My dad, watching this, pointed out that we weren't actually making money because we weren't paying ourselves anything. But we didn't care, we were having too much fun.
• o •
Right after we delivered to Paul Terrell, Steve arranged for me to show the Apple I PC board during the main meeting of Homebrew in about March 1976. I had shown off my computer after the meeting for months by then, but I'd never talked about it formally to the whole group.
Of course, I'd never spoken in front of a group of people this large. This was the largest spotlight I had ever been in. I mean, by now Homebrew had grown to about five hundred or more peopie. The meeting was being held at the auditorium at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). So I just stuck to the facts after I walked down the aisle with my printed circuit board in my hands. This was the first of only two times I ever spoke in front of the Homebrew meeting. (The other was when I introduced the Apple II.)
I knew that many people in the club had seen me running my prototype. So I just stood there in front of everybody and described the chips on the board—what they were and all—and talked about the specifications and the architecture. I talked about how I built it. And I talked about the main thing, as far as I was concerned: having a human-typable keyboard instead of a stupid, cryptic front panel with a bunch of lights and switches.
I explained that I'd used dynamic RAM instead of static RAM and why. I pointed out that my board had 8K bytes RAM and compared that to the Altair motherboard, which had only 256 bytes. I talked about a little BASIC program—the one that moved your name around on-screen when you typed it in. I described the video circuitry, the connectors, the voltages needed, everything. And finally I got to tell everyone the price—$666.66.
I'm not sure if we were a big hit or not. You'll have to ask someone there who saw me giving the talk. After all, by that time a lot of Homebrew members were either starting or working for little computer companies. So maybe they couldn't see that the Apple I was that special.
But I could. And Steve could. We were so proud.
We were participating in the biggest revolution that had ever happened, I thought. I was so happy to be a part of it. It didn't have to be a big business. I was just having fun.
Ron Wayne, the third partner, wasn't having as much fun, I guess. He was used to big companies and big salaries. We bought him out for $800 after we delivered some of the first boards to Paul Terrell and well before we got our first outside investment.
Chapter 13
The Apple II
By early 1976 we had sold maybe 150 computers. Not just through the Byte Shop but through other little stores that were popping up all around the country. We would drive around California, just walk into a store, and ask if they wanted to carry the Apple I. We did sell a few that way.
But this was nothing. Because we were watching other companies that sprang up around Silicon Valley at this time. And one of them, Processor Technology it was called, was supposedly selling more than a thousand units a month of their SOL-20 computer. It was the hit of the hobby computer world. It was also the hobby computer that supported a keyboard, which is how they designed it after I showed the Apple I at a main meeting at Homebrew. The Apple I started that trend.
Lee Felsenstein, the guy who emceed the Homebrew meetings, had actually designed the SOL. And Gordon French worked there. So we heard things.
I thought the Processor Technology SOL computer wasn't that impressive. Steve and I were sure we could sell more than what they were selling. But by then we had a prototype of the next Apple, the Apple II, and it was ten times better than the Apple I.
With that computer, we knew we could easily sell as many
computers as Processor Technology if we just had the money to build them.
The Apple II, which I started working on almost as soon as the Apple I was complete, was a phenomenal improvement over what I'd done before. I knew I wanted to have a computer that did color, for instance. I had built the Apple I from the beginning with chips working at the frequencies you would need to generate color on an American television, and I had planned to add color. But though I'd designed the Apple I so I could add a color to it, I decided it would be better to design a fresh computer instead.
You see, the add-on to color wasn't just a matter of buying more chips. It was a matter of efficiency and elegance of design. I wanted to design color from the ground up, not just as an addon to an existing computer. That way, the Apple II would be designed with color ability on those chips from the start.
Another Apple II improvement I thought of was to design the whole new computer around text and graphics, with all of it coming out of the system's own memory.
So rather than having a whole separate terminal to do the onscreen stuff and other memory to do the other computations, I decided to combine all the memory into one bank—one section of DRAM. A portion of the DRAM the microprocessor used could also be continually tapped for whatever needed to be displayed on the screen.
In doing this, I knew I would save some chips. In fact, the Apple II ended up with half as many chips as the Apple I in the end.
It was also quite a bit faster. Remember how I told you how the Apple I had to constantly keep the contents of its DRAM memory alive by refreshing them? Well, by now I had faster DRAM chips. And instead of the microprocessor being able to access (write from or read to) the RAM once eveiy millionth of a second, these new chips could do it twice every microsecond.
In fact, it even worked out that the microprocessor could access the RAM in one-half of a microsecond (millionth of a second) while the circuitry that refreshed the RAM could access during the other half. That's why the new computer I designed, this Apple II, actually ran faster. It was also smaller and cheaper. And that is always the goal with me.
The Apple II had countless improvements over the Apple I. Some people consider the Apple II to be a second design built from the Apple I, but I want you to know that that is not so. Not so at all.
The Apple I was not a computer designed from the ground up. It was a quick extension of my ARPANET terminal to a microprocessor, with virtually no electronic innovations except for the DRAM.
The Apple II, on the other hand, was designed and engineered from the ground up. Also solely by me.
Looking back now, I could've done the Apple II first—color and all—but I chose to go with the design I could come up with most quickly.
