What a great feature. It tricked people into thinking they were just really lucky in hitting it. The paddle was so shaky and jiggly that a person could never tell it wasn't really because of their own skill and their own movements that they were hitting it.
One day I sat down with John Draper (Captain Crunch, remember?). We were at Homebrew right after the main meeting, the time people could demo stuff.
John had never played an arcade game before.
I said, "Here. Play this game." I showed him how you turned the dial so the paddle went up and clown. And he sat there and played it. Everyone in the room watched him for about fifteen minutes. The ball was going so fast, and he, even though he didn't really know what he was doing with the control, kept hitting it. People just thought he was a superior game player.
After about fifteen minutes, he finally won the game. And all of us were congratulating him like he was the best game player in the world. I don't think he ever knew it was a setup.
• o •
In the spring of 1976, as I was working on the Apple II, Steve and I got into our first argument. He didn't think the Apple II should have eight slots. Slots are connectors you can plug extra circuit boards into in case you want to expand the functionality of the computer. Steve wanted only two slots—one for a printer and one for a modem. He thought that way you could build a cheaper, smaller machine that was good enough for today's tasks.
But I wanted more slots, eight of them.
I had the idea that there would be a lot of things people would want in the future, and no way did we want to limit people.
Usually I'm really easy to get along with, but this time I told him, "If that's what you want, go get yourself another computer." There wasn't a single chip I could save by reducing the number of slots from eight to two, and I knew people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any computer.
I was in a position to do that then. I wouldn't always be. A couple of years later, Apple went on to design the Apple III, which was just a disaster, and it had fewer slots.
But in 1976 I won that argument, and the Apple II was designed and eventually came out the way I wanted it to.
• o •
I remember coming in one day to HP—where I was still working—and showing the other engineers the Apple II. I demoed it doing color swirls. The other engineers would come up to me and say this was the best product they'd ever seen. And yet HP still couldn't find a way to do it right, a way to do this kind of project.
One day my boss, Pete Dickinson, told me that some people in my calculator division had created a new project that had gotten through levels of corporate approval to build a small desktop machine with a microprocessor, DRAM, a small video screen, and a keyboard. They even had five people assigned to write BASIC for it.
The awful thing about this was they all knew what I had done with the Apple I and even the Apple II. Yet they had started up this project without me! Why would they do that? I don't know. I think they just saw what they wanted to do as a project was what I'd done.
But I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell.
Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I
and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measely printer interface engineer. Something tiny.
I told him, "My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators."
After a few days, I was turned down again.
I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he's tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he's productive. Where he's happy. The only thing I can figure is there were managers and submanagers on this computer project who felt threatened. I had already done a whole computer. Maybe they bypassed me because I had done this single-handedly. I don't know what they were thinking.
But they should've said to themselves, "How do we get Steve Wozniak on board? Just make him a little printer interface engineer." I would've been so happy, but they didn't bother to put me where I would've been happiest.
• o •
Like I said before, we needed money. Steve knew it and I knew it.
So by that summer of 1976, we started talking to potential money people about Apple, showing them the Apple II working in color in Steve's garage.
One of the first people we showed it to was Chuck Peddle. Remember him? He was the guy from MOS Technologies who'd sold me the 6502 processor I designed the Apple I around the year before at the WESCON show.
By this time Chuck was working at Commodore, a consumer electronics company rumored to be shopping around for a personal computer to sell. I remember I was so impressed to meet him after the role his chip, the MOS 6502, had played in the Apple I. We'd opened Steve's garage to the sunlight that day, and he came walking in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat. Wow, I was excited to see him and couldn't wait to show him the Apple II. This was a very important person in my mind.
I typed in a few BASIC programs, showed some color spirals
on-screen, showed him how many chips and how it worked and everything. Just to show him what we were doing. Chuck was in good spirits throughout the meeting, laughing and smiling. He told us we should make a presentation to the company bigwigs, which we did a few weeks later.
I'll never forget how, in that conference room, Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement. He said, "You might just want to buy this product for a few hundred thousand dollars."
I was almost embarrassed. I mean, there we were, we had no money, we had yet to prove to anybody there was going to be any money in this thing. Steve added, "A few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working on this project."
Well, we left and heard back a few days later that, no, they'd decided they would build their own machine, it was cheaper. They didn't need to support fancy things like color, sound, and graphics, all the cool things we had. Chuck Peddle, in the garage, had told us he thought it was possible for them to do their own computer in four months. I didn't see how anyone could, but I guess after he saw the Apple II, it would be a lot easier to design something like what he wanted.
I saw the Commodore PET, the computer they came up with so quickly, a few months later at the West Coast Computer Faire, by the way. It kind of sickened me. They were trying to do something like what we'd shown Chuck in the garage that day, with a monitor and programming and a keyboard, but they made a real crappy product by doing it so quick. They could Ve had Apple, you know? They could have had it all if they'd had the right vision. Bad decision.
