Cofounder, Apple
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Makes a 1987 Guest Appearance at OCAS
Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Makes a 1987 Guest Appearance at OCAS.
About Steve Wozniak
In a July 2025 interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak discussed the early days of the company, describing himself as the engineer who designed the Apple II, which he said was the only product generating revenue for Apple in its first decade. He stated that Steve Jobs did not have the ability to design hardware or software and that Jobs learned marketing principles from investor Mike Markkula. Wozniak also said he initially gave away his computer designs for free to help start the personal computer revolution. Speaking at the A3F 2026 conference in Zurich in June 2026, Wozniak reflected on his early passion for digital technology and his goal of building useful products for everyday people. He expressed skepticism about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, citing the need for human oversight and concerns about deepfakes and scams. Wozniak attributed Apple's later massive growth to the business thinking of the people who ran the company after its first decade, rather than to his own engineering contributions.
Transcript (61 segments)
H
Host0:00
The next speaker that I'm going to introduce does need an introduction and probably doesn't. I asked him this morning how he'd like me to introduce him, and I wanted to know if he had a spiffy title or something. I think those of you that have had the Apples for some time have seen the name all over the place, particularly in the red book if you had an early Apple version with the red book and you saw the Woz signature and the monitor routines and a lot of the Apple software that was being written. I think the large attendance we have at this meeting is largely responsible due to Steve being here today. Steve has a few remarks he's going to make, a little bit of a discussion on the background of the company and Apple Computer, its growth, and then he will, I think, open up for questions and answers. So we'll try to hear by an opportunity in a question and answer format. I'd like to ask you when you ask a question if you would please give your name and where you're from so everybody can hear it. We'll try to repeat the questions when we get into that format so everybody can hear it, and we'll just have to see how it goes. But ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce the founder of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak.
S
Steve Wozniak1:35
Okay, first of all, I'd like to say that it's a great pleasure to attend club meetings like this, and it's a particular thrill because I don't take advantage of the opportunity to travel for business very often. Most of the traveling that I've done in the last few years has been to clubs around the country to chat. So I was really thrilled yesterday when I looked on the airplane map and realized that Cincinnati's just across the border from Kentucky, and I thought, what if I could get over there? Then I discovered last night that I was in three firsts: I was in Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio for the first time, so it was quite a thrill. Then this morning I woke up about 3:00 a.m. California time, had some coffee at the coffee shop—you might know the one—I think I might be joining John Anderson in the hospital. So I'm plenty tired, but that's bad and it's good because you'll probably get me to say all sorts of stuff that I wouldn't normally say. I don't have a prepared talk, so I'm just going to figure it out in about a minute. First of all, I would like to say I enjoyed that last talk by Tom; that was just great. I think that was, you know, perfect Apple style, and I hope I can get a videotape of it to show around Apple.
Okay, I'm going to go back. A lot of times I talk about the origins of the Apple and how it was kind of developed in a club-type atmosphere, and I'm going to browse over that a little quickly and get into other early Apple folklore. It was mid-'75; I got interested in the club scene. It was just kicking off with the MITS computers, and I wanted to build a certain style computer for about 10 years. All I could do was do it on paper because I couldn't afford to realize it myself. Finally, the technology was in the right place, and I got the chance to do it. I designed the Apple, wrote the Integer BASIC, and the first Apple I monitor ROM at the Homebrew Computer Club. Essentially, every two weeks it was come down, show it off, get some feedback, help other people hand-wire them. My friend from high school days, Steve Jobs, proposed starting a company—just to kind of start a little company on our own, not knowing what a company was. He came up with the name Apple Computer, which was undeniably the best computer company name possible. So we kicked it off in March of '76. He sold his van, I sold my HP calculator, we laid out a PC board, we managed to pay the PC artist, and we thought we were going to sell blank boards for 40 bucks each at the club. Anyone wanted an Apple I board. Instead, it turned out Steve went out right away and started hustling for business. Since the design, the engineering, and the software was basically done, he hustled around, talked to a few store owners, and the only store in the area in those days was the Byte Shop in Mountain View. He sold Paul Terrell on 50 fully assembled Apple Is, which just blew us away and more or less put us in business at a level we had never thought possible. So we did about $100,000 of business the first year.
Okay, I'm going to go back a little bit further, even, which is about the time I was kicking around getting interested in what was possible with microprocessors. Of course, I had terminals in those days, and I'd call up the local time-sharing systems and play the games that I like to play and hop around on the ARPANET. It was really great fun, and I always thought how great it would be to be able to play games like LUNAR and whatnot just right in your own home. When the microprocessor came about, it was obvious that in a very small package you could put it all in one place and have total control over it. So that was more or less the initial kickoff concept for me. There was no idea of starting a company, selling a product, or anything; it was just being able to do what I had done before with the terminal and time-sharing computers. About the time that I started working on Apple I designs and ran into the 6502 microprocessor and wrote the Integer BASIC, another friend at HP, where I worked in the calculator division, we both got very interested in the possibilities of doing roughly a thousand-dollar Apple I-ish machine—maybe 4K of RAM, 4K of ROM with BASIC, simple video coming out that you'd play into your home TV set, and the keyboard. We approached the lab manager with the idea of building a completely built, ready-to-go machine for a thousand bucks. No color, none of the real fancy features, no disk—we hadn't really thought out too far. We just thought it would be nice to have a fun machine to program BASIC on, a small 9830. The lab manager at the time said that he was intrigued by the idea; it was a good idea for a startup company, but it didn't quite fit into the HP way. You know, what if there's a problem and the picture looks crummy—is it the TV set or is it the HP computer? He had a lot of objections and couldn't really allocate any resources to the project. But he continually came up to me and said he hadn't slept since we discussed it with him. In the meantime, he mentioned it to the Corvallis division, which built several thousand-dollar, three-thousand, five-thousand-dollar low-end of their 9830 BASIC machines. They were more or less scared of any $800 products, but they were especially scared if they grew into like $2,500 products that would come close to competing with what they had. So more or less, even though there was no go-ahead on a project or anything, there was a product split. Then Steve and I went into business with the Apple and went through a legal release process through HP. No division was interested, of course, and basically brought out the Apple I. It was not a real big seller, but we started taking out national ads and getting around. We went out to Atlantic City for PC '76, and that was a great thrill, you know, to travel and do things. We were kind of on top of the world, even though we really weren't making big money. You know, we had basically what we wanted, and I had what I wanted, which was a computer of my own, so I was quite happy. I was working at Hewlett-Packard in the day and doing the Apple stuff totally moonlight at night. I was the engineer; Steve was a 20-hour-a-day businessman setting up a company, doing the marketing, tracking down the parts, scheduling the construction of the PC boards, talking to all the vendors, just hustling every aspect of it, making sure the ads got written in the magazines, etc. So about that time, my real interest wasn't so much—Apple was not a real big deal. It wasn't a big company; it wasn't something that you're extremely attached to. It's like something we did that was fun. My real attachment was to the growing field of personal computing. In those days, a lot of the people that were in the clubs were talking using the phrase 'home computer,' and they were a little bit off-base because it really hasn't happened yet as a true home computer. The early people, the first people that were talking using the phrase 'home computer' or 'personal computer,' were just strictly hobbyists, technicians, the people who were building kits themselves. They were a little bit off-base, but they were the first ones to use the phrases, and I was interested in the entire field. I pursued it. I'd already pursued it once at HP, trying to push the Apple I concept along as an official project in the lab unsuccessfully. So then I thought, you know, HP was my real love; it was my security, it was my job. I looked about HP for other aspects of personal computing that I might be able to get into because I loved that more