The Digital Antiquarian

Steve Jobs’s unique sense of design and aesthetics has dominated every technology project he’s led following the Apple II — for better (the modern Macintosh, the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad) or worse (the Apple III) or somewhere in between (the original 1984 Macintosh, the NeXT workstations). The Apple II, though, was different. While Jobs’s stamp was all over it, so too was the stamp of another, very different personality: Steve Wozniak. The Apple II was a sort of dream machine, a product genuinely capable of being very different things to different people, for it unified Woz’s hackerish dedication to efficiency, openness, and possibility with Jobs’s gift for crafting elegant experiences for ordinary end users. The two visions it housed would soon begin to pull violently against one another, at Apple as in the computer industry as a whole, but for this moment in time, in this machine only, they found a perfect balance.

To call Jobs a mediocre engineer is probably giving him too much credit; the internals of the Apple II were all Woz. Steven Levy describes his motivation to build it:

It was the fertile atmosphere of Homebrew that guided Steve Wozniak through the incubation of the Apple II. The exchange of information, the access to esoteric technical hints, the swirling creative energy, and the chance to blow everybody’s mind with a well-hacked design or program… these were the incentives which only increased the intense desire Steve Wozniak already had: to build the kind of computer he wanted to play with. Computing was the boundary of his desires; he was not haunted by visions of riches and fame, nor was he obsessed by dreams of a world of end users exposed to computers.

When you open an Apple II, you see a lot of slots and a lot of empty space.

All those slots were key to Woz’s vision of the machine as a hacker’s ultimate plaything; each was an invitation to extend it in some interesting way. Predictably, Jobs was nonplussed by Woz’s insistence on devoting all that space to theoretical future possibilities, as this did not jibe at all with his vision of the Apple II as a seamless piece of consumer electronics to be simply plugged in and used. Surely one or two slots is more than sufficient, he bargained. Normally Jobs, by far the more forceful personality of the two, inevitably won disputes like this — but this time Woz uncharacteristically held his ground and got his slots.

Lucky that he did, too. Within months hackers, third-party companies, and Apple itself began finding ways to fill all of those slots — with sound boards, 80-column video boards, hard-disk and printer interfaces, modems, co-processor and accelerator cards, mouse interfaces, higher resolution graphics boards, video and audio digitizers, ad infinitum. The slots, combined with Woz’s dogged insistence that every technical nuance of his design be meticulously documented for the benefit of hackers everywhere, transformed the Apple II from a single, static machine into a dynamic engine of possibility. They are the one feature that, more than anything else, distinguished the Apple II from its contemporaries the PET and TRS-80, and allowed it to outlive those machines by a decade. Within months of the Apple II’s release, even Jobs would have reason to thank Woz for their existence.

All of the trinity of 1977 initially relied on cassette tapes for storage. Both the PET and TRS-80 in fact came with cassette drives as standard equipment, while the Apple II included only a cassette interface, to which the user was expected to connect her own tape player. A few months’ experience with this storage method, the very definition of balky, slow, and deeply unreliable, convinced everyone that something better was needed if these new machines were to progress beyond being techie toys and become useful for any sort of serious work. The obvious solution was the 5 1/4 inch floppy-disk technology recently devised by a small company called Shugart Associates. Woz soon set to work, coming up with a final design that engineers who understand such things still regard with reverence for its simplicity, reliability, and efficiency. The product, known as the Disk II, arrived to market in mid-1978 for about $600, vastly increasing the usability and utility of the Apple II. Thanks to the expandability Woz had designed into the Apple II from the start, the machine was able to incorporate the new technology effortlessly. Even at $600, a very competitive price for a floppy-disk system at the time, Woz’s minimalist design aesthetic combined with the Apple II’s amenability to expansion meant that Apple made huge margins on the product; in West of Eden, Frank Rose claims that the Disk II system was ultimately as important to Apple’s early success as the Apple II itself. The PET and TRS-80 eventually got floppy-disk drives of their own, but only in a much uglier fashion; a TRS-80 owner who wished to upgrade to floppy disk, for instance, had to first buy Radio Shack’s bulky, ugly, and expensive “expansion interface,” an additional big box containing the slots that were built into the Apple II.

