asked how much stock Wozniak

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. He was a ferociously competitive tennis player and a force of nature: he combined the promotional charisma of Steve Jobs with the engineering virtuosity of Steve Wozniak. But to Metcalfe’s immense frustration, Xerox showed no sign of building a business out of his Ethernet invention, nor did the company appear eager

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Sequoia Capital’s investment, 83–84, 85–86, 90–91, 160, 430n Venrock’s investment, 86–87, 88, 90–91, 429n, 430n Apple I, 82 Apple II, 84–85 Arab oil embargo of 1973, 63–64 Archie, 20 ARD. See American Research and Development Ariba, 170 ARPANET, 417n Arthur, Brian, 350 artificial

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age

by Leslie Berlin  · 7 Nov 2017  · 615pp  · 168,775 words

four consecutive nights. They had both ended up with mononucleosis, and Wozniak says Jobs never paid him the full amount they had agreed on. The Apple II used a version of the same MOS 6502 microprocessor that Atari had built into its Stella system. It was also Atari, indirectly, that brought Apple

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around the country, was a cauldron of entrepreneurship. Jobs and Wozniak had shown off the Apple I at a Homebrew meeting, and Wozniak demonstrated the Apple II, the machine that had so impressed Markkula, at Homebrew meetings throughout the computer’s development. In January 1976, twenty-one-year-old Bill Gates published

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cash register. II. Among established computer makers, only Commodore made an early move into personal computing, and this only after Wozniak and Jobs showed the Apple II to a Commodore employee, Chuck Peddle. Peddle had also sold Wozniak the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor when Peddle was working for MOS Technology. III. Among

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more user-friendly computer, it lacked the Alto’s graphical user interface, mouse, ease of use, and network capabilities. Even five years after the Apple II’s introduction, lay users complained that it took many hours to figure out simply how to begin to use a personal computer. What does it

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business plan for Apple, he experienced that wonderful moment when the desires of his heart and the dicta of his mind meshed. He loved the Apple II, and every calculation he ran said that the computer could be the basis of a wildly successful business. Markkula could imagine only one significant potential

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school,” a confidential Apple document explained.28 Within two years of the Apple Education Foundation’s launch, more educational software had been developed for the Apple II than for any other personal computer. In 1982, under a program called “The Kids Can’t Wait,” spearheaded by Steve Jobs, Apple donated some

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nine thousand Apple IIs worth $21 million to schools in California.VIII That donation, of course, led to tax write-offs for Apple, even more educational software being written

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for the machine, and more students who would leave for college and, as Markkula put it, “say ‘I want an Apple II’ ” when it came time to buy a computer.29 By 1983, after the foundation had made grants totaling more than $750,000, 73 percent of

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one visitor described as “big, and flashy, and right in front.”41 Markkula knew that the Faire would mark not only the debut of the Apple II and the company itself, but also that of a rival machine: the Commodore PET. Markkula coached Jobs and Wozniak ahead of the Faire’s

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opening day. They needed to dress nicely and trim their beards, he said.VII He had them practice their pitches for the Apple II and walked them through what he saw as the computer’s most attractive features. He learned only years later that despite his attempts to orient

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had attended the Faire, many of them not hobbyists but onlookers curious to know more about computers. The visitors were an ideal audience for the Apple II, the only machine on the floor that a reporter described as so easy to use that “you don’t really have to know anything

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really want to be the computer company, not the small-business computer company or something else—just the personal computer company!” He explained that the Apple II would be ready to ship in a few weeks and that the $1,298 price (more than $5,100 in 2016) included two game

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drawers, and a small bookshelf. Behind the desk, a hook on the wall for Markkula’s coat hung beneath an open copy of the Apple II brochure prepared for the West Coast Computer Faire and tacked to the wall.46 A coffeemaker stood on a not-particularly-stable-looking table. “I

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want to come to work here,” Carter said. He had seen the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire. The machine and its marketing materials had impressed him. “Are you crazy?” Markkula asked. Carter had done well

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birth of Apple’s floppy disk drive almost exactly a year after the company incorporated, and six months after it began shipping Apple IIs, offers a fine illustration. The Apple II was selling well, but Markkula was convinced it would never make the leap to a broad consumer market unless there were some

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software programs, mostly games and a few educational programs, in the works. But loading even something as simple as a game of Hangman from the Apple II’s cassette drive could take many minutes. A hobbyist might be willing to wait that long, but most consumers would not. In December 1977, Markkula

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told Wozniak and Jobs that he wanted a floppy disk drive for the Apple II. IBM had invented the floppy disk drive, about one hundred times faster than cassette drives, six years before at its San Jose research center.

