Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher

  Dan Kottke: It was apple harvest time and Steve may have stayed there longer than me, but I was there for like a week doing the apple harvest. We were fasting on apples. It was our fruitarian experiment. And that’s why the name Apple was in the air.

  Also in the air, thanks to Stewart Brand’s 1972 Rolling Stone article, was the idea of a “personal computer.” Brand coined the phrase after meeting Alan Kay at Xerox PARC. There were lots of personal computers at PARC—the Altos—but it wasn’t until the release of the Altair, a build-it-yourself computer kit, that an ordinary hobbyist could get his or her hands on one. It was all the excuse the hackers in Silicon Valley needed to get together. The first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was held in 1975, and no one was more excited about it than Woz.

  Steve Wozniak: I realized that finally the day had come when you could buy low-enough-cost memory chips, low-enough-cost microprocessors that did enough to build an affordable computer. And I thought, Wow! This is what I’ve wanted for ten years. I’ve got it! I’m there.

  Steve Jobs: The clubs were based around a computer kit called the Altair.

  Jim Warren: The Altair was what really started the hustle-and-go around microcomputing. But the Altair was a pretty shoddy design.

  Steve Jobs: You didn’t even type; you threw switches that signaled characters.

  Steve Wozniak: A bunch of switches and lights and you can push a button and some ones and zeros go to memory? That’s geeky computer stuff; that’s not usable.

  Jim Warren: And Woz, he looked at the Altair and thought, Okay but it doesn’t do exactly what I want it to do. So hey, why don’t I design one?

  Michael Malone: People started realizing that this stuff could be done by people who weren’t businesspeople. And they weren’t PhDs in electrical engineering. It could just be done by smart kids.

  Lee Felsenstein: Woz was there from the beginning with his high school cadre, Randy Wigginton and Chris Espinosa prominent among them.

  Randy Wigginton: We knew that everything was changing: Mainframes were not the future, and even minicomputers were just continuing to shrink very quickly. And that’s why everybody was so excited.

  Steve Wozniak: I’d already built a terminal that talked to faraway computers. And I just did it for fun; it was a hobby.

  Lee Felsenstein: The terminal was mentioned in the first meeting. Woz was there at the first meeting and just kept coming.

  Randy Wigginton: Then MOS Technology started selling the 6502 for twenty-five bucks each.

  Dan Kottke: The 6502 was way, way cheaper than the 8080 in the Altair.

  Chuck Thacker: At PARC we used a 6502 in our keyboards for digitizing the stream that went down to the computer. The 6502 was the keyboard controller.

  Steve Jobs: It was the computer hobbyist community that first thought about making a computer out of these things.

  Randy Wigginton: Woz bought some and then went home and figured out how to hook it into the terminal.

  Steve Jobs: And so what an “Apple I” was was really an extension of this terminal—putting a microprocessor on the back end.

  Randy Wigginton: That’s how the whole Apple I came to be. And it was really fast.

  Steve Wozniak: I was a hero at the club. I had built a computer. I had given the plans away for free. I helped others build it.

  Lee Felsenstein: And then of course what’s missing was any software to make it go, and that’s why Woz was writing BASIC in less than 256 bytes.

  Steve Wozniak: I called my BASIC “Game BASIC.” And my whole idea was if you write a language that can play games, it can do all the things that computers do that I don’t know about. Financial stuff? I don’t know what companies use computers for. I only know what I like to use them for. And it’s games.

  Lee Felsenstein: Then this guy turns up at Homebrew in the spring of 1976 who doesn’t say anything. I thought of him as “that rat-faced kid who hung around Wozniak and never said anything.” He was the business guy.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve came into town and I said, “You’ve got to come down and see this!”

  Randy Wigginton: Steve was never very technical, even though he liked to say he was, but he really never was. I don’t know that he could actually program or design hardware. I never saw any evidence of it. He was more interested in the Homebrew Computer Club as a way to make a business. I mean he just wanted to work for himself, he always wanted to be in control of his own destiny. He really wanted to be rich when he was young.