Another killer app enabled by the Apple II’s open architecture had a surprising source: Microsoft. In 1980, that company introduced its first hardware product, a Zilog Z80 CPU on a card which it dubbed the SoftCard. An Apple II so equipped had access to not only the growing library of Apple II software but also to CP/M and its hundreds of business-oriented applications. It gave Apple II owners the best of both worlds for just an additional $350. Small wonder that the card sold by the tens of thousands for the next several years, until the gradual drying up of CP/M software — a development, ironically, for which Microsoft was responsible with its new MS-DOS standard — made it irrelevant.

While most 6502-based computers were considered home and game machines of limited “serious” utility, products like the SoftCard and the various video cards that let it display 80 columns of text on the screen — an absolute requirement for useful word processing — lent the Apple II the reputation of a machine as useful for work as it was for play. This reputation, and the sales it undoubtedly engendered, were once again ultimately down to all those crazy slots. In this sense the Apple II much more closely resembled the commodity PC design first put together by IBM in 1981 than it did any subsequent design from Apple itself.

Another significant advantage that the Apple II had over its early competitors was its ability to display bitmap graphics. The TRS-80 and the PET, you may recall, were essentially limited to displaying text only. While it was possible to draw simple pictures using the suite of simple shape glyphs these machines provided in addition to traditional letters and punctuation (see my post on Temple of Apshai on the TRS-80), this technique was an inevitably limited one. The Apple II, however, provided a genuine grid of 280 X 192 individually addressable pixels. Making use of this capability was not easy on the programmer, and it came with a host of caveats and restrictions. Just 4 colors were available on the original Apple II, for instance, and oddities of the design meant that any individual pixel could not always be any individual desired color. These circumstances led to the odd phasing and color fringing that still makes an Apple II display immediately recognizable even today. Still, the Apple II was easily the graphical class of the microcomputer field in 1977. (I’ll talk a bit more about the Apple II’s graphical system and its restrictions when I look at some specific games in future posts.)

So, Woz was all over the Apple II, in these particulars as well as many others. But where was Jobs?

He was, first of all, performing the role he always had during his earlier projects with Woz, that of taskmaster and enabler. Left to his own devices, Woz could lose himself for weeks in the most minute and ultimately inconsequential aspects of a design, or could drift entirely off task when, say, some new idea for an electronically enabled practical joke struck him. Jobs therefore took it upon himself to constantly monitor Woz and the pair of junior engineers who worked with him, keeping them focused and on schedule. He also solved practical problems for them in that inimitable Steve Jobs way. When it became apparent that it was going to be very difficult to design the RF modulator needed for hooking the computer up to a television (dedicated monitors at the time were a rare and pricy luxury) without falling afoul of federal RF interference standards, he had Woz remove this part from the computer entirely, passing the specifications instead on to a company called M&R Electronics. When sold separately and by another company, the RF modulator did not need to meet the same stringent standards. Apple II owners would simply buy their RF modulators separately for a modest cost, and everyone (most of all M&R, who were soon selling the little gadgets by the thousands) could be happy.

Such practical problem-solving aside, Jobs’s unique vision was also all over the finished product. It was Jobs who insisted that Woz’s design be housed within a sleek, injection-molded plastic case that looked slightly futuristic, but not so much as to clash with the decor of a typical home. It was Jobs who gave the machine its professional appearance, with its screws all hidden away underneath and with the colorful Apple logo (a reference to the machine’s unique graphical capabilities) front and center.

Jobs, showing a prejudice against fan noise that has continued with him to the present day, insisted that Woz and company find some other way to cool it, which feat they managed via a system of cleverly placed vents. And it was Jobs who gave the machine its unique note of friendly accessibility, via a sliding top giving easy access to the expansion slots and, a bit further down the line, unusually complete and professional documentation in the form of big, glossy, colorful manuals. Indeed, much of the Apple II ownership experience was not so far removed from the Apple ownership experience of today. Jobs worked to make Apple II owners feel themselves part of an exclusive club, a bit more rarified and refined than the run-of-the-mill PET and TRS-80 owners, by sending them freebies and updates (such as the aforementioned new manuals) from time to time. And just like the Apple of today, he was uninterested in competing too aggressively on price. If an Apple II cost a bit more — actually, a lot more, easily twice the price of a PET or TRS-80 — it was extra money well spent. Besides, what adds an aura of exclusivity to a product more effectively than a higher price? What we are left with, then, is a more expensive machine, but also an unquestionably better machine than its competitors, and — a couple of years down the road at least, once its software library started to come up to snuff — one uniquely suited to perform well in many different roles for many different people, from the hardcore hacker to the businessman to the teacher to the teenage videogamer.

