That's what was on display Saturday at the
Computer History Museum here as several hundred longtime
Silicon Valley veterans and youngsters
alike showed up for a panel discussion called "Apple in the
Garage" celebrating Apple's 30th anniversary.
To be sure, that anniversary was really in April, but as
part of the ninth annual Vintage Computer Festival, Wozniak,
Apple employee No. 6 Randy
Wigginton, Apple employee No. 8 Chris Espinosa, and longtime
Apple employee and original Macintosh team member Daniel
Kottke got together
for an afternoon of storytelling about the earliest days of
Apple and its seminal computers.
Last year, festival organizers, including Bruce Damer,
founder of the DigiBarn computer museum in California's
Santa Cruz mountains,
celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer
Club. Wozniak appeared at the event as well, and to some,
Saturday's event was a
suitable bookend for a historical look back at the birth of
personal computing.
And on Saturday, many of those in attendance were happy just
to hear the four panelists tell stories about the creation
of the Apple I in 1976,
and its successor, the Apple II in 1977.
"We thought it would be a shame if we didn't have a birthday
party for Apple with a cake," Damer said at the beginning of
the discussion. And
indeed, he had brought along a birthday cake adorned with a
digital print of Apple's original logo.
But before anyone could eat the cake, the panelists took the
audience down a memory lane of poignant Apple history.
Espinosa, for example, recalled how he had begun working for
Apple while still in high school, and that he still counts
himself lucky--he still works
at Apple today--to have gotten to work alongside such
technology luminaries.
"It was really interesting being 14 and 15 years old and
having my hobby being hanging out with guys who were"
changing the face of technology,
Espinosa said. "I didn't really know that this wasn't the
way 14-year-olds spent their high school year."
Apple's roots
Kottke recalled how he had become friends with Steve
Jobs--who was not present at Saturday's event to the dismay
of some in
attendance--when both were college students at Reed College
in Portland, Ore. He said the two had bonded over Eastern
philosophies and that
Jobs had not talked about his computer work.
But upon being invited to Silicon Valley, Kottke said he
visited Jobs' house--the home of the famous garage where
Jobs and Wozniak started
Apple--and the first thing he found was Jobs' sister
watching "The Gong Show" on TV and plugging chips into Apple
Is.
Wozniak said that the early Apple team didn't have a
telephone, and that Jobs was essentially running the entire
business form his bedroom.
"It was a nice, warm place to meet people," Wozniak said of
the Jobs' garage.
Wigginton remembered that in those days, many of today's
computer industry luminaries hung out at the Homebrew
Computer Club because it
was a way to have access to working computers.
"Nobody could afford their own computer," Wigginton said.
"It's amazing to me that owning your own computer was
considered impossible."
For his part, Espinsoa joked about why he had gone to work
for Apple rather than for another computer company.
"Scott Computer was too far away to work because I only had
a bicycle," Espinosa said. "So Apple was much better for me
because it was much
closer."
He also said that when Apple began working on the Apple II,
the team got its own building, though it didn't have any
furniture beyond some
telephones.
"When you're in a building with nothing but telephones and
Steve Wozniak," Espinosa said, alluding to Wozniak's storied
history building blue
boxes, "you know you're going to have some fun."
But he also said the carpeting in the building was a
constant source of static electricity, and that anytime
someone was walking over the carpet
and touched an open Apple II case, "you fried the keyboard
chip."
"So we spent an incredible amount of time," Espinosa said,
"replacing keyboard chips."
Before co-founding Apple, Wozniak was working for
Hewlett-Packard, and he said that in order to protect
himself from claims by HP that he
was profiting off work that the computer giant owned, he got
the company's legal team to run the Apple I plans by every
department. They all
turned the project down, he said.
And while HP was interested in the machine, Wozniak said
that ultimately, the company was afraid it wasn't polished
enough to be an HP
computer. Later, he added that if HP had wanted it, it
probably would have been a commercial failure and might have
set the personal computer
business back significantly.
In the early days, Apple was putting software on cassettes,
but that the company didn't have automated tape duplication
machines.
So, someone rigged up a system in which a rack of Panasonic
tape machines were linked together off an Apple II and in
order to copy as many
tapes at a time as possible, the team would have to
simultaneously press play and record on all the tape
machines and hit the return key on the
Apple II to begin the process.
"Any time someone would come in and talk about something
like a $25 million Bank of America credit line," Espinosa
said, an Apple employee
might have to "stop the meeting and go over and switch out
the cassettes and put in new ones and then come back and
say, 'So what were we
talking about?' That's the kind of place it was."
But of course, Apple is now one of the most important
technology companies in the world, and its hallmark, despite
Wozniak's long-ago
departure, is elegant design. And he hopes to lay claim to
that legacy.
"I don't want credit for designing the first (personal)
computer," Wozniak said. "I just want credit for designing
the first good one. (And for)
publicizing the fact that a computer could be attractive."
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