The dynamic RAMs were going to be one-half to one-quarter the price. The
dynamic RAMs meant that instead of 32 chips to have enough memory for a
computer to have a language, you only needed 8 chips of RAMs. But dynamic
RAM needs all this circuitry to get into every single address in the RAM every
2000th of a second, read what was there and write it back, or it forgets it.
Dynamic RAM (this is what we have in our computers today) will forget every
single bit in a 2000th of a second...

1 instruction; 1 instruction of 16 bits—6 ones and zeros. A couple of those ones
and zeros told it which of four registers to put on one side of the arithmetic
unit. A couple more bits told it which other of the four registers to use. Another
couple of bits told it whether to shift or rotate the result after it finished, left or
right, which is equivalent to multiplying or dividing by 2. There were bits as to
whether you should set a carry (just like you learned addition in elementary
school, you...

payment on a good house. So, because I could never build one, all I could do
was design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was
competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s
because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up
with ideas that nobody else would come up with.
I knew that I had a lot of approaches in computers that basically no human
really would use. They couldn’t even be taught...

build a program that was immense. I didn’t know anything about computer languages
except—a friend of mine had gone to MIT and, while he was there, he
would Xerox pages out of books that were good topics, and he had sent me a lot
of pages back from compiler design books. So I had actually read some compiler
design books. I hadn’t taken a course, I hadn’t had a teacher, but I had
some ideas of some of the parts involved in parsing a computer language.
So when I got my computer built, the...

Steve Wozniak 37
formats. Then I came up with an idea—and I have no idea where it came
from—just a weird, weird idea that, as a user types in a statement, I will just
scan his statement, character by character, from left to right, and I’ll see where
it fits into the syntax table. I typed my whole syntax table into memory. I said,
“I’ll just follow along in memory and, if what he types fits the syntax table, then
whenever he hits return, I know all the elements he typed in.” I just...