When the Apple II made its debut at the first West Coast Computer Faire in April of 1977, Jobs’s promotional instincts were again in evidence. In contrast to the other displays, which were often marked with signs hand-drawn in black marker, Apple’s had a back-lit plexiglass number illuminating the company’s new logo; it still looks pretty slick even today.

In light of the confusion that still exists over who deserves the credit for selling the first fully assembled PC, perhaps we should take a moment to look at the chronology of the trinity of 1977. Commodore made the first move, showing an extremely rough prototype of what would become the PET at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January of 1977. It then proceeded to show progressively less rough prototypes at the Hannover Messe in March (a significant moment in the history of European computing) and the West Coast Computer Faire. However, the design was not fully finalized until July, and the first units did not trickle into stores until September. Even then, PETs remained notoriously hard to come by until well into 1978, thanks to the internal chaos and inefficiency that seemed endemic to Commodore throughout the company’s history. (Ironically, Jobs and Woz had demonstrated the Apple II technology privately to Commodore as well as Atari in 1976, offering to sell it to them for “a few hundred thousand” and positions on staff. They were turned down; Commodore, immensely underestimating the difficulty of the task, decided it could just as easily create a comparable design of its own and begin producing it in just a few months.) The TRS-80, meanwhile, was not announced until August of 1977, but appeared in Radio Shack stores in numbers within weeks of the PET to become by several orders of magnitude the biggest early seller of the trinity. And the Apple II? Woz’s machine was in a much more finished state than the PET at the West Coast Computer Faire, and began shipping to retailers almost right on schedule in June of 1977. Thus, while Commodore gets the credit for being the first to announce a pre-built PC, Apple was the first to actually follow through and ship one as a finished product. Finally, Radio Shack can have the consolation prize of having the first PC to sell in large numbers — 100,000 in just the last few months of 1977 alone, about twice the quantity of all other kit or preassembled microcomputers sold over the course of that entire year.

Actually, that leads to an interesting point: if Apple’s status as the maker of the first PC is secure, it’s also true that the company’s rise was not so meteoric as popular histories of that period tend to suggest. As impressive as both the Apple II and Jobs’s refined presentation of it was, Apple struggled a bit to attract attention at the West Coast Computer Faire in the face of some 175 competing product showcases, many of them much larger if not more refined than Apple’s. Byte magazine, for instance, did not see fit to so much as mention Apple in its extensive writeup of the show. Even after the machine began to ship, early sales were not breathtaking. Apple sold just 650 Apple IIs in 1977, and struggled a bit for oxygen against Radio Shack with its huge distribution network of stores and immense production capacity. The next year was better (7600 sold), the next even better (35,000 sold, on the strength of increasingly robust software and hardware libraries). Still, the Apple II did not surpass the TRS-80 in total annual sales until 1983, on the way to its peak of 1,000,000 sold in 1984 (the year that is, ironically, immortalized as the Year of the Macintosh in the popular press).

Apple released an enhanced version of the II in 1979, the Apple II Plus. This model usually shipped with a full 48 K of RAM, a very impressive number for the time; the original Apple II had initially had only 4 K as standard equipment. Also notable was the replacement in ROM of the original Integer BASIC, written by Woz himself years ago when he first started attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings, with the so-called AppleSoft BASIC. AppleSoft corrected a pivotal flaw in the original Integer BASIC, its inability to deal with floating-point (i.e., decimal) numbers. This much more full-featured implementation was provided, like seemingly all microcomputer BASICs of the time, by Microsoft. (As evidenced by AppleSoft BASIC and products like the SoftCard, Microsoft often worked quite closely with Apple during this early period, in marked contrast to the strained relationship the two companies would develop in later years.) Woz also tweaked the display system on the II Plus to manage 6 colors in hi-res mode instead of just 4.

