AppleFest Keynote Speakers Steve Wozniak and Del Yocam August 1988

Thank you very much for your warm reception. I'd like to apologize in advance for a sore throat. It seems that a virus has hit me. I come out here today to Boston where I've got a lot of good computer friends. Some of the finest people in our business have come from here. I come from Cupertino which is the home of the greatest revolution of our times. I grew up in Silicon Valley, home of transistors and integrated circuits. That's why it's called Silicon Valley. And there were a lot of electronics parents, a lot of electronics kids. We read Tom Swift books, stories like the Hardy Boys, except it was about this inventor named Tom Swift who had his own company, who had his own laboratory. I would sit there reading these books about how ingenious he was and how resourceful he was to solve any problem in the world to build any device that was needed to trap aliens from outer space or to send anti-earthquake pulses through the earth. Would read these stories by moonlight after my parents made me turn my own lights off. That Tom Swift was our hero. A lot of times when you're very young, you read a book and it kind of gives you inspiration. The heroes you identify with lead you on your path in life. Read a book in about fifth grade called SOS at Midnight about a guy who had a ham radio license. And he was in high school and a bunch of his friends would get on the air every Tuesday night at midnight and send messages back and forth in Morse code with telegraph keys. Beep beep beep beep. He got kidnapped in the book. He was able to rewire the kidnapper's TV, build a transmitter, transmit a message to his friends, and they were able to come and rescue him. Went to school the next day and told my friends, 'I'm going to be a ham radio operator.' And sure enough, by sixth grade, I had a ham radio license. A lot of these little directions, things like science fair successes and all kind of determine your direction in life. And it all happens when you're young. Most teachers tell me that it's like around by third, fourth grade, they can tell which students have decided to kind of be dropouts and always act like school's not important and I'm too tough for this and which ones are really bright and they want to learn and they want to study and discover new things. My friend Alan Baum was my only friend. He went off to MIT and would ship me manuals from the courses he was taking and I would read all of his books and I learned a lot that way. He told me there's a club starting for people who have terminals and things. I said, 'Great. I just designed a terminal. I can go down to this club and tell everybody I've got a terminal of my own design, a video terminal.' I didn't even know that there were a couple of other people designing video terminals back in that date. Like Don Lancaster, who had the TV terminal, which was a hot product in the hobbyist community, because I'd gotten out of the electronics hobby community. I didn't read their magazines. I didn't know what a microcomputer was. I didn't know what a microprocessor was. I didn't know that a microcomputer had recently been introduced that was spurring this thing to happen. If I had known that the first microcomputer club in the United States was about to start, I would have been afraid to go because I was very shy and scared of kind of unknown territory. I would have skipped it. But my friend lied to me and told me it was a meeting for people with terminals. So, I went. 20 people met in a dark garage with the rain dripping outside the garage in Gordon French's garage. He stood up front and explained what these upcoming computers were and why the 8808 microprocessor might still have a lot of value even though the 8080 was superior. And other people got up and started talking about this 8080 chip that I'd never heard of and how a company out in New Mexico had built it into a cheap computer that people could buy and build it as a kit. You would buy it as a kit, get all the parts, you'd stuff them in boards, solder them together, bolt transformers in place, screw the whole thing together, put a front panel on, solder wires to switches. You had to be a technician to build it. But when you were done, you had a computer. Couldn't do one useful thing in the world, but it was a computer. And there were a lot of people that were going to want this kind of thing even before they could use it for anything. They started talking about these products at this homebrew computer club, as it became known as later on. And I sat there feeling very sheepish. How do these high school kids and how do these grandparents know all these things that are going on and they know mnemonics and codes and processors and I don't even know a thing about this. So I was very sheepish. But I took a data sheet home with me that night and I studied a microprocessor chip. And by morning, I knew that a microprocessor was just like a minicomputer, except it was smaller and all on one chip, but it had the same kinds of instructions and the same kind of computer logic. And I had studied these things and designed my own and built them. And I knew what they were about. I had written a lot of software for them even though I never had one to run it on. So this changed my life quite a bit. I decided to get back into computers and I knew that now I was going to actually own my own computer like I had promised myself when they cost as much as a house that now I could afford it especially if I built my own. It was very difficult to come up with $400 in 1975 which is a lot more of today's dollars to buy a little computer that kind of has 256 bytes of memory and then you've got to spend another 400 for some memory and another 800 for a terminal and another 800 for BASIC. I didn't have this kind of money, but I knew that at least if I built the computer myself, I could get a lot of the parts for