Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [64]
He was precise about the way in which the chips for his computer should be laid out on the bread board. He spent hours working out where the chips should be placed before plugging the sockets, the cradles for the semiconductors, into the board. Wozniak was more meticulous than most engineers when it came to making the wire connections between the semiconductor pins. He disliked the popular “wire-wrapping,” which tended to wreath boards in a spaghetti jungle of wires, and favored “point-to-point” wiring, which required laboriously snipping and soldering lengths of wire between pins. The fastidious approach paid off when it came to troubleshooting and made it far easier to find troublesome pins and spot faulty connections.
Wozniak’s private interests consumed more and more of his time. He carted his prototype to work and spent much of his time at the lab bench making further refinements. Especially after Hewlett-Packard announced that the calculator division would be moved to Oregon, Tuttle said, “We spent half our time working on our pet projects.” Tuttle had also bought a 6502 and was also burning the midnight oil, taking his prototype home and trying another approach. With their prototypes built, Tuttle, Wozniak, and another colleague approached their lab manager to suggest that Hewlett-Packard consider making microcomputers. Tuttle recalled, “It was one of those informal meetings. It wasn’t a big deal. We just sort of asked for five minutes and showed Woz’s board. We were told, ‘HP doesn’t want to be in that kind of a market.’”
When Wozniak took his unnamed computer to the Homebrew Club it received another cool reception. That wasn’t surprising since a poll at one of the club’s meetings in October 1975 showed that of the thirty-eight computers belonging to members, twenty-five were either Altairs or used an 8080 while only one used a 6502. Wozniak hooked his computer to a black-and-white television, connected a board of 4K bytes of memory chips that Myron Tuttle had lent him, and patiently typed in the BASIC. There was a certain amount of surprise that BASIC would run on a machine with so few chips, but most of the club members didn’t even bother to inspect the computer. Wozniak passed out schematics to the few who were interested and later put his new machine in perspective. “It wasn’t as difficult as some of the other computers I had designed.”
“The time to completion is a constant,” Andy Hertzfeld said.
The warm Sunday afternoon gloom pushed against the glass doors at the rear of the Mac laboratory. The air conditioning, which vibrated through the speckled ceiling tiles on weekdays, was turned off. The stuffy darkness was sliced in two places. A gentle light ballooned out of Andy Hertzfeld’s programming cubicle and a cube of cold neon lit an engineer’s bench where Burrell Smith was gnawing the skin of his knuckles. Hertzfeld slipped out of his cubicle and walked to the bench where Smith slid off his lab stool. Both stood lower than the head-light partitions that separated all the offices. They stared at a printed circuit board which, festooned with probes and wires, looked like a stomach pried apart with sutures, retractors, and hemostats. The probes were hooked to a logic analyzer and the rows of lines on its green screen monitored the signals emerging from the microprocessor.
Smith hadn’t gone home the previous day until 11:30 P.M. and then had stayed up until 3 A.M. thinking about why the Mac’s memory chips were