designed new things....
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 I hadn’t heard of it and I hadn’t been a part of it. I
felt very weird—that was the direction in life that I was going to be a part of
Steve Wozniak 33
when it happened. Well, I analyzed what a microprocessor was in one night,
and discovered it was just like the minicomputers I used to design back in high
school that were so good.
Then I looked at the Altair computer that started the whole thing going. It
was the first microcomputer, but it wasn’t really a computer. To me, I needed
one thing. In high school, I told my dad that I was going to have a 4K Data
General Nova. Why 4K? 4K bytes of memory. The reason is that’s the minimum
computer to run a programming language. You’ve got to be able to program in
Fortran or Basic, or some language to get your programs done. The Altair that
was being sold at a ridiculously low price, all it was was a glorified microprocessor
from Intel, with some chips to protect the voltages. All they did was bring it
out and say, “You can now plug in all the things that a microprocessor is
designed to have added to it.” You can add RAM, you can add cards that know
how to talk to teletypes, you can add a big cable over to a teletype, you can buy
a teletype for thousands of dollars. By the time you added enough RAM and
everything else to have a computer that would really run a programming language,
you’re talking so many thousands of dollars, it was still out of the price
range of anyone. It would be like $5,000, and, I’m sorry, but we were all lowlevel,
just barely-getting-along-type people that had this interest in having our
own computers.
Secondly, 5 years before that, in 1970, I had built a computer of my own
design that was exactly what an Altair was—only I didn’t have a microprocessor;
I had to build it out of chips. So I built a little processor and it was only on one
small—almost 3-by-5—card, very tiny. It had switches, it had lights, it looked
like an airplane cockpit, just like the Altair. It had just as much memory as the
| ← I couldn’t really | Altair (256 bytes → |