By 1980, then, the Apple II had in the form of the II Plus reached a sort of maturity, even though holes — most notably, a lack of support for lower-case letters without the purchase of additional hardware — remained. It was not the best-selling machine of 1980, and certainly far from the cheapest, but in some ways still the most desirable. Woz’s fast and reliable Disk II design coupled with the comparatively cavernous RAM of the II Plus and the machine’s bitmap graphics capabilities gave inspiration for a new breed of adventure games and CRPGs, larger and more ambitious than their predecessors. We’ll begin to look at those developments next time.

In the aftermath of even the Apple II’s first, relatively modest success, Jobs began working almost immediately to make sure Apple’s follow-up products reflected only his own vision of computing, gently easing Woz out of his central position. He began to treat Woz as something of a loose cannon to be carefully managed after Woz threatened Apple’s legendary 1980 IPO by selling or even giving away chunks of his private stock to various Apple employees who he just thought were doing a pretty good job and deserved a reward, gosh darn it. The Apple III, also introduced in 1980, was thus the product of a more traditional process of engineering by committee, with Woz given very little voice in the finished design. It was also Apple’s first failure, largely due to Jobs’s overweening arrogance and refusal to listen to what his engineers were telling him. Most notably, Jobs insisted that the Apple III, like the Apple II, ship without a cooling fan. This time, no amount of clever engineering hacks could prevent machines from melting by the thousands. Perhaps due to the deeply un-Jobs-ian hackerish side of its personality, Jobs tried repeatedly to kill the Apple II, with little success; it remained the company’s biggest seller and principal source of revenue when he resigned from Apple in a huff following an internal dispute in 1985.

In February of 1981, Woz crashed the small airplane he had recently learned how to fly, suffering serious head trauma. This event marked the end of his truly cutting-edge engineering years, at Apple or anywhere else. Perhaps he took the crash as a wake-up call to engage with all those other wonders of life he’d been neglecting during the years he’d spent immersed in circuits and code. It’s also true, though, that the sort of high-wire engineering Woz did throughout the 1970s (not only with Apple and privately, but also with Hewlett Packard) is very mentally intense, and possibly Woz’s brain had been changed enough by the experience to make it no longer possible. Regardless, he began to interest himself in other things: going back to university under an assumed name to finish his aborted degree, organizing two huge outdoor music and culture festivals (The “US Festivals” of 1982 and 1983), developing and trying to market a universal remote control. He is still officially an employee of Apple, but hasn’t worked a regular shift in the office since February of 1987. He wrote an autobiography (with the expected aid of a professional co-author) a few years ago, maintains a modest website, contributes to various worthy causes such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and, most bizarrely, made a recent appearance on Dancing with the Stars.

Asked back in 2000 if he considered himself an entrepreneur, Woz had this to say:

Not now. I’m not trying to do that because I wouldn’t put 20 hours a day into anything. And I wouldn’t go back to the engineering. The way I did it, every job was A+. I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way. It was so intense you could not do that for very long—only when you’re young. I’m on the board of a couple of companies that you could say are start-ups, so I certainly support it, but I don’t live it. The older I get the more I like to take it easy.

Woz has certainly earned the right to “take it easy,” but there’s something that strikes me a little sad about his post-Apple II career, as the story of a man who never quite figured out what to do for a second act in life. And the odd note of subservience that always marked his relationship with Jobs is still present. From the same interview:

You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that’s one of the biggest honors of my life. Some people wouldn’t be that way. He has a reputation for being nasty, but I think it’s only when he has to run a business. It’s never once come out around me. He never attacks me like you hear about him attacking other people. Even if I do have some flaky thinking.

It’s as if Woz, God bless his innocence, still does not understand that he was really treated rather shabbily by Jobs, and that, in a very real sense, it was he that made Jobs. In that light, it seems little enough to expect that Jobs refrain from hectoring him as he would one of his more typical employees.

As for Jobs himself… well, you know all about what became of him, right?