than calculator design. Oddly enough, after the Apple I was introduced and we started shipping them, kind of quietly, a project got started in the lab. Before you knew it, they assigned, you know, five programmers to work on the BASIC and a bunch of people looking into printers and CRT screens and CPU design, a custom CPU in CMOS, etc. So the approach was like a big-scale project, except it started slowly and piece by piece. It was kind of odd because it was a similar project to the Apple in a way, but no one ever admitted it. I thought, hey, you know, this is where my real interest is—an 8-bit machine and, you know, RAMs and video and graphics and whatnot. So I approached the group leader and mentioned I'd be interested in working on the project, any phase. I'm great at peripherals, CPU design, whatever—it didn't matter, software. I just wanted to participate on that kind of a product, and they were going to be the first group to move to Corvallis, Oregon, so I said I'm ready to go. I wound up talking to the section leader and basically got turned down. So strike out—that's two strikes. I didn't get into personal computing at that level. I wound up still working on calculator chips. About the same time, a project going on in HP Labs was going to turn into more or less a portable, handheld LCD display BASIC machine at the time. This was a very intriguing idea, especially the portability. It has never come to be quite the product concept; it goes back and forth, especially anything at HP Labs. But a lot of the people that were interested in this were some of the crucial people on the original HP-35 calculator, so they were really excited about getting me on the project because I'd done a lot of these things and I was really enthusiastic in person, you know, this kind of field. So I went over and interviewed, and I didn't really try to create a good impression of myself, didn't really try to push it, because I thought I was a shoo-in for the job, and they turned me down. So that was three strikes at HP, and I tried as hard as I could to get into personal computing there but didn't quite make it. So anyway, then we had this company selling Apple Is out of the garage, part-time on the side. This was really big time for us because we had a lot more going than most typical engineers. We started thinking the Apple II design came about very, very quickly. Sometimes it's been referred to as 'Woz's Law: do it right the second time' or such things. A lot of the original idea, like for color, was I wanted to enhance the Apple I and add color. To enhance it generally takes a lot more chips than to design it in, so I had to be very clever and think it out very carefully to get the number of chips down to something reasonable for the Apple I. By then we had at least a cassette interface for the Apple I after unsuccessfully hiring a consultant. Oh, backing up just a little, when we started the company, okay, we came up with the name, you got to go register the name, and you basically form a partnership and you sign some documents saying you're partners and here's how it's divided and here's what the general responsibilities are, here's what happens if you break up, etc. We had a third partner, and he came on. He wrote our first manuals; he composed them and he did a beautiful drawing of Newton under the apple tree for more or less our first—too complicated for a logo, but it eventually led to a concept that Carl Humber used on a Byte magazine article cover. So this person, at the time we started the company, Steve Jobs had 45 percent, I had 45, this person had 10 percent. I think he saw a VCR or something one day and he needed some money, so he sold out his 10 for $800.
Okay, a few months after we started shipping Apple Is, during—we started shipping them, I think, March, April, April or May of '76. By the end of that summer, the Apple II was being shown around at the club. It was being demoed for selected magazine editors as something that we were just working on. We didn't know what the final concept was going to be. It was a hand-wired breadboard; it didn't have a case. We were selling Apple Is in wood cases at the time, and we, of course, were selling Apple I, so we didn't want to talk too much about the Apple II because it turned out to be just one of those designs that you're really happy with. Everything is so small and well integrated. It did everything the Apple I did; it did a lot more. It did it cheaper, it did it faster. It had the color, it had the game facilities came along with it, the sound, the paddles. Basically, that was because I wanted to implement Breakout first, so a lot of the BASIC commands and the paddles, a lot of the features—there wasn't much software, and before there is much, you're kind of working in the blind as to what the eventual machine should be, what is the concept. The 40 characters across was a pretty easy decision because that was what would work on a standard home TV. That led to the concept of portability also, which when it got to Apple II days, Steve Jobs was instrumental in coming up with a product concept of the lightweight portable machine. He helped hustle things like a lightweight power supply, which was designed by Rod Holt at Atari, and just pushing the idea of a plastic, first plastic case computer, etc. So anyway, the Apple II features were kind of being developed piecemeal, and by the end of that summer, it was pretty clear that we had the product. We thought it was going to be a real hot seller compared to the Apple I, and we were really enthusiastic about it. We were fortunate to get two tries in such a short period of time because companies like MITS and IMSAI basically got in with one product and didn't—when you get to that second level, you've already been through all the timing diagrams and you've been through so many ways of trying it and thinking it out that it's generally a much improved version. We were so happy with the Apple II that when we went out to PC '76 in August, I think, we came down really late one night when all our competitors were gone. They had an Advent projector there, which we'd never really had access to before, and we put it on just to see what it would look like on the big screen. The Advent technician said, 'I want one of those.' Everything else in the world was around him and small computers in those days, and he said, 'I want one of those,' so he got serial number one. It happened to trade our president Mike Markkula a copy of Star Wars for it. So we started thinking about the Apple II. We only shipped in one year we shipped about 175 Apple Is, which isn't that much. We thought it was really surprising; we thought 30 would be great. In those days, 100 of any type of computer was significant. So we started thinking in terms of the Apple II as to the real potential of like a thousand computers a month, pretty easily, because we knew the market was there. In between the Apple I and the Apple II, the SOL computer was introduced, and it wasn't actually shipped until about nine months after introduction, which is typical in our business. But it was pretty obvious by the time it shipped, which was before we shipped Apple IIs, that it was the hot seller in all the computer stores. We thought that we could easily knock off a product like that just by virtue of having better design, easier to interface to, all the color built in, all the fancy features that we had. We thought we had the fun machine. So the problem is, how do you go out and build a run of a thousand of something when you're used to building a hundred? It takes some money, and up till that point in time, the only loan we got was $5,000 from a couple of friends for a couple of months in the beginning. We realized that we had to raise some capital, and one of the intriguing possibilities was finding some venture capital. So Steve started getting a hold of people because he's the businessman. I'm still designing, finishing the Apple II design, getting the PC board layout ready, etc. Steve started phoning around and bringing people into the garage that were around Silicon Valley, you know, in the electronics industry. Ex-company presidents would pop by, and one thing led to another. We ran into a venture capitalist; it was the wrong sort of thing for him, but he got us onto this guy, Mike Markkula, who had been product marketing manager at Intel and had retired on a stock option that was worth like a million bucks or something. So he was pretty comfortably retired, keeping up with the electronics industry, very bright, very sensitive, very ethical type of guy. So we met with him, and originally he was just going to help us write a business plan to get venture money from a couple of venture places that he knew or he knew people that worked in them. By the time he got done, he was so turned on to what we had and the market possibilities, and it was just the sort of thing he had always wanted to do. In a fast-growing market like this is the one opportunity for a company to come on and grow to the size that Apple's grown to in a very short period of time. Business-wise, Steve and I didn't know what we were doing; we were just a couple kids floating around. Mike knew what he was doing, and he knew where he'd take us, and decided to join us as a third, roughly equal partner. That kind of launched—so we launched the company with the Apple II, made a big splash at the first computer fair we went to, picked up a lot of dealer orders. We grew steadily, steadily, steadily. After a while, sales cooled off; we came out with the disk, sales shot sky-high, and it's been growth ever since. The story's told so many times I'm not going to get into that one. What I am going to do is, since I haven't thought out what I'm going to talk about, I'll let you make suggestions by asking questions at this point, and I'll just answer questions all day. And if I can't answer them, I can't answer them.
Double-sided disk for the Apple III? Not announced yet. We're working on it. It was in MicroMation—well, you know, a lot of the stuff, especially the stuff in InfoWorld, is—I don't know, you know as much as I do probably.