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get it out of him,” Kamradt later explained. “I couldn’t.”55 Jobs could. It had been Jobs who suggested certain technical improvements to the Apple II, and when Wozniak had said that implementing those improvements would be too expensive, it was Jobs who cold-called chip distributors and convinced them to

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gave Wozniak manuals and schematics, knowing that he would want to understand everything about disk drives. In a feat of engineering as impressive as his Apple II—Wozniak calls it “my most incredible experience at Apple and the finest job I did”56—Wozniak, working with a high school student named Randy

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Wigginton, designed and built a prototype of a functional 5¼-inch disk drive for the Apple II.57 In only two weeks, he designed a controller with about one-tenth the typical number of chips, moving much of the work previously

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cases and other parts, mostly from suppliers who built them to the company’s specifications.) Scott also wrote the in-house reference manual for the Apple II, the “red book,” so called for its fire engine red cover.I He orchestrated two moves in rapid succession, first to the small offices

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to allow them to invest. By fall of 1977, Apple was no longer the questionable operation with two seedy-looking guys in a garage. The Apple II had begun shipping in May, and already the company was profitable. In 1977, Apple had $49,000 in net retained earnings on $756,000

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living.”79 The document reviewed small computers recently introduced by Commodore and Tandy/Radio Shack that sold for roughly one-third the price of an Apple II. The memorandum also warned that even more formidable competitors—Atari, Texas Instruments, and RCA—would likely enter the market within a year. One line

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at PARC and other research centers used the same word to describe the small computers, a word that would have infuriated Markkula, who saw the Apple II as a powerful tool: toy. Small computers were toys.3 “You couldn’t do real programming. You couldn’t collaborate—there was no network.

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his grandmother. Apple’s first fan letter was a photograph of a screen. VI. Tesler says he did not buy an Apple II because he wanted lowercase letters and the early Apple IIs used only caps. Young Maniacs  MIKE MARKKULA From the moment Mike Markkula funded Apple and demanded the highest-quality marketing, publicity

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The telecom giant ITT distributed computers in Europe. Bell and Howell, a company that supplied media equipment to schools, marketed a classroom version of the Apple II that was black with a tamper-resistant cover. The influence of Markkula’s attention to appearances, an attention shared by Jobs and Regis McKenna, was

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1976 (Jobs, Wozniak, and Markkula), Apple had grown to roughly 1,000. Through Gene Carter’s redesigned distribution model, Apple had sold 131,000 Apple II systems via some 1,800 retail computer stores.3 A month before the IPO, Apple had introduced the Apple III, a higher-end machine with

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had too many different computers under development, but in 1980, the variety was cause for celebration. Hundreds of software programs had been written for the Apple II. Although games comprised the most popular category, the single most important program was VisiCalc, the first easy-to-use spreadsheet program.4 Available exclusively on

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the Apple II for a year, VisiCalc was of such value to Apple that the IPO prospectus devoted a full paragraph to the unnamed “financial modeling system.” (

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One wag called the Apple II a “VisiCalc accessory.”5) With VisiCalc, a user could change a single number, and the spreadsheet would automatically rerun calculations that depended on it with

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.8 Apple had several competitors by the time of the public offering. The Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 had a larger market share than the Apple II, and Commodore’s PET was a close third. In its prospectus, Apple anticipated the imminent arrival of other competitors, including IBM, with far greater

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?” She warned that Apple would suffer if it continued to grow this way.20 By 1981, Apple was manufacturing or developing four different computers: the Apple II, the Apple III, the Lisa, and the Macintosh. Each computer had its own staff and culture. Divisions of other sorts had arisen, as well.