As I write this the news media and the blogosphere are just tailing off from an explosion of commentary and retrospectives triggered by an obviously ill Steve Jobs stepping down at last from his post as Apple’s CEO. The event marks the end of an era. With Bill Gates having retired from day-to-day involvement with Microsoft a few years ago, the two great survivors from those primordial computing days of the late 1970s and early 1980s no longer run the iconic companies that they began to build all those years ago.

For many, Bill and Steve embodied two fundamentally opposing approaches to technology. On one side was Gates, the awkwardly buttoned-down overachiever who never even as a multi-billionaire seemed quite comfortable in his own skin, wielding spreadsheets and databases while obsessing over Microsoft’s latest financial reports. On the other was Jobs, the epitome of California cool who never met a person he couldn’t charm, wielding art packages and music production software while talking about how technology could allow us to live better, more elegant lives. These attitudes were mirrored in the products of their respective companies. In In the Beginning Was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson compared the Macintosh with a sleek European sedan, while Windows was a station wagon which “had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block; it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and [of course] it was an enormous success.” These contrasts — or should we say caricatures? — run deep. They were certainly not lost on Apple itself when it made its classic series of “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” commercials to herald its big post-millennial Jobs-helmed comeback.

Even in the late 1970s, when he was a very young man, Jobs had an intuitive feeling for the way that technology ought to work and an aesthetic eye that was lacking in just about every one of the nerds and hackers that made up the rest of the early microcomputer industry. Almost uniquely among his contemporaries, Jobs had a vision of where all this stuff could go, a vision of a technological future that would appeal not just to PC guy in the commercials above but also to Mac guy. The industry desperately needed a guy like Jobs — good-looking, glib, articulate, with an innate sense of aesthetics and design — to serve as an ambassador between the hackers and ordinary people. Jobs was the kind of guy who might visit a girlfriend’s home for dinner and walk away with a check to fund his startup business from the father and a freshly baked cake from the mother. He made all these hackers with their binary code and their soldering irons seem almost normal, and almost (if only by transference) kind of cool.

There’s a trope that comes up again and again amongst the old-timers who remember those days and the histories that are written of them: that it was a fundamentally innocent time, when hackers hacked just for the joy of it and accidentally created the modern world. In Triumph of the Nerds, Jobs’s partner in founding Apple, Steve Wozniak, said:

“It was just a little hobby company, like a lot of people do, not thinking anything of it. It wasn’t like we both thought it was going to go a long ways. We thought we would both do it for fun, but back then there was a short window in time where one person who could sit down and do some neat, good designs could turn them into a huge thing like the Apple II.”

I believe Wozniak, a hacker’s hacker if ever there was one. To imagine that an amity of hacking bliss united those guiding the companies that made up the early industry, though, is deeply mistaken. As shown by the number of companies and computer models that had already come and gone by even 1982, the PC industry was a cutthroat, hyper-competitive place.

In the same video, Jobs has this to say about those days:

“I was worth over a million dollars when I was 23, and over ten million dollars when I was 24, and over a hundred million dollars when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

In contrast to Wozniak’s comments, there’s a note of disingenuousness here. It seems suspicious that, for someone for whom finances are so unimportant, Jobs has such a specific recollection of his net worth at exact points in time; something tells me Wozniak would be challenged to come up with similar figures. I mentioned once before on this blog how Jobs cheated his best friend Wozniak out of a $5000 bonus for designing Breakout on his behalf for Atari. Jobs was of course a very young man at the time, and we’d all like to have things back from our youth, but this moment always struck me as one of those significant markers of character that says something about who a person fundamentally is. Wozniak might dismiss the incident in his autobiography by saying, “We were just kids, you know,” but I can’t imagine him pulling that stunt on Jobs. In another of those markers of character, Wozniak was so honest that, upon designing the computer that would come to be known as the Apple I and founding a company with Jobs to market it, he suddenly recalled the employment contract he had signed with Hewlett Packard which said that all of his engineering work belonged to HP during the term of his employment, whether created in the office or at home, and tried to give his computer design to HP. Much to Jobs’s relief, HP just looked at it bemusedly and told Wozniak to knock himself out trying to sell the thing on his own.

