Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Wozniak 39
Wozniak: I got this idea that I was going to have the computer that I had
wanted my whole life at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
That night, I realized it, when I found out what a microprocessor was. I went
home and studied it and said, “Oh my god, I’m here. Because now I can come
up with the money to buy it someday.” At first it was quite a job to come up with
the money because the Intel processor was $400, and I just wasn’t going to
come up with that soon. It’s like coming up with $2,000 nowadays. That’s a
big deal. Then I found out there was a Motorola one I could get for $40 at
Hewlett-Packard and then the company introduced the 6502 for $20, so that’s
what I bought. I bought it because it was just super-cheap and it was also the
best one of the day.
Now I had to build the hardware. I looked at all the other computers that
were around me and they were like the standard old computer—switches and
lights and slots to plug boards in and connect them to teletypes. I said, “No, I
want the whole thing, because it’s affordable now.” I’ve got my terminal and my
terminal already has a keyboard for typing on. It’s kind of like our Hewlett-
Packard calculators have human buttons—a human can understand what they
are doing. None of this zero-and-one stuff. So I said, “But the trouble is you
have to get programs into memory.” I’m starting out with a microprocessor that
didn’t even have a programming language, so you’ve got to still stick some zeros
and ones into memory. I said, “Why don’t I write a simple little program”—a
256-byte program that took two chips to store. And my program read what you
typed on the keyboard and did the stuff the front panel would have done, but
did it at 100x the speed in the end. And it could also display on the TV screen
what was in memory. It could let you enter stuff into memory, and it could run
a program at a certain address. And that allowed me to develop further to start
typing my ones and zeros. As I developed Basic, I would type the ones and
zeros in by hand, and it got up to where I would type for 40 minutes to get my
whole program into memory. I would type not ones and zeros, but base 16 actually,
get the program into memory and test out bits of it at a time, and see what’s
going on. So this was not at all a normal project where you have tools. I had no
tools; my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. I know what’s
going on better if I’m not going through a tool.
Livingston: You had your Sears TV and a tape cassette for data storage, right?
Wozniak: Yes. Once I got that much of the Basic done, we had to store a big
program efficiently somehow on mass media. I used a tape recorder so I
wouldn’t have to type it in for 40 minutes. But that came pretty late in the
game. I had developed the whole Basic without it really.
Livingston: And you showed it off at the Homebrew Computer Club?
Wozniak: Every 2 weeks I brought my computer, which became the Apple I,
down. We hadn’t decided to start a company. Because companies weren’t my
thing, technology was. I’d bring it down and show it to people, and I brought
schematics. I’d make Xeroxes at work of all my schematics and pass them out,
because—I made sure my name was on it—I was so shy and I thought, “I’ll get