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the gee-whiz stories about Apple and its computers continued. A reporter wrote about how Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm, was using an Apple II to develop special effects. Steve Jobs, who would later buy the computer division of Industrial Light & Magic called Pixar, clipped the article and sent it

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to Apple’s head of communications. Several papers carried the story of the minister who conducted marriage ceremonies via an Apple II. “Hello, my name is Reverend Apple. I am the world’s first ordained computer,” the screen read before displaying passages from Kahlil Gibran’s

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ideas, such as “A personal computer is more than just a small ‘big’ computer.” In the ads, Jobs also recounted his favorite stories: the Apple II that had saved the business of a sewing machine repairman in England, the medical center that was using the machines to process ambulance reports, the

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intellectual energy, like language or mathematics. But there’s never been much of an artifact that allowed the free use of intellectual energy. The Apple II saves two hours a day for me. That’s free intellectual energy.”56 Jobs told the Los Angeles Times that “Personal computers will promote much

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ran a series of prime-time television spots. The commercials starred popular talk show host Dick Cavett, who in chatting about the easy-to-use Apple II became the tech industry’s “first celebrity spokesman,” according to McKenna, who had convinced the star to do the job.I By the middle

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we don’t.”78 * * * I. The commercials had a deliciously self-mocking tone, and one had a decidedly feminist feel: when Cavett explains the Apple II’s versatility and memory capacity to a woman in terms of recipe storage, she smiles and nods before mentioning that she also uses the machine

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One-on-One, a basketball game featuring two of the sport’s biggest stars. The title was one of the most popular games for the Apple II and an early indicator of the enormous market for licensed sports video games. (Electronic Arts would exploit this market with great success five years

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video game industry, from open to closed systems. Apple made a similar shift around the same time, moving from an open operating system in the Apple II and its descendants to a closed system in the Macintosh. II. Some low-end home computers sold for $200; the new Atari 5200 was

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its “Man of the Year” award to an inanimate object, the computer. The accompanying article singled out the many novel uses to which the Apple II had been put: the Grateful Dead had used an Apple machine for accounting and scheduling; an exhausted father had programmed his computer to rock the

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a reporter without computer experience to learn to use a personal computer, she spent a total of seventy hours with three different machines (including an Apple II and an Apple III), only to conclude, “I remained wholly incapable of utilizing them to suit the needs I would have bought them for.”

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today, and he has generally liked it that way. After Jobs, Markkula was the first person to perceive the business opportunity latent in Wozniak’s Apple II. He used his connections to staff and finance the company. He wrote Apple’s business plans and pushed for key technical developments. He set

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on the assembly line. By 1982, when this picture was taken in Amsterdam, she was traveling the world. Courtesy: Mike Markkula Mike Markkula, with an Apple II, in his backyard in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Courtesy: Sandy Kurtzig Sandy Kurtzig at her ASK desk in the mid-1980s. Courtesy: Leslie

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2016. 9. Markkula, interview by author, May 3, 2016. 10. Outline for Apple Buisness [sic] Plan, Nov. 18, 1976, ACM. 11. Stan Veit, “PC—History: Apple II” at http://www.pc-history.org/apple.htm. 12. Hambrecht profile in Robert Levering, Michael Katz, and Milton Moskowitz, The Computer Entrepreneurs: Who’s Making

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to the $500 million level. Almost from the beginning, Apple stored orders, credit files, and shipping records in databases. 70. “A module for the Apple II fills 30,000 square feet, requires a crew of 70, and produces between 450 and 500 units per day.” Apple Annual Report, 1981: 10. On

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(with 86 percent of buyers having bought or planning to buy the software), followed by word processing (65 percent) and finance (63 percent). “Software for Apple II,” Gene Carter Collection, M1059, SUSC. 5. John Markoff, “Radio Shack: Set Apart from the Rest of the Field,” InfoWorld 5 (July 1982): 43. 6.

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controller at Intel when VisiCalc was in beta testing; his division was one of several beta sites within Intel, all of them running VisiCalc on Apple II machines. (One of the founders of VisiCalc’s parent company, Personal Software, had previously worked at Intel.) 8. Dan Flystra, “The Creation and Destruction

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, only 120,000 had been sold. In the same period between the Apple III’s introduction and its demise, the company sold nearly 2 million Apple IIs. Andrew Pollack, “Next, a Computer on Every Desk,” New York Times, Aug. 23, 1981; Bruce Entin, “Can Apple Keep Its Piece of the Pie?,”

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computer, we created a man-machine partnership” (advertisement), Wall Street Journal, Feb. 25, 1981. 56. Wendy Quiones, “Pioneering a Revolution: Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,” Boston Computer Update, July–August 1981. 57. Jobs, quoted in Kay Mills, “The Third Wave: Whiz-Kids Make a Revolution in Computers,” Los Angeles Times

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

…

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

…

. 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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

-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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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,

…

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

…

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

…

, 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

…

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

…

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

…

. 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

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Howard Rheingold

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San Francisco

by Lonely Planet

Western USA

by Lonely Planet

San Francisco

by Lonely Planet

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