Okay, imagine this if you will. First of all, as an officer of the company, some subjects are taboo. But also, imagine if you will that imagine a person that is really interested in the latest PROM code that he's writing, or goes home and works with the Apple, tries out a new piece of software every night, gets all the hardware cards he can, learn how to use them, and doesn't really have that much interest in the big financial operation and how many buildings we've got overseas and how many employees and what the management structure is. And it really doesn't read the Wall Street Journal and probably doesn't know any more than you.
Why the 6502? Okay, at the point in time there were two processors to consider: there was the 8080 and the 6800. The 8080 was extremely expensive to come by in single quantities, and for just a person who likes to go down to the grocery store to buy a can of Coke, you don't—how do you buy an 8080? There was no real distribution to individuals. The 6800 was a popular processor that had been sort of selected by a couple divisions at HP as a sort of standard, and HP came out with an offering whereby you could buy a processor and a PIA for roughly, I think, 40 bucks or 80 bucks or something. I strongly considered it and designed the Apple I for the 6800. At that time, I'd already finished a video terminal design which I used for myself, and I just popped the video terminal and interfaced it to a 6800, and that was the design. It was on paper before I ever bought the 6800. A little company in Pennsylvania introduced the 6502, announced intentions to sell it over the counter at WestCon for 20 bucks, and this was just totally unheard of. It was like, you know, processors are going to be as cheap as any chip, and we're going to sell it cheap and not make a ton of money going in because it's going to be such a huge market. But that marketing direction largely came from Chuck Peddle, who was one of the designers of that processor. So I thought, well, this is great. I went up to WestCon with my friends; we all threw over our 20 bucks or 25 bucks and bought the 6501, 6502, bought the manuals. Riding home on BART, we flipped through the manuals and discovered that, contrary to claims, it really wasn't all that more than a 6800. It had a lot of nice addressing modes and a lot of nice tricks of its own, but it was missing things like increment the accumulator. So basically, it was the way it was sold. By the time you get the 6502, you think, well, I've been writing compilers and whatnot on machines that I never had in my hand for years just for the fun of it, and that's where I was. I thought, well, first of all, I want to write the first BASIC compiler for the 6502; it'll be really fun, and I'll be way ahead of everything. The only hang-up was there were no assemblers, so I did it all by hand. But it was really exciting. Remember, there was no company; there was no decision saying what are people buying, what would people want to buy. There was nothing like this. The Apple I was running the BASIC about four months before we even decided to start a company. So the development cycle was more like user-oriented: what do I want, what do you really want to use? I had just enough experience to know what I wanted to use. The 6502 was plenty adequate and was the new kid on the block, and it was kind of like the exciting thing to do rather than just pick up a processor that tons of other people already had and were running lots of software on. It was fun to start from scratch. So it came about, and to be frank, we really haven't regretted it.
Why apply the 6502 in the Apple III instead of one of the 16-bit processors? The Apple II has become enough of a standard and a very popular machine, well-liked by people outside of Apple, that we wanted to build in an emulation mode. It wasn't that a lot of software would transfer over directly, but a lot of software experience from our developers would. We built in emulation mode where it emulates an Apple II, and this required the 6502. We evaluated performance of various processors; a lot of people were heavily in favor of the 6809. Basically, we took the 6502 and built with TTL some features around it that extended it to 6502 Plus, if you will, and let us do a machine with the addressability and whatnot that the Apple III has.
Status of the Apple III? I'm not going to comment. It's in the box. I try not to keep aware, especially of schedules on shipments of products, because I find that within a two-day period it will change if it was supposed to be out within two days. Every time I open my mouth and say it's in the stores, it turns out it isn't. So until I see it there myself, I usually don't say.
Okay, any questions? Apple then, Apple now, me, whatever, I don't care. Go ahead.
Center in the diskette fix? Yeah, I think we got one large batch of drives that had a centering problem that we discovered. Some brands of diskettes centered better than other brands of diskettes, and the diskettes that we're shipping now with the Apple logo on have a little plastic insert around the hole that helps that problem. Aside from that, I haven't really talked to the people working on this problem over in the disk division recently, so I don't know what the final solution is.
Hard disks? We're very interested in both the eight-inch and five-inch Winchester-type hard disks, applying them to the Apple II as well as other Apple products. We're going to basically, at the moment, our approach is buy the Winchester drive and build the controller ourselves—pretty much the standard up to now, the Apple approach. You know, like our floppy, we buy the mechanism outside and design our own controller because we're not mature enough yet that we're actually doing a lot of electromech design. We are working on a couple products, but they're like our first step down into that technology. It is possible that at some time, and not too far in the future, we would consider something like building disk drives. We're getting to that size that that's one of the first things you think of: we'll build it ourselves, we'll buy them out.
How soon? No comment, because chances are I'd never be right in the end.
How big is Apple Computer today? I don't know, roughly around, I think, a thousand employees pretty much is a close approximation. It's hard to tell by badge number these days because we've lost enough; you can't just look at the last badge number and say how many there are, plus the number of badge numbers that were reserved for Dallas and North Carolina and wherever else. So that's just an estimate.
Okay, my education background and when did I first become interested in computers? Okay, well, back in high school I was, you know, top math science student, all A's, real high college entrance scores. I was really bright. But unlike most math types, I was also interested in electronics, which was usually considered a shop-type course. So I wound up being very fortunate that in high school—I mean, I built my first computer out of transistors in like sixth grade, okay? And this was back before anyone was doing it. Ham radio license, I was very much in electronics, largely spurred on by my father, etc. In high school, I was the only one in the school who knew anything about computers. We didn't have computers in the school. What the teachers thought was a computer was a bunch of switches and patch cords and relays. I got interested, I started reading small computer manuals. The PDP-8 manual was my big guide, and I started practicing designing first with transistors and then with low-scale integration and MSIs. My designs got better and better, and of course I couldn't build anything because I couldn't get the parts, but I just went through it for the practice. I was excited about instruction sets and computers. That, and basically probably a lot of you in this room have gone through a similar thing with the Apple manuals—you just learn it from the manual. So it was all self-taught; there were no courses. I managed to get into a special project where I could learn programming over at Sylvania, and that was probably the most exciting thing my senior year of high school. So I went off to school, one year, one year college in Colorado. I was still designing computers by then. I was in love with the Nova instruction set; I could never get enough chips to build one. Came back, went my second year of school at a local college. I had good grades in school; I was doing well, very good grades, especially in computer courses. Went off to Berkeley my third year. After Berkeley, I worked at a computer company called Tenet in between. Has anyone ever heard of Tenet? Okay, well, they went bankrupt because they had a great product. It was a 24-bit machine—it was a 32-bit machine. It was absolutely outstanding, and HP would have been wise to buy it instead of developing the 3000. It was supporting 32 users, BASIC, FORTRAN, everything, and this was 1969. Gorgeous machine, much better price than anything else going. The problem is they sold two to the state of California, which are still being used by the DMV today, and they wish they could buy more. We went into a recession, and one of the major owners of the company decided he needed a tax write-off, so basically they shut down instead of trying to stick it out. Just kind of unfortunate because those people from Tenet are still all over Silicon Valley today, and they're all heavily involved in the scene. Went to Berkeley, computer science curriculum. Came out of Berkeley after three years and just got into so many projects, mostly designing stuff that I wanted and couldn't afford—things like Pong games to the first design of Breakout for Atari for the arcade game. I worked up to video terminals and into the Apple stuff. Through a bunch of—I just got into so much stuff, I didn't go back to school. I didn't really drop out like the magazines say; I took courses in the meantime, so I'm roughly a half a year away from a degree if I really wanted to go back and get it, which I may. So pretty much my educational background is not like—I wasn't a student, I was a dropout. Unlike Steve, he went to school for about a week, and he's much brighter than I am. The second part of the question was my computer experience. Okay, well, I've been heavily involved in computers for a long time. The only one I ever got the chips to build was toggle switches and lights, and I wrote some programs of my own. It was a lot of fun; it was kind of like the early mid-computer approach, only it was like 10 years before. It was just a ton of fun, but I realized right away I wanted video, so I designed a video for it. I wanted a keyboard and designed a keyboard interface. Knew what I wanted but couldn't afford anything, but it was all sitting around in my mind. When the technology finally came and it was affordable, it was just like I'd already done it. I knew what I wanted, so it wasn't like sitting back at that time and saying, well, how should you do it? It was just something you know.
