Return to the Little Kingdom (23 page)

Most of the chiefs were unimpressed. They thought the market for assembled microcomputers would be limited to hobbyists and most still bore the scars of earlier attempts to sell consumer items. Some years before, other young men had mustered similar arguments and had persuaded them to build digital watches and calculators. The results had been painful. The chiefs had discovered that expertise in one area wasn’t something that could be transferred to another and that technical superiority wasn’t enough to sway the consumer. Rapid price cutting and competition from the Orient had left some semiconductor companies with warehouses full of unsold calculators and watches.

The semiconductor houses were also faced with their own demands. William Davidow, a vice-president at Intel, remembered, “We had enough trouble keeping the wheels glued on our own machine without worrying about something else.” Meanwhile, the minicomputer companies decided it made more sense to shrink their machines rather than to try to build microcomputers. Both Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced the DEC LS1-11, and Data General with its microNova started to sell machines with switches on the front panels that looked like little sisters of the larger machines.

So small microcomputer companies were left in their anonymity. Most of the others had never even heard of Apple which was too small, too fragile, and too eccentric to be taken seriously. Those with a prophetic bent decided that the company was doomed by Wozniak’s nonconformist decision to choose the 6502 microprocessor while most other companies built their computers around the 8080. Distributors and retailers like Paul Terrell had decided that the future lay with the 8080, the S-100 bus, and industry standards and were planning to discontinue stocking 6502 machines. The large advertisements in magazines like
Byte
were for companies like Southwest Technical Products, Processor Technology, and IMSAI. The Apple computer was an unconventional local curiosity.

 

Shortly before Labor Day, 1976, Wozniak and Jobs headed to the East Coast for a computer show that was being staged in a rundown hotel in Atlantic City. They packed a suitcase with Apple computers and a bundle of one-page advertisements. Along with the Apple computers, Wozniak carried another machine mounted in a case known to hobbyists as a cigar box. Like the engineers and salesmen of other California computer companies, Jobs and Wozniak took TWA’s Flight 67 from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Much of the flight was consumed with the buzz of technical conversation, shop talk, gossip, and surreptitious peeks at new computers. The salesmen from Processor Technology were carrying a new machine named the Sol Terminal Computer, after Les Solomon, the editor of
Popular Electronics
. Dressed in a sheet-metal case with a built-in keyboard, it made the other computers look dated and amateurish. Its proponents were confident that their computer would savage the competition. They talked disparagingly of blankies—computers that had nothing but a switch on a front panel—and of blinkies, like the Altair, with just lights on the front panel. In their minds the Sol formed an entirely new category. Lee Felsenstein, who was a consultant to Processor Technology, leaned over Wozniak’s headrest, glanced at the prototype of the new computer that rested on the fold-down tray, and formed his own conclusion, “It was thoroughly unimpressive. These two guys just had a cigar box. What the hell did they know?”

T
he cigar box that Wozniak and Jobs took to Atlantic City in the dog days of 1976 contained a savagely deformed Apple computer. The printed circuit board screwed to the wooden base was festooned with fresh wires that sneaked between the chips. Despite its forlorn appearance, Wozniak and Jobs guarded the machine carefully. During the daytime, while they tried to sell some Apple computers from a card table on the convention floor, it was locked in their seedy hotel room. In the evenings, after the crowds had disappeared from the fair, Wozniak, Jobs, and Dan Kottke (who had journeyed from New York to help his friends) slipped into a room dominated by a large television screen. Wozniak ran a cable across the carpet, typed some commands into the computer, and made it fling startling sprays of color across the television screen.

Wozniak had been working on enhancements to the Apple since its introduction at the Homebrew Club. In the give-and-take following the original announcement some members had asked what additional features were being contemplated. Wozniak mentioned that he was working on a circuit with a few chips that would convert the black-and-white machine into a color computer. It was an extravagant claim since at the time designers thought a color circuit would take at least forty chips. Wozniak’s determination to add color to the Apple sprang from a demonstration at the Homebrew Club of a minicomputer that was capable of displaying color graphics. The Dazzler, a machine produced by Cromemco, a small company whose founders attended Homebrew meetings, also created color displays that left their mark on Wozniak. “It was so impressive to see colors whirling around. I knew I wanted to do color.” So his announcement that he intended to design some color circuitry was virtually a masochistic challenge and completion amounted to a virility test. Wozniak’s chief reason for adding color circuitry was practical. He wanted a computer that would play Breakout, the game that he and Jobs had designed for Atari.

Wozniak returned to his lab bench at Hewlett-Packard and started to attack two entirely different problems. One centered on devising a circuit that would display color. The other was devoted to reducing the number of chips on the board by simplifying the memory. The Apple computer had two sets of memory. One—an 8K-byte board of chips—served the microprocessor. Another—composed of shift registers (an older, slower form of memory)—served the black-and-white display. In an effort to reduce the number of chips, Wozniak wanted to find a way to let one memory serve both the computer and the display. He investigated the way a picture is displayed on a television and found that a raster scan spends two thirds of its time moving across the screen spraying the phosphor with electrons from left to right, and one third of its time whipping back from right to left. Armed with that knowledge Wozniak decided to force the microprocessor and the display to share the same memory. While the raster moved across the screen, taking bits from the memory, the microprocessor was barred. And while the raster whipped back, the microprocessor plunged in. It was the sort of approach that had been the subject of debate at the Homebrew and a writer in the newsletter had wondered in August 1975 whether the timing for a display might be solved for members if “a circuit could be published which read from a microcomputer memory while the computer isn’t using it.” To make the allocation work, Wozniak had to slow down the speed of the microprocessor. “All the computer was supposed to do was play games, so nobody would ever know. It was funny. Just by thinking of a couple of unrelated issues, out came a simpler design.” Wozniak had virtually added color for free and designed a computer which, though it had about half the number of chips of the first machine, was more powerful.