free. And I already had designed a video terminal, which could be the heart of a computer. The first thought that occurred to me was all these other computers are big old boxes with a flat square metal plate and a bunch of toggle switches on them. And that didn't seem right because here I had a video terminal and it was so convenient to call big computers in Boston and run programs on them with this terminal. And so I came up with the idea in my head that the right paradigm for a microcomputer was a terminal, a keyboard to enter information in. And you could start typing if you had a small program like we had in our calculators, a small program that when you turn it on, it starts looking at the keyboard and says what key gets pressed. You press the five key and it goes off and it tucks a five into memory somewhere and maybe displays it on a screen and then it says what key is going to get pressed and you press a six and it does something with the six and you press the return key and that means go do something. If you write a little program in ROM, ROM memory, non-destructible memory, and you deliver it with the computer, it took many fewer chips and much lower cost to read a keyboard in than the huge number of chips you had to put in to operate with a front panel. Anyway, this kludgy front panel where you had to toggle strange binary numbers on switches took more chips to get into the computer and make the computer operate according to when you push buttons on the panel than if you simply had a keyboard that could send commands directly into a program that would do it for you. So that was the idea was a computer should look like a terminal. It should have a keyboard and a TV screen. And of course I was into what would I use a computer for? Well, there were two obvious things. When you went to open house at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center or Stanford this and that or any other computer place, what did they show on computers in 1975? These big huge machines that there was a computer elite. There was a mystique about them. Nobody could have their own. What did they show to families on open house day? Games. And of course at my homebrew computer club there was a flood of books showing games written in BASIC. And this was going to be the accepted default standard for microcomputers at its start. So I knew that first of all I wanted to be able to run games written in the BASIC language. Also I had certain types of computer design problems that I did for Hewlett-Packard for my job and I wanted to be able to implement those programs and run the ones that would help me in my design work. Well the homebrew computer club I was starting to spin ideas of what I would do with a computer and I knew I was going to build one but there was one problem. The heart of the computer, the microprocessor chip cost $400. That's like a $1,000 today. That's a lot to pay for one chip. That's the heart of your computer. You're not likely to do it if you're just on your own and, you know, you got holes in your jeans and that's all you wear and you're just a long-haired technician kind of at work. So, I wasn't going to go down to some weird little distributor who wants me to sign up on all these sheets that make it look like I'm setting up an account and I'm giving information about my bank, which generally has $20 in my account. And it's a strange world when you're used to buying things, you know, at the grocery store over the counter. You don't feel comfortable. You're not a businessman. You don't know what these accounts are all about. So, it was very difficult for someone like myself to buy a microprocessor. Well, a company called MOS Technology got started and they introduced a microprocessor called the 6502 in such a way that in San Francisco at an electronic show, they would sell it over the counter for a $20 bill. And this was a remarkable marketing coup. And a lot of my friends from Hewlett-Packard, a lot of friends from the computer club who couldn't afford one before went down and bought that $20 chip. And that's how we chose it. And it claimed to be the best chip of its day anyway, which I still agree. The personalities of our computer club, it was the first one in the country. Some of the key leaders, including our eventual meeting conductor, Lee Felsenstein and Robert Riley and some others, they had come from a background of leading anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the Berkeley area and Oakland area. And they had come to discover that they needed a better way to network people and have communication tools. And they envisioned the computer as the eventual solution, the way that people could via electronic bulletin boards leave messages and I need this and eventually expand their database and their knowledge and they wanted to organize this kind of operation. They saw computers as a socialization tool. Others of those who founded the company saw it as a technology changing tool and we were going to revolutionize the world and turn the tables upside down on companies that pretended that computers were big and enormous and beyond our understanding. Now we realized that young children in school, young 8-year-olds and 10-year-olds were going to be writing better programs than their parents and suddenly discovering that hey computer isn't that much of a mystique after all. It's really simple and anybody can do it. So Lee Felsenstein would conduct the meetings. Did a very good job organized us into mapping periods where people would raise their hand and say does anyone have this sort of thing this is what I need a type of chip or an interface schematic or know how you fix this problem other people would raise their hand and say I've got some RAMs for sale today $2 each or I've got some manuals on this I've got a certain type of teletype for sale people would offer things and what you do is if somebody offered something