  Steve Wozniak: Steve wasn’t into social good. He was into “Do we have something that can make money?” He was always looking at that. He’d been selling my stuff for five years. He’d come into town about once every couple years and see what I’d created lately and he’d turn it into money. He was really money oriented at the start.

  Dan Kottke: So Steve Jobs had nothing to do with the Apple I—Woz just completely did it on his own, showed it off to Jobs, and Jobs was thinking ka-ching! Cash registers.

  Steve Wozniak: He suggested that we make a company.

  Steve Jobs: I sold my Volkswagen bus and Steve sold his calculator, and we got enough money to pay a friend of ours to make the artwork to make a printed circuit board. And we made some printed circuit boards and we sold some to our friends. And I was trying to sell the rest of them so that we could get our microbus and calculator back.

  Steve Wozniak: And for a while we were getting the parts on thirty days’ credit with no money and we built the computers in ten days and sold them for cash at the Byte Shop.

  Trip Hawkins: The Byte Shop was the first of the chain computer stores. In the Byte Shop basically you’ve got a whole bunch of card tables set up that had a bunch of circuit boards on it, and a bunch of really smelly geeky people talking jargon.

  Steve Wozniak: So that was how we ran for, you know, a good year with the Apple I computer.

  Trip Hawkins: It was not really a commercial product. It was a kit. They only made maybe 150 of those.

  Al Alcorn: Mostly made with parts from Atari, by the way.

  Nolan Bushnell: It was considered okay for people to do their own projects with Atari parts. We wanted engineers to work on their own projects, and we were happy to subsidize that.

  Randy Wigginton: While Woz was doing the Apple I, he also started thinking about how he could do color graphics. Because what he always wanted to do from the very beginning was to write Breakout on his own computer at home.

  Steve Wozniak: Back when I designed Breakout for Atari I was so tired—in and out of sleep. But you know what? That makes your mind creative. There was a TV set on the factory floor. They only use black-and-white TVs for their games. And this TV set wasn’t playing a game but it had a dot going from left to right and right to left. And as it moved it was changing colors: red… green… blue… yellow. There must have been a Mylar overlay or something, I couldn’t see it. And I just went back to my lab bench. And so I’m just sitting there thinking, Color? It was hypnotizing—like a psychedelic light show or something at a concert.

  Dan Kottke: Something about the fuzzy colors in his blurred vision made him think about how if you shift the phase of the dot clock it would cause different colors, which is true.

  Steve Wozniak: And here an idea popped into my head—a little way to put out a repeating digital signal of ones and zeros: one, one, zero, zero. It goes up and it goes down. If you think about it, ones are up, and zeros are down. Up and down, up and down. It’s not a sine wave, but I know how televisions work: They are going to interpret the signal as red. And if I put the ones and zeros in at a slightly different point in time they are going to call it blue! Oh my God, I have sixteen different colors! Would it work? There had never been a book that ever talked about creating color digitally. It wasn’t allowed. It wasn’t done.

  Dan Kottke: Color television was new and expensive then. And it wasn’t like you could read Popular Electronics explaining how it worked.

  Steve Wozniak: I knew the analog world of color telev
isions well, but I had crossed over to the digital world.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Woz just kind of tuned the Apple II to the frequencies that the television worked on, such that it was synchronous with the color burst signal, the signal that tells the TV what color to display.

  Lee Felsenstein: You are supposed to look at color as a two-dimensional vector of the same frequency with a phase relationship. That’s an analog way to look at it. When you look at it on the oscilloscope it looks like a series of pulses, which ultimately is an approximation of a sine wave. Shifting it a little bit relative to another series of pulses gives it the color. Woz had looked at color as sort of a bit stream. So what he did was do that sine wave with digital data, and shift it with hardware. And you know everybody’s jaw dropped and we thought, My God! I guess you can do that…It was really spare, sparse, and very imaginative.

  Steve Wozniak: Two little parts—maybe twenty-five cents’ worth of parts—and it almost converts a square wave into a sine wave.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It was like a magic trick, getting color for free just by a sort of alignment with color TV technology. And once I saw that I thought, Boy, there is genius at work here.

