emulators of other...
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 perfect as
could be made. And I had a lot going against me because I didn’t have a computer
to compile my code, my software.
Steve Wozniak 49
Livingston: Did you have a hard time getting everyday people to say, “Yeah, I
want a computer in my office, my home”?
Wozniak: Almost everyone who saw it wanted one, but usually the idea was,
“What’s the cost?” A couple thousand bucks. “Well, I want one of those.” But
they weren’t jumping because it’s enough money—you have to plan and maybe
some months ahead downstream, you’ll be able to buy one.
But we never found one person who said, “I wouldn’t have any need for this
at all.” (We didn’t talk to elderly people.) But people not only in their offices,
but just at home, you play one game on it, and an awful lot of people—adults
and children—want a machine to play games. The Apple II really started the
whole gaming industry, because it was the first time a computer had been built
with sound, paddles, color, graphics—all the things for games. And it was really
so that I could implement Breakout in software.
Back a year before, when I had worked at Atari, they were starting to talk
about coming out with microprocessor games. Up till then it was all hardware.
In other words, you solder wire to the right sort of chips and put it through
some more chips and some other chips, and it determines where the score is on
the screen. It’s not like you type it in software and say “put the score at this location.”
No, it was all done with wires and gates and chips and registers, and it was
very difficult back then.
So now I had a machine that I could program a game in (or somebody
could), and I got this crazy idea to try to do Breakout in Basic. Basic is like a
hundred to a thousand times slower than machine language, so I don’t know if
it’s possible. I sat down one night and finally put in all the commands in the
Basic to draw color, and I started typing away in Basic and, within half an hour,
I not only had my Pong game working, but I had done about 50 or so variations
of colors and speeds and sizes and where the score was and all that stuff. I had
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