In the case of Jobs, when we drill down past the veneer of California cool and trendy Buddhism we find a man as obsessively competitive as Gates; both men were the most demanding of bosses in their younger days, who belittled subordinates and deliberately fomented discord in the name of keeping everyone at their competitive best. Gates, however, lacked the charm and media savvy that kept Jobs the perpetual golden boy of technology. Even when he was very young, people spoke about the “reality distortion field” around Jobs that seemed to always convince others to see things his way and do his bidding.

And if Jobs isn’t quite the enlightened New Man whose image he has so carefully crafted, there’s a similarly subtle cognitive dissonance about his company. Apple’s contemporary products are undeniably beautiful in both their engineering and their appearance, and they’re even empowering in their way, but this quality only goes so far. To turn back to Stephenson again, these sleek machines have “their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they work is something of a mystery.” Empowering they may be, but only on Apple’s terms. In another sense, they foster dependence — dependence on Apple — rather than independence. And then, of course, all of that beauty and elegance comes at a premium price, such that they become status symbols. The idea of a computing device, whatever its price, becoming a status symbol anywhere but inside the community of nerds would of course have been inconceivable in 1980 — so that’s progress of a sort, and largely down to Jobs’s influence. Still, it’s tempting sometimes to compare the sealed unknowability of Apple’s products with the commodity PCs that once allowed the “evil” Bill Gates to very nearly take over the computing world entirely. A Windows-based PC may have been a domestic station wagon or (in another popular analogy) a pickup truck, but like those vehicles it was affordable to just about everyone, and it was easy to pop the hood open and tinker. Apple’s creations required a trip to the metaphorical exotic car dealership just to have their oil changed. A Macintosh might unleash your inner artist and impress the coffee-house circuit, but a PC could be purchased dirt cheap — or assembled from cast-off parts — and set up in the savannah to control those pumps that keep that village supplied with drinking water. There’s something to be said for cheap, ubiquitous, and deeply uncool commodity hardware; something to be said for the idea of (as another microcomputer pioneer put it) “computers for the masses, not the classes.”

A mention of Linux might seem appropriate at this juncture, as might a more fine-grained distinction between hardware and software, but these metaphors are already threatening to buckle under the strain. Let’s instead try to guide this discussion back to Jobs and Woz, an odd couple if ever there was one.

Wozniak was a classic old-school hacker. Even during high school in the late 1960s, he fantasized about computers the way that normal teenagers obsessed over girls and cars. His idea of fun was to laboriously write out programs in his notebooks, programs which he had no computer to run, and to imagine them in action. While other boys hoarded girlie magazines, Woz (as everyone called him) collected manuals for each new computer to hit the market — sometimes so he could redesign them better, more efficiently, in his imagination.

In 1970, during a working sabbatical of sorts from university, the 20-year-old Woz met the 15-year-old Steve Jobs. Despite the age difference, they became fast friends, bonding over a shared love of technology, music, and practical jokes. Soon they discovered another mutual obsession: phone phreaking, hacking the phone system to let one call long distance for free. The pair’s first joint business venture — instigated, as these sort of things always were, by Jobs — was selling homemade “blue boxes” that could generate the tones needed to mimic a long-distance carrier.

Jobs was… not a classic old-school hacker. He was, outwardly at least, a classic hippie with a passion for Eastern philosophy and Bob Dylan, a “people person” with little patience for programming or engineering. Nevertheless, the reality distortion field allowed him to talk his way into a technician’s job at rising arcade-game manufacturer Atari. He even got Atari to give him a summer off and an airline ticket to India to do “spiritual research.” In spite of it all, though, the apparently clueless Jobs just kept delivering the goods. The reason, of course, was Woz, who by then was working full-time for Hewlett Packard during the day, then doing Jobs’s job for him by night. The dynamic duo’s finest hour at Atari was the arcade game Breakout. In what at least from the outside has all the markings of a classic codependent relationship, poor Woz was told that they had just four days to get the design done; actually, Jobs just wanted to get finished so he could jet off to attend the harvest at an apple orchard commune in Oregon. (You just can’t make some of this stuff up…) Woz met the deadline by going without sleep for four days straight, and did it using such an impossibly low number of chips that it ended up being un-manufactureable. Atari engineer Al Alcorn:

“Ironically, the design was so minimized that normal mere mortals couldn’t figure it out. To go to production, we had to have technicians testing the things so they could make sense of it. If any one part failed, the whole thing would come to its knees. And since Jobs didn’t really understand it and didn’t want us to know that he hadn’t done it, we ended up having to redesign it before it could be shipped.”