  Randy Wigginton: When he first started showing it at the Homebrew meetings people were amazed, because it was like this little tiny board running things.

  Steve Wozniak: Color in those days was very complicated analog stuff—hardware circuits with feedback and resistors and capacitors and inductors.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It was an incredible advance costwise, because to get a computer monitor to do that would have cost as much as the rest of the computer pretty much. But Woz designed it to use a standard color television set, which could be gotten very cheaply.

  Steve Wozniak: It made it possible for a little one-dollar chip to generate color instead of a thousand-dollar color-generation board.

  Lee Felsenstein: Nobody had to pay for that additional hardware to do all that vector generation and phasing and so forth.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It was the single cleverest thing in the Apple II. That was one of the first revolutions.

  Steve Wozniak: And then I thought, I wonder if I can write a game that’s playable with my slow BASIC?

  Dan Kottke: A video game has to move fast. Maybe the BASIC was fast enough. But most video games would not be written in BASIC.

  Steve Wozniak: I had done Breakout for Atari. I knew Breakout. Would it be fast enough or would it be too slow? Because BASIC is a slow language. And I wrote a little program and put in a bunch of bricks in color. And I changed the color of them and I changed the color and I changed the color twenty times till I had what I liked. And then I programmed in a little paddle that would move up and down as you turn the knob. I built paddle hardware into the Apple II deliberately for the game of Breakout. I wanted everything in there. I put in the speaker with sound so I could have beeps, like games need.

  Andy Hertzfeld: For the Apple II you could write programs that played music—but it had no real sound hardware. All you could do with the software was hit a memory address, which I still remember: C030. So if you hit C030 it would produce a “click” on the speaker. That was all the hardware could do. But if you did that a thousand times a second with software you’d get a one-kilohertz tone, if you did it three thousand times a second you’d get three kilohertz. And the Apple II was literally full of stuff like that, where by just using tiny little bits of resources it could do amazing stuff. In fact, just looking at the Apple II design gave you the feeling that anything was possible, if you were just clever enough. That’s what the main lesson of the Apple II is: that it had infinite horizons.

  Steve Wozniak: So I programmed Breakout, and in half an hour I had tried a hundred variations that would have taken me ten years in hardware if I could’ve even done it. So I called Steve Jobs over to my apartment, and we sat down on the floor next to the cable snaking into my TV that had the back off of it so I could get the wires inside. And I showed him how I could change the colors of things and change the shape of the paddle and change the speed of the balls. So easy! And he and I looked at each other and we were both kind of shaking, because we knew that the world of games was never going to be the same now that they were software. I mean up until then there were no software games in the arcades. But we now knew that animated games were going to be software. Oh my God. A fifth-grader could program in BASIC and make games like Breakout. This was going to be a new world! We saw it right then.

  Al Alcorn: Jobs was telling me he’s going to get this thing funded and all that. And he said, “Well, I want to pitch it to Atari, to you guys.” I said, “Well, I’m not the one to do this.” I pointed him to Joe Keenan. Joe was the serious, levelheaded businessman. Nolan would probably just say yes, just because he couldn’t say no, and anyhow he couldn’t focus on this. And basically the meeting did not go well. Jobs came out and, “How’d it go?” “Not too good.” Joe had basically kicked him out of the office for misbehaving. You just don’t put your bare feet on a guy’s desk! Joe was, you know, Joe was a great guy, but Steve was barefoot and this was just too much. This was like, Geez.

  Steve Wozniak: The story of Apple is a little misunderstood. It’s not like Steve and I did it ourselves.