Regional Midwest? I thought we had the country pretty well covered, but okay, I will walk over a few steps and see what I can do.
What is the Apple II Plus? Next question. Apple II Plus—I don't know, what will we call it? Maybe the Apple III, IV, I don't know. Go ahead.
Another question right there. Can you say anything about bubble memory? Can I say anything about bubble memory? Yeah, it never quite—it's been hanging around for a long time talking about various applications. It was far too expensive to consider. Even if we cut the cost to the bones by ordering really high quantity, like the million-bit chip from Intel, you could get roughly the density of a floppy disk on one nice little small solid-state card, and it's great. It's just right there in your hand; you plug it in, it works, virtually no interface hardware, no mechanics. The problem is it's not removable. You aren't going to spend 500 bucks for each floppy disk worth of data. It may come about someday that it comes like a built-in system-type drive system-type parameter, but it was just outrageously expensive for a personal computing product at the time, and so hasn't found it yet. There was no real reason that the chips were going to get really cheap because it was a very large die and it was subject to the same yield curves as silicon, and the yield problem was very significant. So there was no reason to expect the price to really come down that we could see, and haven't heard anything different since.
Does the Apple III use 64K RAM chips? Yes, the Apple III can use 64K RAM chips. There's a plug-in RAM card; there will be a card available someday, probably with 256K of RAM. Easily, it's supported. Go ahead.
Bridge between Apple DOS and Pascal? Yes. We've done a few things inside, not officially, not as a product, but the people that wanted to transfer files over—it happens all the time, especially assembly files from one environment to the other. The approach was generally to study both of the disk formats. As far as DOS 3.3 and Pascal, they used the same sectoring format, but the catalogs, the directories, are laid out differently. It was basically a matter of understanding both of those and then going through a sector at a time and following catalogs, picking out where the files were on the disk, and moving them over character to character. The programs have been written in Pascal; they've been written in BASIC calling RWTs. Pascal just calls read unit or write unit. So that was the technique: just looking at how all the directories are set up and doing it raw from a very low level.
Not enough money for an Apple computer? In that case, a KIM, a SYM, or a AIM. These are all 6502-based machines, and a lot of people move up from that to an Apple someday. It's a good place, especially if you consider that you might move into an Apple II or an Apple III at a future date. It's a really good machine to start with. It's quite expandable; people have come up with amazing expansions from video to lots of—I forget how many K of RAM, but it's a good machine. The concept is it doesn't come in a case like this; it comes on a PC board, and it's much simpler, very low cost. The companies that make those are Synertek, Rockwell, and MOS Technology. Anything that ends in 'M'—that's the one. They're all so similar.
As someone who both produces software and, I presume, consumes software, could you comment on a recent trend of software producers to protect their software by making it uncomfortable? Okay, as a software producer and a software consumer, got a comment on the problem that software producers have of protecting their software. Yeah, I purchase all my software, every bit of it, and I try to get all the good stuff. Anything good that's out, I try to get; it's almost like a collection. I also have developed some sophisticated copy programs that will copy them for free that I don't use, so I'm kind of on a two-sided approach. Most of the protection techniques get bothersome after a while; you just hate the crap. One of the problems with protected software is you can't take the program and adapt it over to DOS 3.3 or put it on a Corvus; it makes life difficult. So what that calls for is like a VisiCalc liberator—not to steal it, but to make it usable. Some of the techniques that have been used have ranged from studying the diskette format, looking at the marks, changing the marks around, going to different checksum schemes, different checksum schemes only on certain tracks, leaving out a track or two, using track 36—not quite reliable, they stopped doing that one. There have been so many schemes, and almost all of them using the odd tracks is probably the best. It turns out there's some way if you go and modify those to get in between tracks on a half-track basis; that's probably been the stickiest to get around. There are programs called nibble copies—I don't know how many there are around the country at the moment—but originally I was really happy because I thought I had the only one. Basically, it just skims off a track nibble-wise by going out and reading directly off the controller, very simple program, figuring out where a gap is, and then writing from that gap a track on another drive. That's been the best of all; it copies everything, you never have to crack a scheme, but you only wind up with a copy, not a usable copy. I wish that they weren't necessary. I hope we get to the point that it just isn't necessary to protect software, but in some cases it is. We have a couple of general approaches that we use around Apple. I think we have an in-house and an outhouse one. No further comment. You're really interested, John Arkley could confirm you as to what our general approach is. We protect—like we just came out with the FORTRAN system, and we did protect it, which is kind of unfortunate. I really like to just pick up a piece of software and it runs under a standard operating system and pull it over, whatever. So until then, it gives a lot of people, a lot of younger people especially, some of the specific clubs, have a lot of fun cracking the disk formats. I'm sure that Cliff Howard is from out east here somewhere; he does a lot of that. Until then, it's really a sticky question. I've got mixed emotions about it myself and no real advice. It's just that there are a lot of techniques that have been developed, and you can usually find someone else that's done one. Most of them are 95% successful from the people that would have—nobody really—most of the techniques are pretty decent; people just don't spend the time trying to do it. There's very few people that really can read the nibbles off and look at the formats and figure out how you protected it. So I think it's working out pretty well as it is. Almost all the good software nowadays, though, is copy-protected, which is unfortunate, and they've got a point.
I don't really—a lot of people run around Apple and they get really excited whenever somebody's discounting it. There isn't really much we can do about it. The excitement is more or less—it creates a problem for legitimate dealers who are giving very good service, so the dealers are more worried about it than anyone else. I don't really get concerned at all; it's just not one of my interests.
Are you implying that the mail-order are not legitimate? No, actually, no, I was poorly phrased. I meant the guy who's got a storefront day in, day out is dealing with customers on a one-to-one basis. He brings them in, he spends an hour going over their needs, gives them demos, shows them what the computer can do, assures them that it will solve the problem that they want to solve before they buy it. A lot of special attention, which keeps people from making mistakes. Aside from that, a mail order—if I was ordering one, I might order it from a mail house if it was the better price. So really don't know what to say. I just—you just buy it from a mail-order house and hope it doesn't break. No, my brother's going to kill me, strangle me. Go ahead.
The software aspect—okay, the Apple software development, how did the Apple software philosophy develop? Okay, I'm going to try to do the best I can. This is really difficult because the major computer manufacturers really haven't done a heck of a job as far as application software. None of them really quite made it. It's still the individual, pioneering type of sphere—people like Bill Budge and Bob Bishop. Plenty of room for creative people in the software world, and the companies haven't really done that well. We started out with our only software was some simple system software. We had the monitor that comes in the Apple II, and we had Integer BASIC on cassette tape and on ROM. On cassette tape, we had Breakout and Star Trek, as I recall. That was the extent of the software. We hired one—I was up to that point in time I'd written virtually all the software there was for the Apple II, all the demos, everything myself. So we hired one applications software person, Dana Reddington. He interfaced with the outside world and got to know a lot of the people that later on became very active in some of the clubs, helped them out with their problems, learned how to program everything from graphics to whatnot.
