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dozen or so major semiconductor manufacturers usually ensured that prices would fall fast and dramatically. In the fall of 1975 the laws of the industry held true and played havoc with the pricing of eight-bit microprocessors. Wozniak first stumbled on the change when he and Baum traipsed to an electronics trade show in San Francisco and spotted a new microprocessor, the MOS Technology 6502, made by a Costa Mesa, California, company. The men at MOS Technology were aiming the 6502 at high-volume markets like copiers, printers, traffic signals, and pinball machines rather than the small computer-hobbyist market. The 6502 was almost identical to the Motorola 6800 and the MOS Technology salesmen pointedly stated that their company was trying to make a smaller, simpler version of the older chip. The similarities were so blatant that they eventually became the subject of a lawsuit between the two companies but for Wozniak and other hobbyists, legal squabbles were a distant blur. The critical issue was price. The Motorola 6800 cost $175. The MOS Technology cost $25. Wozniak fished a 6502 out of a large glass bowl brimming with microprocessors and immediately modified his plans. He abandoned the 6800 and decided to write a version of the computer language BASIC that would run on the 6502.

His decision to write the language and then to build the machine was tacit recognition of the importance of software. He envisaged using the computer to play the sort of games he had run across on larger machines, which consisted of bursts of typewritten commands and retorts that appeared on a teletype or television screen. One of the more popular games had the lovely name Hunt the Wumpus which let players journey through a maze filled with monsters. At all the club meetings BASIC had proved to be the most popular language on the Altair and the 8080 microprocessor. “At the club all we talked was BASIC. I had a chance to have the first BASIC for the 6502. I wanted to demo the machine quickly.”

Wozniak made every technical decision to satisfy his own interests and made an art of the homily “Adequacy is sufficient.” The deadlines, pressure, and spur were imposed by the fortnightly Homebrew meetings and also by the prospect of his wedding to Alice Robertson. After some weeks of dithering, Wozniak had finally decided to get engaged after tossing three dimes in the air and waiting until they all landed heads up. As he started on the software he also developed asthma and wheezed loud enough for the neighbors to hear through the flimsy plasterboard walls. Frightened that fluid would fill his lungs while he slept, Wozniak took to writing programming code until the small hours.

Wozniak found writing software a more arduous exercise than designing hardware. The shape and style of his first major piece of software were dictated by necessity. He spent several weeks studying the grammatical rules for BASIC and found they were similar to the rules for FORTRAN with which he was familiar. Faced with a choice between two versions of BASIC, Wozniak chose the simpler. He wrote the programs in pencil on paper and a colleague at Hewlett-Packard wrote a program that simulated the behavior of the 6502 and which ran on a Hewlett-Packard minicomputer. The Hewlett-Packard computer was used to test some of Wozniak’s programs. Wozniak conceded, “Fortunately I’d spent a lot of time in my math classes not doing math but trying to write compilers in assembly language when I didn’t have a machine. I had gone off in directions which I had no way of knowing whether they were good or bad.”

After he completed the code, he set about designing a computer and reverted to the schematics he had drawn for Motorola’s 6800 microprocessor. He compared the features of the 6800 with the MOS Technology 6502 and its slightly cheaper brother, the 6501. Wozniak found that with a couple of alterations to some of the electronic signals that affected the chips’ timing, his previous design needed no alteration—“I didn’t have to change a single wire or pin on my design.”

He used some of the