Founders at Work.pdf

50 Founders at Work
Livingston: Did you have a hard time getting everyday people to say, “Yeah, I
want a computer in my office, my home”?
Wozniak: Almost everyone who saw it wanted one, but usually the idea was,
“What’s the cost?” A couple thousand bucks. “Well, I want one of those.” But
they weren’t jumping because it’s enough money—you have to plan and maybe
some months ahead downstream, you’ll be able to buy one.
But we never found one person who said, “I wouldn’t have any need for this
at all.” (We didn’t talk to elderly people.) But people not only in their offices,
but just at home, you play one game on it, and an awful lot of people—adults
and children—want a machine to play games. The Apple II really started the
whole gaming industry, because it was the first time a computer had been built
with sound, paddles, color, graphics—all the things for games. And it was really
so that I could implement Breakout in software.
Back a year before, when I had worked at Atari, they were starting to talk
about coming out with microprocessor games. Up till then it was all hardware.
In other words, you solder wire to the right sort of chips and put it through
some more chips and some other chips, and it determines where the score is on
the screen. It’s not like you type it in software and say “put the score at this location.”
No, it was all done with wires and gates and chips and registers, and it was
very difficult back then.
So now I had a machine that I could program a game in (or somebody
could), and I got this crazy idea to try to do Breakout in Basic. Basic is like a
hundred to a thousand times slower than machine language, so I don’t know if
it’s possible. I sat down one night and finally put in all the commands in the
Basic to draw color, and I started typing away in Basic and, within half an hour,
I not only had my Pong game working, but I had done about 50 or so variations
of colors and speeds and sizes and where the score was and all that stuff. I had
changed so many things around and put in little features that would just take
forever to do in hardware. Little words pop up on the screen when things happen.
I called Steve over and I was just shaking, I was quivering, and I showed
him the game running, and I said, “This game was so easy to write! Look at this,
go ahead—change the color of the bricks.” This would have taken me a lifetime
to do in hardware and I did it in half an hour.
And that was true. It would have taken an entire lifetime for any engineer
with a soldering iron to try all those variations. So I said to him, “Now that games
are software, it’s going to be a different world for games.” And the Apple II, so
many people just started trying to figure out how can you get rocket ships to
launch, how can you get things that sound like sound when you have a real
cruddy voltage to a speaker. How do you listen to somebody talk and figure out
what they said? They started using the Apple II. It was just open to all these
things. We made it easy for anyone to do what they wanted to do. And I think
that was one of the biggest keys to its success. We didn’t make it a hidden
machine that we own—we sell it, it does this, you got it—like Commodore and
RadioShack did.
We put out manuals that had just hundreds of pages of listings of code,
descriptions of circuits, examples of boards that you would plug in—so that