home? And that had to do with different types of photography, pictures, settings,
words to the press. He also wanted us to start getting to work on software
that would apply.
He basically wanted us to write a flash card program. So Randy Wigginton
and I did a flash card program called Color Math and it shipped with every
Apple. We also did one called Checkbook, which would let you reconcile your
checks on the computer. But here’s the problem: you had to first read the
Checkbook program in off of a tape, then twiddle your thumbs for a minute and
it goes “beep”; then you have to pull out another cassette tape of your own and
read your checks in and it goes “beep”; then you have to do the stuff on the
screen, enter some more checks and reconcile them; and then you have to put
that data cassette back in and record onto it and it goes “beep.” You have all
these waiting periods, and it was just too awkward and too slow. So Mike said
we needed two things: a floating point Basic (that’s a Basic with decimal points,
which I didn’t have) and a floppy disk.
Just before I left Hewlett-Packard, a new chip had come out. The chips in
those days were in 14-pin packages and 16-pin packages. This new one was like
an 18- or 20-pin package, a little longer than normal, but it had this beautiful
little 8-bit chip register, and 8 bits is a magic number—it’s a byte. And I had