size. And it’s funny, but every computer since the Apple I, including the
Polymorphics technology Sol computer that came next (it was out of our club),
had a keyboard and a video display. No computer had done this before that. No
small computer was coming with a keyboard yet. The Apple I was the first and
the Apple II was the third. Basically every computer since then had a keyboard
and a video display. The world has never gone back from that day. Now the
Apple II was the great design. I designed it very efficiently with very few
parts—amazing design. We added color. How could you ever have color and
still cut the chips in half? It was half the chips of an Apple I. It had color, and it
was just a clever idea that popped in my head one late night at Atari.
When you get very, very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long;
Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it
thinks of ideas that you’d normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of
taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at
the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I
could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of.
Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the
way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was
established in the television world? Would it work?