And we still didn't have it. It wasn't like an application software department, so to write a good program takes several man-months and there's only so much one person can do. So we didn't have six tapes a month becoming available. It's really difficult to trace the evolution. We got interested in doing some application software. We wound up buying a lot of our offerings on the outside, like the controller, going out and arranging for it to be written, and some of the games, Apple Rider, etc. Most of it just somebody else had done, brought up to show us, and we decided we needed that to fill out our catalog more than anything else and purchased it. Right now we have more people working on software than on hardware, but the large majority of them are working on system software for existing and new machines, anything from the raw assembly language driver programs to certain higher-level editors and whatnot for the Apple II and other machines. We have an application software group that's working on like unified tools at the moment that might be applied eventually to database and other business-type programs, but nothing extremely... it's not like that's our main business. We had a lot of problems getting software out, making it available, and we came up with the idea of the software catalog, which is going to be marketed through International Apple Core, through the Orchard, whatever. And that catalog is going to be for user-contributed software where the user documents it and we make it available, but we give limited support on it. We just try to make sure that the documentation is as adequate as can be, and it'll be low-cost software as opposed to our major packages that we put a big investment into, you know, the Apple Riders and Fortran and whatnot. I wish our Vice President of Software were here because he has a lot of other concepts. He was very much in the compiler-writing world and has a lot of good ideas, but they go into another product line somewhere else downstream, and I'll leave that to him someday.
H
Host43:46
Yes, what are you personally working with Apple right now?
S
Steve Wozniak43:49
What am I personally working with? I get asked that a lot. I'm not working on any really major products like a major mainframe right now. I'm kind of standing around. We're developing concepts of what the Apple IV might be. I've got to have a really comfortable feeling that it's really good before I want to get involved with it. Although I'm just basically a normal engineer-programmer type, I'll do anything. I'll write a driver PROM, I'll write an Applesoft program, I'll write some disk routines, whatnot. I look around for various projects. I don't like winding up getting in a project and going through all of the formal stages of developing the project as a project and what it is and defining it and whatnot. I usually look around for something that there's a need for that I just happen to be the right person to do because of my background, usually having to do with the disk or something like that, some new fast disk routines for example, and then get that into an existing product somewhere in the lab by working with an existing project group. My title is going to be officially Fellow. Rod Holt and I have been elected the first Apple Fellows, and so the charter is kind of wide open. And I'll work on anything from new problems in some cards. Sometimes I get frustrated and get something done that's good or get it to a certain stage and drop it at that point because it's just too far off to put it through the entire product cycle. Sometimes it's good enough that it does get in. I found that the best way to get something out quick at Apple is to find a product that's just about to be released and do a good enhancement for it, and you'll see you'll get some positive feedback very quickly. We're undergoing major reorganization right now to solve some of the constipation of products having approvals at the group level and the lab manager level and the software vice president level and the product marketing level and the marketing level, and we're trying to condense that down to like one person per project. Our president is undergoing quite a bit of reorganization. He's running around like mad, having a great time. Apple's still the best place there is to work. So I don't know, it's difficult to describe. It's just like right now one of the projects I'm working on is... it's not a defined project, it may never come out, but it's a 13/16 combination boot prompt, and I'm accepting bets from the people that don't think I can do it. I try to keep up. I spend a lot of time trying to keep up on what the newest products are. I collect virtually all significant hardware and major pieces of software for the Apple and try to use them and be familiar with them as much as time allows me to, and keep a good touch especially with the Apple II community. That's pretty much the description of it right now. I don't work 12 hours a day, you know, except maybe once a year, one project a year.
H
Host46:37
The student and I are working together to take the interpreter, the Applesoft interpreter, and convert that code into compiled form. So we're trying to create an Applesoft compiler. As you can imagine, it's a major project. And I've heard rumors from time to time of BASIC compilers that were in development here or there, one in Japan, one possibly made by a fellow from Australia, but I haven't heard anything that I could really get into about anybody doing this because you know better than anybody that I can imagine if any of these rumors aren't true.
S
Steve Wozniak47:20
Okay, the question is BASIC compilers. Yeah, the guy in Australia is strictly interpretive. There was one for Applesoft, I saw it, I can't remember where it was. We didn't go with it. The performance improvement wasn't that great, but it did take an Applesoft program and generate a compiled version for it. There's also a Z-Soft card available now that you can run CP/M on a Z80, and they are promising a compiled BASIC for their Graphics BASIC in a very short period of time. They don't quite have the Apple version of their BASIC compiler yet, and it compiles Z80 code, which will run on the Z-Soft card if you've got that. Other than that, I've heard nothing on BASIC compilers. It wasn't so good. It was only about twice as fast as normal Applesoft, and the code was about six times as long. But I'm trying to remember, I can't remember where I encountered that. We weren't really interested in it, but you might check all your magazines and see if anyone's heard mention of it. From Australia? No, no, the Australian one was a very sophisticated learning tool, strictly interpreted. It was fast. The guy used the AMD 9511 or whatever is the arithmetic processor board. That'll give you about a two-fold improvement in speed, especially if you're floating-point based. He had that, but his was the idea that you can watch all of your FOR loops on the screen. It'll show them each, the levels as they run, and it was just a very... you can see everything's going on, but it was very heavily interpretive because of that.
H
Host48:53
Yes, question.
A
Audience Member48:58
Any data on Apple's plans in the direction of COBOL and Ada? That's the new favorite of the military.
S
Steve Wozniak49:07
I don't know. I haven't heard any interest around Apple in Ada, really. COBOL, I don't believe we have anything in the works for COBOL, although Microsoft claims that one's available for the Z80 card, you know, so it's probably available on the Apple version soon. Aside from that, no strong interest that I'm aware of. Probably on the Apple III, COBOL, look for that, yeah.
A
Audience Member49:30
You have the Apple Foundation, I know it's a separate answer, but I wonder if you could make some comments with reference to their philosophy. Are they really interested in... I got some impression that they're interested just in finely focused programs, not a large area. Let's say I wanted to deal with autistic children and I wanted to start developing some programs, I didn't get the feeling that I would get...
S
Steve Wozniak50:04
Okay, the Apple Educational Foundation was set up by Apple to basically make grants of cash and computer equipment to various people writing, applying small computers in education. So far, all the grants have gone to a specific program, a specific job, not to an area like of research. The philosophy is that there's a board of directors that sets guidelines as to how the grants will be dispersed, and then there is a council which actually makes the final determination, that is not the board, as to who will get them. And so I really don't know how you're gonna influence, you know, that. Call the board members or something, I don't know. Just make it sound very... you know, write one program to start with and you might be able to get a grant. But I didn't know that there was any rule against saying we want to work on autistic... But the whole idea was that we had an idea to do an independent living center and use the Apple II as a technique for simulating a home, a group home, and doing other kinds of simulations, and also providing support for teaching vocational training in giving areas, and even having them use that as far as a tool for vocational work field, for actual support. And my fellow was with me, Dr. Jim Buffer from Ohio State, got the impression that they really weren't interested in that kind of program. It sounds foreign to me. I haven't really worked with them on how, so I haven't really seen how they make their decision on grants firsthand. Okay, well the only way to get a grant is to apply for one. Let me know if you find out whether the Education Foundation is broadly or narrowly focused and doesn't want to be broad. I'd like to hear.
A
Audience Member52:17
In the Apple II, is there any reason why the 6502A chip is not used in the Apple II?
