should do it cheap. We should just have black and white; we should have the
cheapest keyboard you can imagine, the smallest screen, and just keep the costs
way down.” They wanted to make it cheap enough to be affordable. The funny
thing is that the Apple II had so few parts, it was cheaper to build and still was
much more of a computer. We didn’t have to include a TV set, because we
assumed everyone had their own.
Livingston: Why didn’t Commodore want it?
Wozniak: Good question. Andre Sousan very soon after (within weeks) left
Commodore and came to Apple saying that he felt we had the right product
and he wanted to be with us. They just missed the boat. I think it was that
Chuck Peddle knew what he could design, but he knew that he couldn’t design
Steve Wozniak 43
what the Apple II was. They should have bought it. They would have had a real
good deal cheap. After that, we were still seeking money. I wasn’t really seeking
the money, Steve Jobs was. I mean, I almost couldn’t have cared less. If I could
show it off at the club and get credit for having a great computer design in my
life, that’s what I wanted. We went down to visit some Atari friends. We went to
Al Alcorn’s house, and he had a projection TV—the first time I ever saw a projection
TV in my life, really. And we put it on his projection TV and he looked at
it and he liked what we were doing. He was real interested. Atari would do this,
but they had a hot project coming out—the first home Pong game—and they
were going to have so many millions of those that every effort in their company
had to go that way. They didn’t have the ability to do two things at once. So they
turned us down, very friendly though.
Then we talked to some venture capitalists. Don Valentine came to the
garage and he looked it over and he didn’t seem too impressed. He would ask
questions like, “What’s the market?” And I’d say, “A million.” And he’d say,
“How do you know?” And I said, “Well, there’s a million ham radio operators,
and computers are more popular than ham radio.” Nobody in the world could
ever deny that. But it’s not the sort of analysis that they wanted. And there were
no analysts yet that were predicting that this was going to be a big marketplace
anyway.
So Don wasn’t that interested, but he gave us the name of Mike Markkula—
Mike being a person who was interested in technology, who was looking around
for things to do. So Steve went over and talked to him and Mike really thought
we had a great thing, that there was going to be a huge market for small computers

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