iWoz (27 page)

"Oh yeah," he said. "That hoax. And I know who did it."

Randy and I both perked up at this. I said, "Who? Who did it?"

He said, "It was Gary Ingram at Processor Technology. He has a strange sense of humor."

This was exactly what I'd hoped for! Someone else getting the blame—and that someone else happened to be at our rival, Processor Technology. So it was a success.

I said, "You know, I heard there was kind of a code in the handout." And I pulled the brochure out and looked at the letters like I was discovering this for the first time. "P . . .R...O...C...

I'm sure that for years and years after this, everyone thought Processor Technology had done it. I never admitted it to anyone until many years later, when I was at a birthday party for Steve Jobs.

It was there that I presented him with a framed copy of it. As soon as he saw it, Steve broke up laughing. He'd never even suspected I'd done it!

The Biggest IPO Since Ford

Chapter 14
The Biggest IPO Since Ford

Right after we officially incorporated as Apple Computer Corporation in early 1977, Mike had us go down to Beverly Hills and talk to patent lawyers. They said that any ROM chips we had around that had any code in them—any PROMs, any EPROMs— every single one of them needed a copyright notice. I had to put "Copyright 1977" on them all.

I sat down with one of the patent lawyers, Ed Taylor, and went through all the clever things in my design that other people definitely wouldn't have done before. How I did the color, for instance, and how I did the timing for the DRAM.

We ended up with five separate parts of a patent. It was a good, secure patent that was going to wind up being one of those patents in history that become very, veiy valuable. It was going to be the heart of lawsuits to come. For instance, it would come in handy when people tried to copy, or clone, the Apple II and other products after that.

Back then, there were no ideas of how software could be patented. This was such new stuff. We found out that copyrights were a better way to deal with people copying our technology. Copyrights were an easier, quicker, and less costly way than patents to stop people who tried to copy our computer outright.

• o •

Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore's PET. These would become our direct competitors.

But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one.

I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high- resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was— and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer.

At first that mode didn't mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic.

The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.

As I said, Commodore and Radio Shack within a few months came out with computers that also ran BASIC out of the box. But the Apple II was far superior to them. The Radio Shack TRS-80 and Commodore PET did have DRAM like the Apple II, but they were limited to only 4K bytes of it. The Apple II could expand up to 48K bytes on the motherboard, and even more in the slots.

The TRS-80 and PET only came in 4K or 8K models, and they weren't expandable. The Apple II had eight slots for expansion; the other two had none. Finally, the PET and TRS-80 screens were black-and-white. No color like ours. And they had rickety keyboards with small keys.

The Apple II could grow into the future and had so much versatility built in. That's why it became the leader.

• O •

The Apple II was also an ideal computer for anybody who wanted to design a computer game.

We provided documentation and tools, making it really easy for programmers to create games in BASIC (at a hundred commands a second), or machine language (at a million commands a second), or both. The only way you could create a game for computers like the PET and TRS-80 was strictly in BASIC, and only with text characters on-screen. Unlike the Apple II, these machines didn't have graphics. It was inconceivable that anyone could've created a compelling arcade game on any of those computers.

Within months dozens of companies started up and they were putting games on cassette tape for the Apple II. These were all start-up companies, but thanks to our design and documentation, we made it easy to develop stuff that worked on our platform. Generally these little companies amounted to little more than a single guy in his house who figured out how to write a neat game, wrote it, and copied it onto a bunch of cassette tapes that he then sold through specialty computer stores.

And back then, there wasn't software rip-off happening like there is today. The stores weren't, for example, taking one cassette tape and making a bunch of copies and not paying the original guy. None of that was going on because there wasn't much money in the business yet. Ethics could still be high. It wasn't as if there was that much more money to be made by stealing.

So all the tapes the stores sold were legitimate, and the stores

were taking a cut on the games they sold. Within a year a whole Apple II industry sprang up with dozens and dozens of companies of little guys—just onesy-twosy companies, really—at home writing software for the Apple II.

And then little companies started building circuit boards that fit into the Apple II slots. Boards were easy to design for the Apple II because we gave complete documentation on how our boards worked. Also, I had included some great tools: the Apple II had a little operating system developers could access, as well as a set of easy-to-use software debugging tools I had written myself.

So how do you design a printer board that will attach a printer to the Apple II? How do you design a scanner or a plotter board? It was all so well documented that within a year of the Apple II shipping that June, all of a sudden there were all these Apple II add-on products being sold by people.

People who wanted to do an add-on board not only had to design that board, but they had to write a little program—a device driver program that translates between computer programs and the actual hardware. The predecoded addresses I had for all eight slots would be connected to a ROM or PROM chip on the board containing this program. The program could be 256 bytes long with just a single PROM chip, but each slot had another 2K bytes of predecoded address space for a larger amount of code. You had to be aware that this second address space went to every board, so in order to use it, there had to be some other circuits that knew which board was in control.

