iWoz by Steve Wozniak & Gina Smith

Author:Steve Wozniak & Gina Smith [Wozniak, Steve & Smith, Gina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Memoir
ISBN: 9780393061437
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2006-10-31T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The Apple I

I was never the kind of person who had the courage to raise his hand during the Homebrew main meeting and say, “Hey, look at this great computer advance I’ve made.” No, I could never have said that in front of a whole garageful of people.

But after the main meeting every other Wednesday, I would set up my stuff on a table and answer questions people asked. Anyone who wanted to was welcome to do this.

I showed the computer that later became known as the Apple I at every meeting after I got it working. I never planned out what I would say beforehand. I just started the demo and let people ask the questions I knew they would, the questions I wanted to answer.

I was so proud of my design—and I so believed in the club’s mission to further computing—that I Xeroxed maybe a hundred copies of my complete design (including the monitor program) and gave it to anyone who wanted it. I hoped they’d be able to build their own computers from my design.

I wanted people to see this great design of mine in person. Here was a computer with thirty chips on it. That was shocking to people, having so few chips. It was like the same amount of chips on an Altair, except the Altair couldn’t do anything unless you bought a lot of other expensive equipment for it. My computer was inexpensive from the get-go. And the fact that you could use your home TV with it, instead of paying thousands for an expensive teletype, put it in a world of its own.

And I wasn’t going to be satisfied just typing Is and Os into it. My goal since high school was to have my own computer that I could program on, although I always assumed the language on the computer would be FORTRAN.

The computer I built didn’t have a language yet. Back then, in 1975, a young guy named Bill Gates was starting to get a little bit of fame in our circles for writing a BASIC interpreter for the Altair. Our club had a copy of it on paper tape which could be read in with a teletype, taking about thirty minutes to complete. Also, at around the same time a book called 101 Basic Computer Games came out. I could sniff the air.

That’s why I decided BASIC would be the right language to write for the Apple I and its 6502 microprocessor. And I found out none existed for the 6502. That meant that if I wrote a BASIC program for it, mine could be the first. And I might even get famous for it. People would say, Oh, Steve Wozniak, he did the BASIC for the 6502.

Anyway, people who saw my computer could take one look at it and see the future. And it was a one-way door. Once you went through it, you could never go back.

• o •

The first time I showed my design, it was with static RAM (SRAM)—the kind of memory that was in my Cream Soda Computer.

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