Wozniak also wanted to expand the capacity of the Apple. Much of the power of minicomputers had sprung from slots in the motherboard that housed smaller printed circuit boards. The slots were a crucial part of the design because it meant that the computers could be expanded to perform a large variety of tasks. smaller printed circuit boards that plugged into the slots might contain more memory chips, a connection to a printer or to a telephone. Some of the most successful minicomputer companies had encouraged smaller firms to make peripherals that would work with the computer. So the slots tended to bring benefits to everybody: to the computer manufacturer who could boast about the machine’s many attributes and the subindustry that it created; to peripheral manufacturers who would make a new product; and to the customer who came to own a machine that could do more than one job. Part of the reason the Altair made such an impression on the hobbyists was that it mimicked a minicomputer with slots. Wozniak liked the notion of slots—“I was used to computers with twenty slots that were always filled up with boards”—and decided that his color computer should have eight slots. Jobs disagreed, and the difference of opinion turned into one of their most protracted arguments. Wozniak recalled, “All Steve saw was a computer that could do a couple of things—write basic programs and play games. He thought you might add a printer and maybe a modem but you would never need more than two slots. I refused to let it go with two slots.

 

While Jobs and Wozniak wrangled about the number of slots, they made regular appearances at the Homebrew Club whose meetings ran like a motif through the development of the color computer. At the hobbyist sessions Wozniak collected a couple of teenage camp followers: Randy Wigginton who in the summer of 1976 was sixteen and fifteen-year-old Chris Espinosa. Wigginton had written some small programs for Call Computer and had encountered Wozniak and his dumb terminal, being more impressed by the latter than the former. Wigginton’s father was a Lockheed engineer and the family home was in Sunnyvale. With a tongue that could be rough but with sunny, ice-cream looks, Wigginton had his share of growing pains. “I was strung out on drugs at junior high school.” He watched while one of his acquaintances, a drug pusher, was arrested for murdering a slow-paying client who had been stuffed down a sewer. Wigginton was thirteen when he found a less dangerous diversion after encountering computers at a Homestead High School summer class where a Teletype terminal was linked to a computer at Hewlett-Packard. “Once I hit computers that was the end.” Transferred by his parents to a private high school in San Jose, he became engrossed by computers. In his freshman year he organized a computer class and in his sophomore year taught BASIC to students two years his senior. He was nicknamed Computer Randy and when, embarrassed at having no date for the junior prom he tried to escape the clutches of a ticket seller, he was told to invite a computer. Wigginton found that Wozniak, who had endured similar taunts, was far more sympathetic. Wozniak provided parts and guidance and helped Wigginton, whose chunky soldering iron was giving him trouble, build his first piece of hardware, an Apple.

The Homestead summer computer course proved as infectious for Chris Espinosa as it had for Wigginton. “Once we were armed with elementary knowledge we knew more than the teacher.” Espinosa had been raised in Los Angeles where he attended nine different schools in eight years but was caught in the Cupertino mill when his father started attending law classes at the University of Santa Clara. “Cupertino was a completely different atmosphere. In Los Angeles most of my friends grew up to be thieves, musicians, or drug addicts. In Cupertino I had new friends who were intelligent, academically inclined, middle-class and fairly progressive.” During junior high school Espinosa was a student spokesman at town meetings that were convened to discuss plans to turn an orchard into a shopping mall. Thanks to an interest in public transportation, he also became a thorn in the side of the Santa Clara Transit District, arguing at public meetings in favor of an expansion of the local bus service and touting the merits of light railways. He took to riding buses for hours—“To me, the bus service was a large, intricate system”—and used them to visit Byte Shops where he learned how to program an Apple. Yet like Wigginton, who introduced him to Wozniak, Espinosa was too young to drive to Homebrew meetings. Since neither the tentacles of the bus system nor the inclination of their parents extended to the darker fringes of Palo Alto on Wednesday evenings, Wigginton and Espinosa were chauffeured to Homebrew meetings by Wozniak.

The two teenagers became Wozniak’s acolytes. Espinosa persuaded Wozniak to give a computer to Homestead High School and displayed his bright, jaunty sense of humor by installing it in a box labeled IBM. On trips to Homebrew, they piled into Wozniak’s car, making space on a backseat covered with magazines, newspapers, and hamburger wrappers and joking that the fungus growing on the upholstery was known, in botanical circles, as the Woz Effect. Espinosa, being of slighter build, carted books and manuals into meetings while Wigginton had the unenviable task of carrying Wozniak’s nineteen-inch Sears color television. Wozniak carried the new computer in a wooden case designed and built by Wigginton’s brother. After the meetings the trio adjourned to a local Denny’s for more shoptalk. At one of the Homebrew sessions Jobs quizzed Espinosa, who was displaying his prowess by demonstrating the color, and offered him a job in exchange for a row of 4K memory chips which were the most sought-after parts for the Apple. Espinosa accepted but recalled, “Jobs never came through with the promise.”

At every Homebrew meeting the Apple was set up on a card table alongside other hobby computers near the entrance to the SLAC auditorium. In the steeply raked hall, almost every major development in microcomputers surfaced while the club newsletter dutifully reported on the appearance of new products, the dates of fairs, the opening of the first computer store in Santa Monica, and the start of retail computer-kit companies like Kentucky Fried Computers. The newsletter’s editors also taught the tinkerers some of the cruel facts of life. When Processor Technology’s video display failed to appear as promised, the newsletter noted: “It would appear that patience is a necessary attribute of the computer hobbyist.” There were frequent appeals for more software and an announcement of a journal whose editors intended to publish computer languages and programs and who gave it the whimsical title
Dr. Dobbs’ Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia
.