Otherwise, when one of these 2K bytes of addresses came along, a bunch of boards would put data to the processor, and the boards would conflict. Each board also had 16 predecoded addresses intended to trigger hardware—to control and sense the hardware devices.

There were so many options available to a board designer that

it led to a lot of very creative designs. The best designs made the most of the least, just as I like to do.

The computer magazines had tons of Apple II product ads for software and hardware. Suddenly the Apple II name was everywhere. We didn't have to buy an advertisement or do anything ourselves to get the name out. Our name was suddenly all over the place. We were just out there, thanks to this industry of software programs and hardware devices that sprang up around the Apple II.

We became the hot fad of the age, and all the magazines (even in the mainstream press) started writing great things about us. Everywhere you looked. I mean, we couldn't buy that kind of publicity. We didn't have to.

• o •

Like I said, the Apple II used a cassette tape for data storage. I had never been around or even used a floppy disk in my life. They did exist, though. I'd heard of floppy disks you could buy for Altair-style kit computers, and, of course, the expensive minicomputers of the time used them. Now, all these were in the big, eight-inch floppy format. That means they were spinning magnetic disks that measured eight inches in diameter. And you could only hold about 100K bytes of data on each floppy disk. That's not very much by today's standards. Totally, it's only about 100,000 typed characters.

But Mike Markkula told me at a meeting that we really should have a floppy disk on the Apple II. He was annoyed at the way it took forever to get his little checkbook program to load from cassette. A floppy disk, because it spins so much faster and stores data more densely, would load the checkbook program much more quickly.

For instance, a computer could read 1,000 bits per second off a tape, but it would go 100,000 bits per second off a floppy.

I knew that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las

Vegas was coming up. It would be the first CES where companies could demonstrate computers, and only marketing people from Apple were going.

I asked Mike, if I finished the disk drive in time, could I go to Vegas for the show, too? He said yes.

That gave me only two weeks to build a floppy drive for the Apple II, a device I had never seen working before or ever used in any way, but I now had this artificial motivation (artificial, because of course I could've gone to the CES if I wanted to) to try to astound people at Apple again.

I worked all day, all night, through Christmas and New Year's trying to get it done. Randy Wiggington, who was actually attending Homestead High by now, the school Steve and I had graduated from, helped me a lot on that project.

• o •

To help me get started, Steve told me he'd heard that a company named Shugart, which was the main floppy drive manufacturer at the time, was coming up with a 5-inch format. (Alan Shugart had invented the floppy years before when he was at IBM.) Steve was always looking for new technologies that had an advantage and were likely to be the trend, and this was definitely a case like that.

He got one of the new Shugart 5-inch drives for me so I could see if I could make it work with the Apple II. What I had to do was design a controller board—a card that would plug into the Apple II—that would let you read and write data from the floppy. The first thing I did was examine the drive and its controller board and how they worked. I scanned the manual. Finally I studied the schematics of their circuitry, and I analyzed Shugart's floppy disk circuit too. It had a connector and a protocol for how signals would be applied to write data. In the end, I decided that of the twenty-two or so chips, about twenty of them weren't needed. To make the floppy disk work required a combination of a circuit I

had to design and the existing circuit on the Shugart drive. I stripped out twenty of their chips, so that reduced twenty of my total end product. That's the way I always think about things. I could run data right from my own floppy controller to the read/write head and implement any start/stop protocols of my own in code on the computer. To tell you the truth, it was less work on the computer than generating the funny protocol Shugart wanted. Then I sat down and came up with a very simple circuit that would write data at floppy disk rates and read it. This turned out to be a real challenge.

• o •

In the case of the cassette tape interface I'd designed, I had a signal that constantly varied from high to low and low to high and so on. The signal could never stop as long as the tape was running. The circuit handling signals to a cassette recorder weren't designed to let a signal stop changing.

And the tape wasn't able to store a signal that stayed the same for too long. So I had the microprocessor time the low-high-low transitions according to the Is and Os of the data being written. I chose the rates of this cassette data to be between 1,000 and 2,000 hertz. Those were typical voice frequencies that a cassette tape was designed to record and play. That's approximately one millisecond (a thousandth of a second) between transitions from high to low to high and so on signals.

But the signals to a floppy disk needed transition times that were much shorter—only four to eight microseconds (or mil- lionths of a second). There was no way to get my microprocessor to generate these timings directly from the Is and 0s. It was just too fast. After all, the 6502 microprocessor inside the Apple II ran at a clock speed of approximately 1 MHz. The fastest instruction took two microseconds and would take many instructions to generate the timing for Is and 0s. This was a problem.

I came up with an answer, thankfully.

The Apple II was designed to read and write bytes of data to cards plugged into the eight free slots, and it could do that really efficiently. So I came up with a scheme to output 8 bits (that's one byte) of data to the floppy controller, which would output those bits every four microseconds on its own, one bit at a time.