S
Steve Wozniak52:22
Yeah, the Apple II was designed four years ago and it was not available. And so much of the Apple II timing is fixed, it's concrete. There's a lot of software out that requires the clock to be at a certain rate. Everything, the way the video interacts with the processor addressing, everything is worked out. The system is very well integrated and tight on its timing, so we don't need a 2-megahertz processor. If we had one, probably couldn't take advantage of it because other system timing components, how fast the I/O, the peripheral cards will address, for example, would... you know, you can't take a 1-megahertz car designed for 1-megahertz operation and expect it to work at 2. So it's not like we can just simply upgrade. We did use the 2-megahertz processor in the Apple III, and basically it shares time space with the video DMA and probably averages about 1.5x throughput instead of 2.0. But it also still has a mode you can turn it into a strict 1-megahertz every cycle type mode for compatibility with the Apple II.
A
Audience Member53:28
Question. Michigan Applegram comments that DOS 3.3 diskette routines are slower than DOS 3.2.
S
Steve Wozniak53:44
They are so similar that there should be no real reason for that. And if they're different a little bit because of interleave, it should be very small. I would say look for some utilities on DOS 3.3 that are incredibly fast, including among others Alan Hill's Amp Read when it's available. But there's no basic reason that it should be slower. There was a 10% difference or whatever, it might be due to just missing interleave.
A
Audience Member54:19
Okay, Hayden Book Company creates the Sargon II chess game, boots on 13 or 16 sector diskettes.
S
Steve Wozniak54:24
Okay, this has been a big controversy since I was the one to develop the 16-sector environment and the 13, come to think of it. But what I did was, Apple's strategy on that is that we've got a 13-sector environment, we're going to convert everything over to a 16-sector environment. That's real good, but the thinking was so pure and so well-planned that they didn't think about the transition phase and that it's difficult. And the best approach to that that I came up with, which I've used on all my disks for about a year and a half now since we've had both environments, is a thing I call Update 16, which I freely hand out all over the place. And it just takes a 13-sector disk and you run it through and it comes out and it'll boot on either system, but it's still a 13-sector diskette. And that's just a real nice solution. Okay, the Hayden disk will boot on either? Right, well that's what will happen if you run this Update 16. It'll boot on either when you're done. Also, Bill Budge's games, he uses my Update 16. I don't know what Hayden uses, they've heard they developed their own. But the trick is, for example, let's say you've got a 13-sector disk. The boot program goes out to track zero, sector zero, and begins a boot sequence there. All you have to do is fake in, inside of a 13-sector sector somewhere, take in a 16-sector sector zero. It's smaller, so it fits. And the 16-sector boot program will find that one, which can then simulate a 13-sector boot program to pull the rest of it in. So it's a relatively small amount of code, a simple trick. And generally the disky people in the clubs that are really into the disk formats have the ability to do that, as well as a few people around Apple. And I wish it were more widely... I wanted it to go out in the DOS 3.3 package, but it never quite got marketing enthusiasm, and I think it was a great solution.
A
Audience Member56:04
Yes, what would you personally hope to see in the way of an Apple personal computer product, say three years down the road?
S
Steve Wozniak56:11
What I personally like to see in the way of an Apple personal computing product about three years down the road... three years, how about today? Three years down the road, I would say something kind of along the lines of the Apple II, only extended, smaller, lighter weight, less logic internally, less heat, ultimately a portable. Portable, completely portable Apple II. Something that you can not only develop software on in your dorm room, but you can carry to class and use like you do a calculator. Now you can't take your computer to class. You can write any number of programs for any subject, but you can't take it to class and use it. And I think I'd like to see that more than anything else. Either a liquid crystal display or something, something portable that's battery-operated. And that would be worth... and there's a certain threshold of function that it has to have, which is probably pretty similar to a 64K Apple II, minus, perhaps, color, depending... Okay, I guess I'm out of time. We're just... there's people in the back of the room, I think I've got a couple questions.
H
Host57:14
Okay, I'm going to try to hit some of the ones in the back of the room, starting on the right. Yeah, Steve, who can we scream at to get an update of the Pascal system disk that works?
S
Steve Wozniak57:29
Okay, yeah, the Pascal system is full of bugs and is untrustable right now. We have a second version of Pascal. It's in what we call our beta test phase now. We have a new manual that's been created. It's good. It was written at Apple rather than adapted from UCSD. Where can you get one? Your local computer store. Next question? When can you get one? I look for it every time. It's really nice. A lot of bugs were fixed. There were some enhancements to the system, such as the ability to link in other devices, faster disk routines, one-to-one interleave on reads and whatnot. It's really nice. It's a really much better system, and I just wish I knew the date. I just give up on schedules now. So it might be next week. Yeah, well, definitely within the next year. I mean, it's far beyond that stage. Even accounting for everything there, it could actually be a month. It could be a month, but I'd have to go and check to make sure that all the cellophane was ordered for the packages before I could really say with confidence.
H
Host58:40
Okay, in the back again, way in the back. Yeah, area or networking?
S
Steve Wozniak58:52
Okay, is Apple interested in doing some work in the multi-user or networking area? Networking, absolutely yes, on the Apple II and the Apple III. Possibly by a couple different techniques. One small technique might someday be applicable to like education use, and another fully general technique for communicating with other machines might be applicable to the Apple II and the Apple III, which we might even call AppleNet, and would interface to large disks and whatnot. As far as multi-user, we have not yet approached the question of multi-user on a single machine. The Apple III hardware is certainly capable of operating in that realm and would probably be adapted to it at a future point in time, but it would be a secondary operating system. We have no operating system right now that's really feasible to consider that, other than short little experiments like the Mountain Hardware Intro X10.
A
Audience Member59:45
Yes. Like DEC, for example, have one. After the mainframes, IBM and whoever, going to attack?
S
Steve Wozniak1:00:01
We don't attack anyone. We just kind of work and do the best job we can. Attack the marketplace of the larger companies such as DEC, who is leader, and we kind of consider ourselves the DEC of the microcomputer world. DEC and IBM, we're getting closer and closer to very similar products, and the only difference is going to be... yeah, we'll probably be head-on with them in the marketplace at some point in time. The only difference can be our products will be better. And we've got some starts in that direction now, but I can't say any more. Yes.
A
Audience Member1:00:36
DOS 3.2.1, are you aware of any bugs in using the EXEC routines, especially modifying programs, and if so, will that be fixed in 3.3?
S
Steve Wozniak1:00:45
DOS 3.2.1, am I familiar with any bugs in using EXEC routines, will it be modified in 3.3? No, I am not familiar. I haven't heard of dropouts of characters. I haven't had the problems myself. That doesn't mean they don't exist.
A
Audience Member1:01:03
Um, right here. The Atari machine uses the Atari graphics. I'm not extremely familiar with it. Their colors are good and they have object generators. They actually have a bunch of custom chips in there that are a pretty decent machine if they gave you the ability to get at them yourself and have fun, and they just don't publish the information on how to do that. Some of their approaches of having like a character generator chip are pretty intriguing, especially for animated games and whatnot. As to how necessary it is for typical use, don't know. No real comment. Atari machine, we just don't pay that much attention to it.
H
Host1:01:43
In the back, one more question. Three quick ones.
A
Audience Member1:01:49
Number one, how much work did you do on the Apple III yourself? And number two, for example, you got anything that works on a Teleport lowercase? And number three, there's a rumor out that, well, of course the Apple II is supported by outside peripheral manufacturers, but that Apple is trying to reign in on the Apple III and not let outside get in on the Apple III.
