Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [26]
The experience with the Data General Nova prodded Wozniak toward a grander diversion. He decided to try to build his own computer. He managed to spur the interest of one of his neighborhood chums, Bill Fernandez, to help with the effort. They had known each other for several years and their fathers played golf together. Though several years younger than Wozniak, Fernandez with his tense, thin, ivory features had a broader range of interests. He became a member of the Bahai faith, studied aikido, and seemed like the sort of person who might have been at home in sixteenth-century Japan as the student of a samurai warrior. He too was lured by science fairs and one year had entered an electric lock that had flat switches nailed to a piece of plywood. He built sirens from oscillators and was, as he readily admitted, thorough and competent but not given to whim or impulse. He was fastidious, good with his hands, and had a knack for installing items like car radios.
In his final year at McCollum’s electronics class, Fernandez had worked as a technician in NASA’s spacecraft-systems laboratory. There he built, tested, and modified circuits, learned about special soldering techniques, was taught how to dress leads properly, and was lectured on the perils of nicking wires. Fernandez carved out a corner of his parents’ garage to work on his hobby. He squeezed his own shelves and workbench between the family water heater and clothes dryer. “Space in the garage was a constant battle. They were saying I had a quarter of the garage when I only had a sixteenth.” But the Fernandez garage offered a sturdy place to build Wozniak’s machine.
Wozniak knew what he wanted from his computer. “I wanted to design a machine that did something. On a TV you turn a knob and it does something. On a computer you push a button and some lights come on.” To build a machine that would blink, Wozniak and Fernandez started scavenging for parts from a bundle of semiconductor companies. Intel furnished them with eight memory chips each of which could store 256 bits. Intersil gave a couple of expensive chips that contained arithmetic logic units. They rounded up some switches from a batch of samples belonging to a salesman for a switch company, light-emitting diodes from a Monsanto engineer, and a metal frame from one of Hewlett-Packard’s scrap piles. The largest batch of parts came from a couple of applications engineers at Signetics. Wozniak and Fernandez spread their trophies out on the latter’s living-room floor and sorted out all the adders, multiplexers, and registers. They checked the part numbers against the data sheets and stuffed them into rows of small, carefully labeled manila envelopes.
Once they set to work there was a division of labor. Wozniak designed the computer on a couple of sheets of notepad paper and concentrated on the logic design. Fernandez designed the timing circuits and the circuits that hooked the computer to the lights. Wozniak watched his younger pal, who was still at high school, play technician and assemble the computer. “He didn’t really have any engineering background but he knew how to build it with straight wires and a soldering iron. He was slow but very careful and very neat.” For several weeks the pair used their evenings and weekends to build the computer and managed to swig down a considerable number of bottles of Cragmont cream soda in the process. Fernandez bicycled down to the local Safeway with the empty quarts and used the deposits to help buy the few parts they still needed.
The Cream Soda Computer was a small version of the minicomputers that had caught Wozniak’s fancy—“It was the absolute minimum hardware”—and the design was dictated by the off-the-shelf parts in the manila envelopes. The center of the machine was formed by two four-bit arithmetic-logic units which Wozniak rigged in tandem to give an eight-bit-wide computer. The completed computer was mounted on a metal frame.