Homebrew And How The Apple Came To Be
HOMEBREW AND
HOW THE APPLE
CAME TO BE
by Stephen Wozniak
Stephen Wozniak is the designer of<br>the Apple II computer and cofounder of Apple Computer Inc.
Without computer<br>clubs there would probably be no Apple computers. Our club in the<br>Silicon Valley, the Homebrew Computer Club, was among the first of its<br>kind. It was in early 1975, and a lot of tech-type people would gather<br>and trade integrated circuits back and forth. You could have called it<br>Chips and Dips. We had similar interests and we were there to help<br>other people, but we weren't official and we weren't formal. Our<br>leader, Lee Felsenstein, who later designed the Osborne computer, would<br>get up at every meeting and announce the convening of "the Homebrew<br>Computer Club which does not exist" and everyone would applaud happily.
The theme of the club was "Give to help others."<br>Each session began with a "mapping period," when people would get up<br>one by one and speak about some item of interest, a rumor, and have a<br>discussion. Somebody would say, "I've got a new part," or somebody else<br>would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of<br>teletype.
During the "random access period" that followed, you<br>would wander outside and find people trading devices or information and<br>helping each other. Occasionally one guy would show up and say, "Is<br>there anyone here from Intel? No? Well, I've got some Intel chips we<br>want to raffle off." This was before big personal computer firms and<br>big money considerations. There was just one personal computer then,<br>the Altair 8800, based around the Intel 8080 microprocessor.
The Apple I and II were designed strictly on a<br>hobby, for-fun basis, not to be a product for a company. They were<br>meant to bring down to the club and put on the table during the random<br>access period and demonstrate: Look at this, it uses very few chips.<br>It's got a video screen. You can type stuff on it. Personal computer<br>keyboards and video screens were not well established then. There was a<br>lot of showing off to other members of the club. Schematics of the<br>Apple I were passed around freely, and I'd even go over to people's<br>houses and help them build their own.
The Apple I and Apple II computers were shown off<br>every two weeks at the club meeting. "Here's the latest little<br>feature," we'd say. We'd get some positive feedback going and turn<br>people on. It's very motivating for a creator to be able to show what's<br>being created as it goes on. It's unusual for one of the most<br>successful products of all time, like the Apple II, to be demonstrated<br>throughout its development.
Today it's pretty obvious that if you're going to<br>build a billion-dollar product, you have to keep it secret while it's<br>in development because a million people will try to steal it. If we'd<br>been intent on starting a company and selling our product, we'd<br>probably have sat down and said, "Well, we have to choose the right<br>microprocessor, the right number of characters on the screen," etc. All<br>these decisions were being made by other companies, and our computer<br>would have wound up being like theirs-a big square box with switches<br>and lights, no video terminal built in . . .
We had to be more pragmatic. The 6502<br>microprocessor, for instance, was chosen for one reason only. It was<br>the first one to sell over the counter for $20. The 8080 cost $370 at<br>the time, and you couldn't get it at any surplus stores. You had to go<br>down to a distributor, and they made you feel like you had to be a<br>company with an account. It wasn't set up for hobbyists or<br>experimenters.
Apple Seedlings
Steve Jobs was a friend of mine from high school. We were introduced<br>because we had two things in common: electronics and pranks. It turned<br>out that he had a tremendous drive to start a company. He had worked at<br>Atari and had become friends with some of the key people there,<br>including Nolan Bushnell, the founder. Nolan was his idol. Steve wanted<br>to have a successful product, go out and start selling it, and make<br>some money. He also had excellent product ideas for the upcoming home<br>personal computer.
To produce the Apple I, Steve and I formed a<br>partnership. We didn't sell very many Apple Is the first year. We built<br>them at night in our garage. At first we expected to sell circuit<br>boards at the Homebrew Club: just put in your own chips and it'll work.<br>Then we got a $50,000 order from a local store and we were in heaven.
The trouble was how to get the money to build a<br>hundred computers-they might cost over a hundred dollars each to build.<br>Steve went to a local parts supplier and talked them into giving us a<br>lot of parts on thirty days' net credit. It was very unusual for them<br>to give us credit, because we didn't own anything. We didn't own<br>houses. We didn't even own our cars. But Steve is very persuasive. We'd<br>get the parts and then stuff them into the circuit boards, have them<br>soldered, get them back in the garage and test them. And we could turn<br>the whole cycle...