you needed you'd look at them raise their hand you'd see who it is and you'd meet with them later during the random access period. If someone needed help on something and you could offer help, you'd go meet with them during the random access period. And we were all there to help each other see what this revolution was all about. And we use the word revolution very openly. All the companies, everything that was printed in the financial sections of the newspapers in 1975 said, 'It's a bunch of kids driving around in beat up VW vans that this thing's never going anywhere. These computers don't have a marketplace. It's just a little fad, you know, for the hobbyist community.' But we started realizing that people were going to have computers in their homes and that it was just starting and that the big companies didn't see it. Jim Warren came to our club meetings and he had some experience with a company called People's Computer Company involved a lot in getting educational software out to the masses. And he had rumor after rumor after rumor, every single tidbit about what company was going to come out with this product and so and so over there, this executive was leaving to join some other firm, a new microprocessor was about to be introduced. He always knew every tidbit of information weeks before we normally heard it. So half of the meeting was consumed listening to these interesting little tidbits about the industry that was evolving from Jim Warren. This was the most important every two weeks we met. Wednesday night, 7:30 p.m. This was the most important every two weeks of my life to get ready for this meeting and to hinge on every word and listen because I was too shy to ever raise my hand and speak myself. I was not really a participant yet. My friend Dan Sokol, whom I met there, would go up to the front of the auditorium sometimes and say, 'Is there anyone here from Atari?' No hands would go up. He'd say to 500 people, he'd say, 'Well, I've got some chips from a Pong game they're going to come out with for their home, and it's not quite on the market yet, but we're going to auction them off.' We had kind of a pirate aspect to it. Nothing ever seemed wrong to us. Later on, the people who eventually formed Microsoft introduced the first BASIC for these small computers. You buy the computer for $400, you buy the BASIC for $600. Doesn't sound very efficient. Okay, this is from Bill Gates. Well, Dan Sokol took a copy of it on paper tape that you could read in with a big huge teletype, took it home, came back with 20 copies. Okay? And the rule of the club sort of became anything you take out of the library, you have to bring two or more back. Randy Wigginton was a high school kid who eventually became very important in Apple's early history. And although he was just in high school, he was sharp, he was at the club, he had a lot of good questions and comments. And I met him there and he would help me carry my big Sears TV in and set it down on a table where I could demonstrate my computer work as I started designing computers for the club. Randy was in charge of running a chat program on a local time sharing company where people with terminals could all call in and talk to each other much like today's forums much like you know even forums on the new AppleLink. Well, I discovered that this program that did this chatting used a file. I read the program written in BASIC used a file called CHATX to pass the information one person was typing to everyone else that was listening. So I wrote a program of my own that sat there in a little loop and said, 'Is CHATX free? Is CHATX free?' As soon as it was, grabbed it and dumped 14 pages of knock-knock jokes into it. Another youngster I met at this club, Chris Espinosa, became very important in Apple's history going way back to its earliest days before we even started right on through today. He still works at Apple, one of our longest term employees. In one of the we were about to come out with the Apple II in an eventual year. I'll skip ahead and tell this, the Apple II. Chris stayed all night with me writing the first demonstration program ever to use high-res color demonstration program on the Apple II computer for a magazine article so we could get some pictures. We stayed there till 2, 3, 4 in the morning making little changes to it to swirl lines around on a screen. Chris went home kind of late, you know, he lived down the street and his mother got so upset at him coming home that late because he was only like 15 or 16 that she wouldn't let him come to Apple for a long time. Most of the people in our club were very scraggly. They weren't dressed certainly in suits. They weren't managers. They weren't the people who even had good access to computers. They were the ones that wanted computers of their own. They were all technicians. Very few of us could afford a computer. After about one year of the club operating with every single person out of 500 going to own a computer, only about five to eight of us had our own computers yet. The newsletter, we had a newsletter. People would give little program listings. Here's how you can write a program to calculate a random number. Here's how you can write. They were very simple, trivial programs at first, but it inspired others of us to believe that anything you do has value. You could if you want to share it. So, I started writing programs and sharing them through this club newsletter with other people or handing out my own schematics or my own programs so that other people could build their own projects. I handed out schematics of my terminals. Eventually, when I built the Apple I, I handed out schematics of that. Went over to people's houses and helped them build their own. We believed that there wasn't any money in this. This was not a business. We were doing it for the love of technology and we were changing the world and this was just our little step on the way.