If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it
might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a
desktop computer was: the Apple II.
Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between
Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful
team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon
Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with
the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines,...

the side. When I came home from work, I kept doing electronics anyway.
I didn’t do the same calculators we were doing at work, but I got involved
through other people with the earliest home pinball games, hotel movies . . .
The first VCRs made for people were actually made by an American company—
not Betamax, it was before Betamax even—called Cartravision. It was
put in some Sears TVs. I got involved with that. I saw arcade games—the first
arcade game, Pong, that really made it big—so I designed one of those on...

I couldn’t really afford to buy the pieces I needed. I couldn’t buy a teletype,
so I had to design my own terminal. The only thing that was free (because I had
no money) was a home TV to see characters on. I got a keyboard for $60, which
was amazingly low-priced then. That was the most expensive thing to getting
my terminal built. Then it was just a matter of designing logic to put dots on a
TV screen that add up to the letters of the alphabet and spell out what’s coming
...

designed new things. Maybe they had jobs as technicians at work wiring stuff
up, analyzing it, spotting inputs that were the wrong voltage. They were that
kind of electronics person, but most of them weren’t designers.
Livingston: This is Homebrew right?
Wozniak: This is the Homebrew Computer Club. There were a lot of software
people that had no hardware background, and it took hardware to build these
first machines. I was embarrassed because the world had somehow jumped
ahead of me—they had come out with little cheap microcomputers based
around microprocessors and...

Altair (256 bytes was the starting amount of memory). I could toggle these
switches, punch some buttons, get ones and zeros into memory and run it as a
program, and I could verify it really was in there and running. So I had done
this 5 years before. Now I saw the Altair and I saw the microprocessors and I
knew that they weren’t enough. You needed something to run a whole computer
language. But it was close.
So I searched around. My thinking was always, in making something possible,
you’ve got to...