This industry bore little resemblance to today’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and rapidly iterative tech world. It was a stodgy enterprise most similar to the capital equipment business. Its universe of potential customers could be counted in the hundreds, and these were companies with deep pockets whose demands focused more on performance and reliability than on price. No surprise, then, that the industry had become cloistered and a little complacent.
Out in California a significant number of the people who would have a hand in flipping that industry on its head started meeting regularly as a hobbyist group called the Homebrew Computer Club. Their first get-together occurred shortly after the publication of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured a cover story about the Altair 8800 “microcomputer.” Gordon French, a Silicon Valley engineer, hosted the gathering in his garage to show off an Altair unit that French and a buddy had assembled from the $495 kit sold by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). It was an inscrutable-looking device, about the size of a stereo component amplifier, its face sporting two horizontal arrays of toggle switches and a lot of blinking red lights. The clunky thing couldn’t do too much, but it demonstrated the feasibility of having a computer to yourself, one that you could program twenty-four hours a day if you wanted to, without having to wait in line or punch any cards. Bill Gates read the article, and shortly thereafter famously dropped out of Harvard to start a little outfit called Micro-soft to design software programming languages for the Altair.
Woz knew the MITS machine wasn’t all that much more advanced than the Cream Soda Computer he’d created four years earlier, in 1971, when he had to use much less sophisticated components. Spurred by a geek’s natural competitive instincts, he roughed out some new designs for what he knew would be a better microcomputer, one that would be easier to program, control, and manipulate. Flipping toggle switches and counting flashing lights was like using flag semaphore and Morse code, he thought. Why not input commands and data values more directly with a typewriter keyboard? And why not have the computer project your typing and results onto an attached television monitor? And for that matter, why not plug in a cassette tape recorder to store programs and data? The Altair had none of these features that would make computing far less intimidating and far more approachable. This was the challenge Woz decided to tackle. In the back of his mind he hoped that his employer, HP, might want to manufacture a version of his concept.
Enter Steve Jobs, the budding opportunist and junior impresario. He didn’t think Woz needed HP. He thought he and Woz could develop a business of their own. Steve knew that Woz was so uniquely talented that any computer he would design would be cheap, usable, and easy to program—so much so that the other hobbyists at Homebrew might want one, too. So during the fall and winter of 1975 and early 1976, as Woz perfected his design, Jobs started to conjure how they might pool their resources to purchase the components they needed to make a working prototype. Every couple of weeks, they would take the latest working version of the computer to the Homebrew meetings, to show off a new feature or two to the toughest audience in town. Steve persuaded Woz that they could make the club members their customers by selling them the schematics, and perhaps even printed circuit boards. Club members could then buy the chips and other components themselves, and assemble them into the guts of their very own working microcomputer. To raise the cash to pay a mutual friend to draw a “reference design” for the circuit boards, Steve sold his treasured Volkswagen minibus, and Woz unloaded his precious HP-65 programmable calculator. After spending $1,000 on designing the board and contracting to have a few dozen made, Jobs and Wozniak made their money back and then some by selling them to fellow Homebrew members for $50 apiece, netting them a nifty $30 for each circuit board.
It wasn’t much of a business, but it was enough for two young men who were coming to believe that these microcomputers could change everything. “We felt it was going to affect every home in the country,” Woz explained years later. “But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their problems that way.” Steve decided that their new company should be called Apple. There are different tales about the origin of the name, but it was a brilliant decision. Years later, Lee Clow, Steve’s longtime collaborator on Apple’s distinctive brand of advertising, told me, “I honestly believe that his intuition was that they were going to change people’s lives by giving them technology they didn’t know they needed, that would be different from anything they knew. So they needed something friendly and approachable and likable. He took a page out of Sony’s book, because Sony was originally called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, and [cofounder] Akio Morita said they needed something much more approachable.”
Indeed, adopting the name Apple foreshadows the expansiveness and originality Steve would bring to the creation of these new machines. It’s suggestive of so much: the Garden of Eden, and the humanity—both good and bad—resulting from Eve’s bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Johnny Appleseed, the great sower of plentitude from American myth; the Beatles and their own record label, a connection that would lead to litigation years later; Isaac Newton, the plummeting apple, and the spark of an idea; American as apple pie; the legend of William Tell, who saved his own life and that of his son by using his crossbow to pierce an apple perched on the son’s head; wholesomeness, fecundity, and, of course, the natural world. Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies. It hints at a company that would bring, as it eventually did, humanism and creativity to the science and engineering of computers. As Clow suggests, settling on Apple was a great, intuitive decision. Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.
Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree. It was the kind of overworked, precious image that a young calligraphy student might find enchanting, but far too esoteric for a company with big mainstream ambitions. This graphic rendition was drawn by Ronald Wayne, a former Atari engineer whom Steve had recruited to join the team. Wayne would have acted as the wise, elder tiebreaker if Steve and Woz ever came to loggerheads. The three signed a partnership agreement that gave Steve and Woz each 45 percent of the equity, with Wayne taking the remaining 10 percent. But Wayne quickly decided he wasn’t prepared to risk his future on this pair of neophytes. In June 1976, he sold back his stake for $800 to Jobs and Wozniak, who a year later would commission a new logo. In the tradition of Pete Best of the Beatles, Wayne would miss out on the ride of his life.
SHORTLY AFTER REGISTERING Apple as a California business partnership on April Fools’ Day, 1976, Steve and Woz made one more trip to the Homebrew Computer Club to show off the finished, fully assembled version of their new computer. Woz had met every challenge. On a circuit board measuring 9 inches by 15.5 inches, he had assembled a microprocessor, some dynamic random access memory chips, a central processing unit, a power supply, and other parts in such a way that once you connected it to a keyboard and a monitor, you could do a couple of radically new things: write computer programs on your own machine, in your own home, without being tied into a remote mainframe; and for the first time on a microcomputer, you could type your commands on a keyboard and see them immediately displayed on a black-and-white TV monitor, making them easier to edit than ever before. Both steps were radical departures from past practice. Woz had also written a version of BASIC, the simplest and most important hobbyist programming language, to run on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor that functioned as the brains of what he and Steve were starting to call the Apple 1. Woz didn’t fully appreciate it, but he had created the first truly personal computer. Steve, however, understood the magnitude of the achievement, and the power of the term personal computer in the context of an industry that had historically been anything but personal. So that was exactly the term he used whenever people asked him what it was that Woz had dreamed up.