S
Steve Wozniak1:02:17
Okay, three big questions. How much did I do personally on the Apple III? I was spending a lot of time on disk routines and whatnot at the time and enhanced versions, and decided that to break away and try to play a major role on a big project like the Apple III when there are plenty of people around that had learned the Apple II... and Wendell Sanders was the designer of the Apple III and he ran the entire project. He made the enhancements, he cut the chips down by going to NMOS techniques, he added the features, and I stayed virtually totally out of it as far as decision-wise because it was a matter of trusting him and having a lot of other things that I was not only interested in doing but virtually the only person around that could do. 80-column cards, there are a number of 80-column cards out now, they're becoming popular. It looks like there's going to be a big Apple II 80-column market and a lot of software is coming out compatible with several of these cards. More or less the best hardware design so far actually began inside of Apple with a programmer named Chuck Morrow who went out and did his first hardware project and designed this beautiful, clean, simple... he did everything right, using the best chips, you know, studying himself, and it was the first hardware design he'd ever done and it came out immaculate, which kind of says something. It was a gorgeous product. Apple was not interested in pushing the Apple II as an 80-column product because we had the Apple III and it was more or less a 40/80-column division. So he got a release and went out and promptly got a few offers for his card from companies in the area or a lot of interest from companies like Mountain Hardware. And then Apple reevaluated their policy on their ideas on how long the Apple II lifetime would be, etc., etc., decided we needed an 80-column card of our own to market, and reapproached him and had to buy it from him. I think, considering how it happened, it's kind of neat and I think it's great. So he's in business. He has his own company called ALS, Automated Logic Systems. He delivered the first 700 or something cards to Apple, who is non-exclusively marketing it. It should be available pretty soon and it's the best of the lot, hardware-wise. His firmware is... he did a lot of the things that the M.R. Superterm did, a lot more than the Videx did as far as compensating for anomalies in our BASICs. The Chuck Morrow card did these same things, but the firmware is just a hair below the M.R. Superterm at this moment. The Superterm consumes a lot more power. The Morrow card doesn't quite do type-ahead and Pascal, which I think I would have rather had than the graphics commands which it does support. But I think version two of the firmware when it's available will really make that card sweet. But it's my favorite now and I got the first four. So... Apple III, Apple II support from outside vendors, we like to work with the outside vendors. We like to think that they help us sell computers and we like to keep as good a relationship as we can with all of them. In the Apple III, I'm not that close to the Apple III strategies as far as peripheral card interfacing. And the Apple II cards will run in an Apple III, but they won't be FCC approved. The Apple III had specific designs which I can't imagine how you would stop someone from interfacing to the Apple III. It's basically the same bus as the Apple II, it's the same connector and virtually no differences. So I don't think there is a great deal of support that they need from us. Information on how to write drivers will be made available. So I would say that, yes, cooperative as we can be. It may be that you heard a rumor based on we didn't give out a schematic or something. Okay, I'm finished and I'm going to try to get out back and talk to people before I have to catch my plane back. If you're interested, so thank you.
H
Host1:06:30
Alan. Alan, would you come up now? Alan Hill has a presentation he'd like to make to Steve. And if you don't know him, this is Alan Hill, the Ampersand Man.
A
Alan Hill1:06:51
I'd like to give this to the guy who started something in his garage that came out in the stores and then put us back down in the basement. My wife had to join in doing this in cross-stitch, and she doesn't program, but she decided to get in there too, so she did a... oh, he can see, there may be a reflection. Thanks a lot.
S
Steve Wozniak1:07:17
Yeah, thank you very much, Alan. Thanks. This is really touching because everywhere I travel to the clubs, people come up and say thank you, thank you for designing that, thank you for this, I have so much fun from it, and that's what really pleases me the most. So I really appreciate this and I will hang it in my office at home proudly and thank you again, all of you.
H
Host1:07:50
Steve does have to catch a plane and he'll be leaving around three or so. Unfortunately, he can't stay this evening. I'd certainly like to thank him on behalf of the club for being here. As you can see, we're behind a little bit, but I think we'll probably catch up a little bit later. We might run over a little bit, but I did not want to cut Steve off. I wanted to give him the full time, and I'm sure nobody objected to that. We'd like to continue on with our presentation. The next presentation... Tom travels quite a bit. Tom worked for Tektronix for many, many years and then formed his own company, has taken an active part in Apple computer software for his own company, but more so, Tom's been active in trying to get people together to do things in the sharing of information. Last year Tom gave a paper, his theme was more or less standardization of some of the software, particularly in the disk operating routines. It was an enjoyable presentation. Tom has a master's in common sense and a PhD in getting his point across, and I think it's going to be a very enjoyable presentation. So ladies and gentlemen, our next speaker, the title of Tom's paper is most appropriately 'Apple Dumplings,' and ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce to you Mr. Tom Skogen. Tom.
T
Tom Skogen1:09:42
Can you see me over the podium out there? All right, I am standing up. I'd like to start off this talk by saying that I appear here through courtesy of my company, Subsystems in Atlanta, but that any speculation or facts or rumors that I might mention does not necessarily reflect the official position of my company. I'd like to explain where the title for this talk came from, 'Apple Dumplings.' About a month and a half ago we had an article appear in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned that Apple stock was now ripe. And if they could, in the Wall Street Journal, use puns with the apple, as most other people have, I also chose to. This is going to refer to a dump of data, small pieces of individual, not necessarily related data. First of all, as I mentioned, Subsystems is my company. We're an OEM manufacturer out of Atlanta. We've designed several peripherals for the Apple. The primary one that we'll be putting on the public market shortly is the serial card. And Lord knows, some of you may think, what the world needs now is another serial card. This one is a little bit different. It was designed for uses that we would have and needs that we had, such as... some printers that you all may own may also have these needs, such as it has quite a bit of handshaking. It has three lines coming in, three lines going out to handshake. Some printers require more handshaking than others. Some other devices require more than others. This card could replace most, if not all, the serial cards on the marketplace now. In some cases, it would be the only card that could be used. It was designed last year and has been used in our dedicated system now. Since then, this user software should be available later this month. Some of the features of it are that it has totally software-controlled baud rates. The baud rate can change from 50 to 19,200 just by changing your routine, and this allows you to tell it to be a printer card one minute and be a modem card the next minute, and it can be just whatever you'd like it to be, dealing with RS-232. The handshaking, of course, as I said, is also under software control. It has ROM and RAM on board, and it can be switched to either one. This is an example of the card here. Now, I don't feel I really need to demonstrate a card. I'm sure most of you have seen a printer working, so it's not really necessary on that. I'll just tell you about the features very quickly. The ROM is powered down when you are not using the ROM and powered up only during access. The RAM is powered down while you are using the ROM. You can order your card with either of several soon-to-be-available ROMs. The ROMs will come in type designations such as the communications ROM, the standard printer ROM, the Heathkit printer, and for those of you who have Heathkit printers, you know what control characters will do for you to send several out. So this again will help you work with the Heathkit printer. The price on the board is $130. The ROMs will be $20 each and will be available shortly. We will also have a service for you to send in your own special routine and have it put into a ROM. We'll burn it for you. You can also... the price, I might mention, the cable is $18. You can save $18 by wiring your own if you prefer. The software that will come with this will allow you to write your own routine if you wish. And I know what you're thinking when you hear 'allow you'—that's like me saying I will allow you to buy the card. That's not it. This is going to be an interactive BASIC program, and it'll help you write the program that you need for your particular printer by asking you a few things such as: what baud rate do you think you'd like to run at? What will be your parity, odd, even, whatever? Which handshake lines do you think will be used, based on what your printer documentation said, and in some cases what it didn't say? Do you need delays after the carriage return? Do you need a line feed added after a carriage return? After you write this routine based on what you and the Apple have discussed, it'll probably be right. It'll help you test it, and if there's any problems, you'll have