It's funny. I think back on it now—the Apple II would turn out to be one of the most successful products of all time. But we had no copyrights or patents at all back then. No secrets. We were just showing it to everybody.
• o •
After Commodore turned us down, we went over to AI Alcorn's house. He was one of the founders of Atari with Nolan Bushnell, and he was the one who'd hired Steve to do video games there two years before.
Now, I knew Al knew me. He knew I had designed Breakout, the one-player version of Pong. I remember that when we went to his house I was so impressed because he had one of the earliest color projection TVs. Man, in 1976, he would have been among the first people to have one. That was cool.
But he told us later that Atari was too busy with the video game market to do a computer project.
A few days after that, venture capitalists Steve had contacted started to come by. One of them was Don Valentine at Sequoia. He kind of pooh-poohed the way we talked about it.
He said, "What's the market?"
"About a million," I told him.
"How do you know?"
I told him the ham radio market had one million users, and this could be at least that big.
Well, he turned us down, but he did get us in touch with a guy named Mike Markkula. He was only thirty, he told us, but already retired from Intel. He was into gadgets, he told us. Maybe Mike would know what to do with us.
• o •
The very first time I met Mike, I thought he was the nicest person ever. I really did. He was this young guy. He had a beautiful house in the hills overlooking the lights of Cupertino, this gorgeous view, amazing wife, the whole package.
Better still, he actually liked what we had! He didn't talk like a guy who was hiding things and thinking about ripping you off. He was for real. That much was obvious right away.
What a major thing this was.
He was truly interested. He asked us who we were, what our backgrounds were, what our goals were with Apple, where we thought it might go. And he indicated some interest in financing us. He was talking about $250,000 or thereabouts to build 1,000 machines.
Mike was just talking in normal commonsense terms about what the future of a new home computer industry might be like. Now, I had always thought of the Apple computer as being something for a hobbyist who wanted to solve a work simulation or play a game.
But Mike was talking about something different. He talked about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing at home things like keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook. This was what was coming, he said. He had a vision of the Apple II as a real home computer.
Now, we'd already been kicking around this idea a little, of course. I mean, out-of-the-box and ready-to-use was something Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop had asked for. And we were planning on doing that, as well as a plastic case. We had even planned to hire a friend of Steve's, Rod Holt, to build a switching power supply. That kind of power supply was so much more efficient than what was previously available—we knew it would generate less heat. That was necessary if you were going to fit a board and our power supply into a plastic case.
But when Mike agreed to sign up, he told us, "We're going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade."
I believed him oniy because of his reputation and position in life, you know? He was the sort of person who if he said it—and you can tell sincerity in a person—he really believed it. I thought Fortune 500 might be out of the range, though. I mean, a $5 million company would be immense and unbelievable.
But if somebody knows how to make certain judgments better
than I do, I don't try to use my own logic and reasoning to challenge them. I can be skeptical, but if someone really knows what they're talking about, they should be trusted.
It turned out that even Mike was underestimating our success. But look, I'm getting ahead of myself.
• o •
Well, after Mike agreed to do our business plan—after he started working on it—he asked to talk to me. He said, "Okay, Steve. You know you have to leave Hewlett-Packard."
I said, "Why?" I mean, I'd been at HP the whole time I'd designed the Apple I and Apple II. And all the time I was moonlighting, I set up interfaces, did the color, the graphics, wrote the BASIC, just did the whole thing. I said, "Why can't I keep doing this on the side and just have HP as my secure job for life."
But he said, "No, you have to leave HP." He didn't give me any reasons. He told me I had to decide by Tuesday.
And I went and thought and thought and thought. I realized I had a lot of fun designing computers and showing them off at Homebrew. I had fun writing software and I had fun playing with the computer. I realized I could do all those things for the rest of my life. I didn't need my own company.
Plus, I felt very insecure in starting a company where I would be expected to push people around and run their affairs and control what they did. I'm not a management kind of person. I told you before: I'd decided long ago that I would never become someone authoritative.
So I decided I wouldn't do Apple after all. I would stay at HP for my full-time job and design computers for fun.
I went to the cabana—Mike had a cabana on his property—on ultimatum day and told Mike and Steve what I'd decided. I told them no. I'd thought about it, and I'd come to the conclusion that I wasn't going to leave HP.
I remember Mike was very cool about it. He just shrugged and said, "Okay. Fine." He was really terse about it. It was like he thought, okay, fine, he would just get what Apple needed somewhere else.
But Steve was upset. He felt strongly that the Apple II was the computer they should go with.
• o •
Within a couple of days my phone started ringing. I started getting phone calls at work and home from my dad, my mom, my brother, and various friends. Just phone call after phone call. Every one of them told me I'd made the wrong decision. That I should go with Apple because, after all, $250,000 is a lot of money.
It turned out that Steve had talked them all into calling me. Apparently he thought I needed an intervention.