Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [79]
So small microcomputer companies were left in their anonymity. Most of the others had never even heard of Apple which was too small, too fragile, and too eccentric to be taken seriously. Those with a prophetic bent decided that the company was doomed by Wozniak’s nonconformist decision to choose the 6502 microprocessor while most other companies built their computers around the 8080. Distributors and retailers like Paul Terrell had decided that the future lay with the 8080, the S-100 bus, and industry standards and were planning to discontinue stocking 6502 machines. The large advertisements in magazines like Byte were for companies like Southwest Technical Products, Processor Technology, and IMSAI. The Apple computer was an unconventional local curiosity.
Shortly before Labor Day, 1976, Wozniak and Jobs headed to the East Coast for a computer show that was being staged in a rundown hotel in Atlantic City. They packed a suitcase with Apple computers and a bundle of one-page advertisements. Along with the Apple computers, Wozniak carried another machine mounted in a case known to hobbyists as a cigar box. Like the engineers and salesmen of other California computer companies, Jobs and Wozniak took TWA’s Flight 67 from San Francisco to Philadelphia. Much of the flight was consumed with the buzz of technical conversation, shop talk, gossip, and surreptitious peeks at new computers. The salesmen from Processor Technology were carrying a new machine named the Sol Terminal Computer, after Les Solomon, the editor of Popular Electronics. Dressed in a sheet-metal case with a built-in keyboard, it made the other computers look dated and amateurish. Its proponents were confident that their computer would savage the competition. They talked disparagingly of blankies—computers that had nothing but a switch on a front panel—and of blinkies, like the Altair, with just lights on the front panel. In their minds the Sol formed an entirely new category. Lee Felsenstein, who was a consultant to Processor Technology, leaned over Wozniak’s headrest, glanced at the prototype of the new computer that rested on the fold-down tray, and formed his own conclusion, “It was thoroughly unimpressive. These two guys just had a cigar box. What the hell did they know?”
A LOT OF POOP
The cigar box that Wozniak and Jobs took to Atlantic City in the dog days of 1976 contained a savagely deformed Apple computer. The printed circuit board screwed to the wooden base was festooned with fresh wires that sneaked between the chips. Despite its forlorn appearance, Wozniak and Jobs guarded the machine carefully. During the daytime, while they tried to sell some Apple computers from a card table on the convention floor, it was locked in their seedy hotel room. In the evenings, after the crowds had disappeared from the fair, Wozniak, Jobs, and Dan Kottke (who had journeyed from New York to help his friends) slipped into a room dominated by a large television screen. Wozniak ran a cable across the carpet, typed some commands into the computer, and made it fling startling sprays of color across the television screen.
Wozniak had been working on enhancements to the Apple since its introduction at the Homebrew Club. In the give-and-take following the original announcement some members had asked what additional features were being contemplated. Wozniak mentioned that he was working on a circuit with a few chips that would convert the black-and-white machine into a color computer. It was an extravagant claim since at the time designers thought a color circuit would take at least forty chips. Wozniak’s determination to add color to the Apple sprang from a demonstration at the Homebrew Club of a minicomputer that was capable of displaying color graphics. The Dazzler, a machine produced by Cromemco, a small company whose founders attended Homebrew meetings, also created color displays that left their mark on Wozniak. “It was so impressive