on it running in its own addresses, and it didn’t have to have all the
normal chips to decide, “Well, if the addresses are such and such, I will respond
to them.” That was done on the main board. In the Altair world, each board you
had to dial in the address that it would look at, and that took a couple of thumbwheel
switches to dial the address on (they cost money), and a bunch of chips
that would compare the address coming from the microprocessor to the one
that they were good...

We got the computer finished up enough. We don’t have much to add on
besides a printer and a telecommunications of some sort. So Steve was arguing
for two slots. And the trouble is, two slots wouldn’t save me a single chip. And I
wanted to show off that I had eight slots and so few chips. If I only had two
slots, I would have had parts of chips unused. I was really dead set to hold my
chip count, so I said, “If you want two slots, get another computer.” That was
...

emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in and out of an emulation
mode. It had all these kinds of things and not one bug ever found. Not one bug
in the hardware, not one bug in the software. And you just can’t find a product
like that nowadays. But, you see, I had it so intense in my head, and the reason
for that was largely because it was part of me. Everything in there had to be so
important to me. This computer was me. And everything had to be as...

changed so many things around and put in little features that would just take
forever to do in hardware. Little words pop up on the screen when things happen.
I called Steve over and I was just shaking, I was quivering, and I showed
him the game running, and I said, “This game was so easy to write! Look at this,
go ahead—change the color of the bricks.” This would have taken me a lifetime
to do in hardware and I did it in half an hour.
And that was true. It would have...

anyone could look at this and say, “Now I know how I would do my own.” They
could type in the programs on their own Apple II and then see “that’s how that
works” instantly, and know how to write their own programs. Running cards
was the most important thing. All these companies started up making cards that
you could plug into your Apple II and write a little software (mostly games at
first) on cassette tapes. You’d go to the store and they’d just have all this stuff
that you could buy to...