Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [23]
Named after the short, narrow skirts made popular by London’s Carnaby Street, the minicomputers were usually no larger than a combination refrigerator-freezer for a family of six. The minicomputer makers, just like the companies that designed satellites and rockets, capitalized on the great shrinking world of electronics. As the semiconductor companies developed their manufacturing techniques, they squeezed more and more transistors onto single pieces of silicon. This made it possible for companies like Digital Equipment to produce computers that, even if they didn’t match the performance of a contemporary mainframe, were more powerful than some of the mainframes that had been made five years earlier. Every graph that appeared in the trade magazines and plotted price against performance showed the machines would become still cheaper and even more powerful.
But even though minicomputers were far smaller than mainframes, they still needed bulky attachments. Programs were entered on paper tape; the memory was formed out of dozens of small doughnut-shaped pieces of iron linked by wires and built into blocks that were the size of cigar boxes. Results of programs appeared on a Teletype printer. The handbooks and manuals revealed something of the complexity of trying to control the flow of millions of bits moving in all sorts of directions. Digital Electronics Corporation’s Small Computer Handbook,which the Sylvania analysts gave to Wozniak, became something of an industry classic because it revealed so much about the computer. It included detailed descriptions of the quirks of the central processing unit, provided directions about how the memory should be managed, presented ways of making connections with the Teletype machine, and provided flow charts to help with the writing and testing of programs.
The computer trade magazines were accompanied by a more specialized literature: the component magazines. At the end of the sixties these focused on the integrated circuits, the chips made by semiconductor companies like Fairchild, Signetics, Synertek, Intel, and Motorola. For Wozniak and Baum these magazines became almost as important as the computer magazines and computer manuals. Though no semiconductor company was making a single chip that performed like a computer, some did make chips that, with sufficient ingenuity, could be combined to act as a computer. The companies themselves released details of the features and performance of their new chips on what were called data sheets which were chockablock with technical information. These too became sought-after items. Designing a decent computer, a computer that approached that distant world, the state of the art, required intimate familiarity with the diagrams and details of the data sheets.
Though he pored over DEC’s Small Computer Handbook, the Varian 620i was the first minicomputer Wozniak subjected to close inspection. It was packed into a brown cabinet with rows of black and white switches on the front panel. For the first time, Wozniak tried to design his own version of a minicomputer with chips he selected: “I didn’t know how to make a complete computer but I understood what a computer was.” He began to understand the layers between the program that a user would type into a computer and the very heart of the machine. He focused on the heart and understood the idea of a set of precise instructions that formed a code to control the machine.
But if he had not mastered all the links of computer design, Wozniak had fastened onto the idea of using as few parts as possible. He was delighted when he discovered a way of combining or eliminating gates, the circuits that form the basis of digital logic. When chips contained circuits that would replace several gates they became the cause of jubilation. Wozniak began to concentrate on making parts perform as many functions as possible. “I started moving