  Al Alcorn: We helped them get the account to get the 6502 microprocessor. Remember these kids were like eighteen or nineteen years old, they can’t get a credit card let alone a trade account and a credit account. They’d show up and say, “Al, they won’t talk to me!” Of course not, you’re a high school kid. You know, they’ve got a business to do. And I said, “Well, I tell you what, I’ll put in the word to my friend.” And I said, “Talk to these kids, they’ve got something cute and they’ll go somewhere.” He said, “Okay.” I get a call back a couple weeks later saying that was the funniest meeting he’s ever had! “What? What happened?” He said, “Well, these two kids, Steve Jobs and this Wozniak come in, and they were trying to get parts from us and they got no accounts—no trade accounts, no references.” And Jobs not only is trying to get an account, he’s trying to negotiate a great price. And Woz is trying to tell him, “Just go get an account. Let’s just take the parts and worry about that later.” Jobs is trying to get Woz to shut up. So Jobs tries to hit Woz under the table and Jobs slides off the chair because he’s so thin and he falls under the conference room table and they have to pull him out! “Okay, tell you what: We’ll give you a ninety-day account and if you don’t pay you’re cut off. Okay?” “Okay.” That was the biggest account they ever had.

  Steve Wozniak: A guy funded us, an angel. And he joined us. He had made his money working in marketing at Intel and as an engineer before. And he was a mentor. He was kind of young but he was wealthy and he owned as much of Apple as Steve and I did. Same amount of stock. Mike Markkula was his name.

  Mike Markkula: The two of them did not make a good impression on people. They were bearded, they didn’t smell good. They dressed funny. Young, naïve.

  Arthur Rock: Mike asked me if I’d be interested in investing in Apple Computer. And I met with Jobs and Wozniak and I really didn’t think I wanted to be involved with them. Steve Jobs had just returned from six months in India with a guru or whatever you call them. And they didn’t appear very well and they were bragging about the blue box they had invented to steal money from the telephone companies. And I didn’t like that too much.

  Mike Markkula: But Woz had designed a really wonderful computer.

  Al Alcorn: That was the trouble with starting a company when you’re under twenty-one. You’re underage. You can’t drink—but you can start a company.

  The fledgling company made its first big splash in 1977 at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire which—like the Mother of All Demos a decade before—was held at Brooks Hall in San Francisco’s Civic Center. The confab was a coming-out party for the talented hackers of the Homebrew Computer Club, and Apple was just one company out of perhaps a half-dozen Homebrew hopefuls.

  Jim Warren: I didn’t know anything abo
ut producing a computer convention. I got on the phone and started calling people. Because I had been editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia, to say nothing of being very active in Homebrew, I knew all of the owners and founders of the start-up companies. So I called them up: “Oh yeah, we really want to exhibit in that. Oh yeah, that would be wonderful.” I called up Steve Jobs: “Hey, we’re doing this faire.” “Hey, I want to be in on that. We want the front of the hall right at the main entrance.” “Okay, send me some money.” “Sure. How much you need?” “Okay, those are going to be high-priced. Why don’t you send me this much?” “Sure. It will be in the mail.”

  Andy Hertzfeld: I remember walking into the West Coast Computer Faire, I was impressed with just how many people were there.

  Randy Wigginton: There were thousands of hippies walking around, people who were more, I should say, freethinkers. Because it wasn’t mainstream. It was a lot of just hobbyists and people who had heard something about it. It was more of a counterculture event than I think you would expect.

  Steve Jobs: In the first several years of Apple, we were selling to people just like us.

  Randy Wigginton: The industry had no direction, it was just sort of growing like mold, just sort of popping up. Nobody knew what was going to win, what was going to lose, what the direction was going to be. Nobody knew about Apple, for sure.

  Al Alcorn: I remember thinking, All those poor bastards making computers nobody is going to buy. And nobody did, except for the Apple II.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Somehow like a magnet I was just drawn to the Apple booth.

  Randy Wigginton: Steve was so proud of that booth. I mean he just thought it was the greatest thing ever. I mean he couldn’t stop talking about it. You know he was so proud of the whole sign, how beautiful it was, how it looked professional, and how he was going to make us look better than everyone else: That was just totally his baby. Because I mean honestly at that point in the company we had no idea what to do with Steve. Steve was just a pain. He would try to negotiate with vendors: “Ah, I think you need to go sharpen your pencil.” It was code for “Give me a better price.” Woz and I were making fun of him all the time for that, but he really found his calling developing the booth.