It's true that both machines brought striking advances to the computer world. The Apple I made history by being the first personal computer that could work with a keyboard and a display. But the Apple II brought color, high-resolution graphics, sound, and the ability to attach game paddles. It was the first to boot up ready to use, with BASIC already built into the ROM.
Other computers eventually caught up, but it took years for them to match what I'd done. Eventually every one of them would have to offer that same list of features.
The Apple II was the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn't have to be a geek to use.
• o •
But no one had seen the Apple II yet. I was still finalizing it, and we were still working in our houses at this point. I was working out of my apartment and Steve was working the phones in his
bedroom. We were still testing computers in his garage. I was still building calculators at HP, and I still thought this was just a hobby. I was still planning on working at HP forever.
But it was very soon after delivering the Apple I boards to Terrell that I had a working Apple II. And like I said, it wasn't just twice as good. It was like ten times better.
By August 1976,1 had completed it—the board, I mean, which was the center of the Apple II. I remember that so well because that was the month Steve and I flew out to the PC 76 show in Atlantic City.
• o •
We got on the plane in San Jose, and Steve and I sat together with the Apple I and II with us on board. And the funny tiling was, a bunch of the people we knew from Homebrew, who now worked at all these little competing computer companies, were seated around us on the same plane. We could hear them talking in advanced business talk—you know, talking about proposals and using businesslike acronyms we'd never heard before. We felt so left out of these discussions.
But inside, we knew we had a secret. A big secret. Maybe we weren't part of the business-type groups, but we knew we had a better computer. Actually, we had two better computers. The Apple I and the Apple II. And no one in the world knew about the Apple II yet.
When the show started in Atlantic City, I was lucky because I didn't have to hustle the Apple I at the booth. I'm not a sales type. Steve Jobs and Dan Kottke did that. I was upstairs getting the very last BASIC sequences finished up.
The show was full of young, barely financed companies like Apple. The proprietors looked like us. I mean, there weren't any nicely dressed company executives, company owners, or company managers really attending the show. It was a pretty sloppy group of people, come to think of it.
They were in our business and most of them were competitors. We were all friends, but we were still competitors.
Even though we didn't let the Apple II out of the bag at that show, there was one guy not associated with any of these companies or businesses who saw it. He was a convention guy setting up a projection TV for the convention goers. Steve and I went down the first night, after everyone else had left, and met with this projector technician. I think we had told him to stay. It was probably about 9 p.m. You see, I had this different method of generating color and I was still amazed at how many TVs it worked with. In fact, I never found a TV that it didn't work with. But I figured that a projector might have different color circuitry that would choke on my color method. I wanted to see if the Apple II would work with it.
So I hooked the Apple II prototype up to this projector and it worked perfectly. That technician, who was seeing every low- cost computer in the world as he was setting up the show, told me that of all of them, this was the only computer he would buy.
I only smiled. The Apple II wasn't even announced yet.
• o •
After the show, the biggest, earthshaking Eureka moment ever was the day I got Breakout, the Atari game, working on the Apple II.
I had put enough capability in BASIC that you could read where the game paddles were. It could sound the speaker as needed, and it could plot colors on the screen. So I was ready.
I sat down one day with this little blank board with chips on the top side of it and little red and blue wire-wrapped wires all soldered underneath and connected it with some wires to transformers and then connected it all to my color TV.
I sat down and started typing in BASIC the commands I needed to make one row of bricks—just like the ones in Atari's arcade game—and it worked! I had a row of bricks. I played
around with different color combinations until I had the brick color that worked.
I made eight rows of bricks lying side by side. I figured out the right colors, I figured how the bricks should be offset to look more realistic. Even and odd rows. And then I started programming the paddle. I made the on-screen paddle go up and down with the game control knob. And then I put in a ball. I started giving the ball motion. Then I started telling the ball when it hits bricks, here's how it gets rid of the bricks and here's how it bounces. And when it hits the paddle, here's how it bounces and here's how it changes direction vertically and horizontally.
And then I played with all these parameters and it only took a half hour total. I tried dozens and dozens of different variations of things until, finally, I had the game of Breakout completely working on the Apple II, showing the score and everything.
I called Steve Jobs over. 1 couldn't believe I'd been able to do it, it was amazing. I sat him down and showed him how the game came up with the paddle and the bricks. And then I said, "Watch this." And I typed a couple of BASIC statements, changed the color of the paddle, and the color of the bricks, and where the score was.
I said, "If I had done all these varieties of options in hardware the way it was always done, it would've taken me ten years to do. Now that games are in software, the whole world is going to change."
That was the exact moment it sank in. Software games were going to be incredibly advanced compared to hardware games— games that were hardwired into arcades and systems like that.
These days, the graphics are so great in games. They have gotten incredibly complicated and huge in size. If they had to be in hardware, there wouldn't be enough time in the universe to design them.
I thought, Wow. Nobody in the club is ever going to believe
that an arcade game could be written in BASIC. It was a first in the world. I put a secret into my Breakout game for the Apple II, too. If you hit CTRL and Z on the keyboard, the game went into a mode where the paddle would always jiggle but could never miss the ball.