But Jobs made it to the apple festival, and also got that $5000 bonus he neglected to tell Woz about to spend there. Even in 1984 Woz still believed that he and Jobs had earned only $700 for a design that became the big arcade hit of 1976.

We can really only speculate about what caused Woz to put up with treatment like this — but speculation is fun, so let’s have at it. Woz was one of those good-hearted sorts who want to like and be liked, but who, due to some failure of empathy or just from sheer trying too hard, are persistently just enough out of sync in social situations to make everything a bit awkward. Woz always seemed to laugh a little bit too loud or too long, couldn’t quite sense when the time was right to stop reciting from his store of Polish jokes, didn’t recognize when his endless pranks were about to cross the line from harmless fun into cruelty. For a person like this the opportunity to hang out with a gifted social animal like Jobs must have been hard to resist, no matter how unequal the relationship might seem.

And it wasn’t entirely one way — not at all, actually. When Woz was hacking on the project that would become the Apple I, he lusted after a new type of dynamic RAM chips, but couldn’t afford them. Jobs just called up the manufacturer and employed the reality distortion field to talk them into sending him some “samples.” Jobs was Woz’s enabler, in the most positive sense; he had a genius for getting things done. In fact, in the big picture it is Woz that is in Jobs’s debt. One senses that Jobs would have made his mark on the emerging microcomputer industry even if he had never met Woz — such was his drive. To be blunt, Jobs would have found another Woz. Without Jobs, though, Woz would have toiled away — happily, mind you — in some obscure engineering lab or other his entire life, quietly weaving his miniaturized magic out of silicon, and retired with perhaps a handful of obscure patents to mark his name for posterity.

Unsurprisingly given their backgrounds and interests, Woz and Jobs were members of the famous Homebrew Computer Club, Woz from the very first meeting on March 5, 1975. There, the social hierarchy was inverted, and it was Woz with his intimate knowledge of computers that was the star, Jobs that was the vaguely uncomfortable outsider.

Woz designed the machine that became the Apple I just for fun. It was somewhat unique within Homebrew in that it used the new MOS 6502 CPU rather than the Intel 8080 of the original Altair, for the very good reason that Woz didn’t have a whole lot of money to throw around and the 6502 cost $25 versus $175 for the 8080. The process was almost committee-driven; Woz, who had the rare and remarkable gift of being without ego when it came to matters of design, would bring his work-in-progress to each biweekly Homebrew meeting, explaining what he’d done, describing where he was having problems, and soliciting advice and criticism. What he ended up with was pretty impressive. The machine could output to a television screen, as opposed to the flashing lights of the Altair; it used a keyboard, as opposed to toggle switches; and it could run a simple BASIC interpreter programmed by Woz himself. Woz said he “designed the Apple I because I wanted to give it away free for other people. I gave out schematics for building my computer at the next meeting I attended.”

Steve Jobs put a stop to those dangerous tendencies. He stepped in at this point to convince Woz to do what he never would have done on his own: to turn his hacking project into a real product provided by a real company. Woz sold his prized HP calculator and Jobs his Volkswagen van (didn’t someone once say that stereotypes are so much fun because they’re so often true?) to form Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. The Apple I was not a fully assembled computer like the trinity of 1977, but it was an intermediate step between the Altair and them; instead of a box of loose chips, you got a finished, fully soldered motherboard to build onto with your own case, power supply, keyboard, and monitor. The owner of an important early computer store, The Byte Shop, immediately wanted to buy 50 of them. Problem was, Jobs and Woz didn’t have the cash to buy the parts to make them. No problem; Jobs employed the reality distortion field to convince a wholesale electronics firm to give these two hippies tens of thousands of dollars in hardware in exchange for a promise to pay them in one month. Apple ended up selling 175 Apple Is over the next year, each assembled by hand in Jobs’s parents’ garage by Jobs and Woz and a friend or family member or two.

While that was going on, Woz was designing his masterpiece: the Apple II.