you and the card on your side, and y'all will work against the possible printer of unknown heritage. Another unit that we'll have available shortly is the BCD-to-serial translator, and this is used for instrumentation where you have an instrument that has several digits, such as four or five digits, that need to be sent to a remote location with the Apple. An example of this would be a scale device that may have four digits BCD coming out of it, requiring 16 lines to send it to the Apple. And this is fine if it's within a few feet of the Apple, but if the main processor should be in a remote location, you really need another device, and the BCD-to-serial translator is one of those devices that will take these 16 lines and convert them into RS-232, any baud rate, any parity, and send it down to your Apple. Approximate distance is less than a mile. So at any rate, the three wires you need to send this will be much less than the 16 for the BCD. The only other thing that I should mention on this card is that the UART used, this is the device that actually changes it from the parallel that the Apple puts out to the serial-type transmission, the UART on this one is a 6551. It's a relatively new UART. Forethought in this case allowed us to choose this. Forethought also provided us with a problem with our distributors in getting the quantity we needed, but it's becoming more available now and we soon will have sufficient quantities for shipment. The 6551 is the UART designed for the 6502 family, which is the processor that the Apple has, not older technology like the 6800. Okay, next bit of information is that I have a few rumors, I guess would be the word, to pass along. One of the things that is not a rumor, it's a fact: the Apple II will be going on the Space Shuttle. And I think most of you have read that, that Apple released that, that's the only personal computer going. That's right, my question was, is it an Apple II or an Apple II Plus? I own an Apple II, so being a little bit mathematically inclined, I asked about it, and the only information I could really dig up was that the lifetime was approximately five and a half years. Now, most space projects use the number of orbits as a unit of time. Well, the low orbit that the Space Shuttle will be in will be about 90 minutes. If the project termination is about five and a half years and the revolution time around the Earth is 90 minutes, that comes out to be just short of 32,767 revolutions. I heard that the PET was going at first, but there's always the possibility with any space project that it can get away from them, and all spacecraft share this possibility. It's possible that it could break away from orbit when they first blast it up. It's also possible that it might escape our solar system. Possible that it might yet reach another galaxy and possibly encounter an alien life form. If they're sufficiently advanced, when they see this thing coming at them, they may interpret it as a gift. If they open it and say 'PET'... well, NASA knew that. They knew that if you care enough to give the very best. The other rumor comes a little bit from Apple. Now, don't call them on this, they'll call you. The rumor of the Apple IV. Some may actually think that the Apple III is a rumor, but that's not so, it will be out very shortly. The Apple IV, so I've heard, is a dedicated processor for those of you who can't quite turn off your Apple II, becoming a lawn waterer or thermostat control or some other dedicated use in your house. This will be a small microprocessor, 6502-based, 4K expandable to 12K, possibly add a keyboard and power supply, and looks remarkably like an Apple I with a little vivacity. I don't know on that, don't call them, they'll call you. I'll skip ahead with another rumor, skip past version 79 all the way up to the Apple X. Now, Apple's, so I've heard, was dealing with a robotics company out of New York and a company in Southern California that makes life-sized dolls. And you know the code name for the Apple III was Sarah. Supposedly now the code name for this is Bo Derek. I've heard Interlude's doing the software. Next rumor: Radio Shack is selling apples. Now, that's right. Page 194 of the 1980 catalog. Prices vary, different areas, it's $10.88 in my area. An apple, as you might know, Bill and Howell is also selling apples, and theirs are black. The Xerox apple, as I understand, is blue. The Radio Shack apple is gold. I know you may not be carrying the Radio Shack catalog, so I'll tell you: the apple they have is a small apple. It has a volume control on the top and a tuning knob on the side. Requires a 9-volt battery, but it's symbolic. It's symbolic, it's coming. Rumor has it that Dennis Hayes was being watched closely here lately because of his remarkable advancements with the telephone systems interfacing with computers. Watched closely by Southern Bell there in Atlanta. Southern Bell is a little paranoid at times. In fact, it's been a few months, but they thought they had very stiff Mexican competition coming into Atlanta when they first saw the Taco Bells opening up there. I called the Apple Hotline one time to get some information, and they asked me what it was about, and I said, 'How about the scoop on the RWTS?' And they said, 'Could you spell that?' Okay, I back off of that. They've done a wonderful job out there with some really left-field questions from me and some others, but yeah, they've done very good. Here's some information that might not have been available through them, and this might be the point where you might want to use a pen on a little bit of this. On page 53 of the Applesoft manual, it mentions that in Applesoft when you set one string equal to another string, that you might not use as much memory as you thought because they will be pointed to by the string pointers to the same location in memory. Well, this is true only under some very exacting circumstances. The circumstance is this: only when in the middle of your program you tightly define a string, such as A$ = 'HI' for high or something, only then will the string pointer not be down at the end of memory where the normal string ASCII is held. Only then will it point right in the middle of the program, right at that very line, right at the very hex address that this particular ASCII is located on, 'HI' in your program. That's where the string pointer for A$ in this case is pointing to. Later on, if you say W$ = A$, W$ also will point to this hard location. Only under those circumstances. All others, where you say INPUT A$ and you say 'HI' on the keyboard, then you say W$ = A$, in memory it will be strung out in two different places. So that's just a... in case you're finagling in machine level behind Applesoft's back, you should be aware of that. The next thing that came up in Atlanta, and this was discovered by Carrie Clark in Atlanta, passed along to me to bring up here: if you start a particular file or executing, if you have a particular file on the disk, it's a persistent thing. You can hit RESET and when you come back up in BASIC, it's still going to continue executing that particular file right where it left off. Persistence. And if per chance you need to stop it or want to stop it or have the program under certain conditions stop, it can be a real pain because apparently there was no way to stop it. Now there are two ways. One is elegant, very elegant. The other one is machine level. So the simple, elegant way, if you wish to choose to stop a program, is... I'll give you a hypothetical case where you have a store demo program that's running a bunch of BASIC programs over and over and over under an EXEC file, and the EXEC file is feeding it all the inputs it needs and then running the next program. Now at some point you may wish to regain control of the Apple. In this case, we're going to regain control by someone pressing the Escape key. All we need do is, at different points in the programs, or for that matter in the main program that rotates through the other BASIC programs, is from time to time check and see if the keyboard is, excuse me, equal to 155, I believe it is, for Escape. If it is, then we want to stop the EXEC file. So we say: IF KEYBOARD = 155 THEN PRINT CHR$(4) 'CLOSE'. And that's all. That closes the EXEC file, as you would think it would, but that's not documented yet. And in machine level, should you need to stop it at any place, that would be at $AAB3 for a 48K machine. That address normally has $00 in it, and when the DOS or the EXEC file is running, it has $C6. So if you set that back to $00, it'll stop the EXEC file. Another very interesting trick, I guess this would be called: suppose I told you you could have a way to make a program unlistable. That is, that it would not list, it would run just fine, but it would not list. Suppose I told you it could be Applesoft or Integer. Suppose I told you it could even be some of the assembler programs. Well, the way this comes about is that you enter this line, as I say, first line of the program: REM, then you put in a null character, X or A, A would be a good one. I happen to know them off the top of my head. So let's say REM A, Control-D, and then your command, in this case INT, and then another A. Now you need to get back in BASIC and go into it, or get back in machine level rather, and go into it and make two changes. Now, as I understand, PLAS can do this also. Change those two A's to carriage returns, or hex characters $8D. And what this will do, this will give you a line that has REM, carriage return, Control-D, then a command INT, and a carriage return. When you run the program, REM statements aren't accessed by either BASIC, it's ignored. But when you list it, it comes out. The print routines go to the DOS and say, 'DOS, you see anything you like?' DOS sees a carriage return and Control-D, it says, 'I'll execute.' When it hits that INT or FP, if you choose, it will immediately clear the program. There'll be no program left. You can also have it run another program if you choose, or delete the program, and or initiate the desk top. And the program will run fine, never ever accessing that particular line, but anyone listing it will get your line number and a REM on screen. And that's about it. Have any questions on this? Okay, wow.