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At every Homebrew meeting the Apple was set up on a card table alongside other hobby computers near the entrance to the SLAC auditorium. In the steeply raked hall, almost every major development in microcomputers surfaced while the club newsletter dutifully reported on the appearance of new products, the dates of fairs, the opening of the first computer store in Santa Monica, and the start of retail computer-kit companies like Kentucky Fried Computers. The newsletter’s editors also taught the tinkerers some of the cruel facts of life. When Processor Technology’s video display failed to appear as promised, the newsletter noted: “It would appear that patience is a necessary attribute of the computer hobbyist.” There were frequent appeals for more software and an announcement of a journal whose editors intended to publish computer languages and programs and who gave it the whimsical title Dr. Dobbs’ Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia.

While Wozniak busied himself developing some programs for the Apple, the issue of software spurred a vigorous debate at the club. Most computer hobbyists considered software, if not a birthright, certainly something that should be provided free of charge to anyone who displayed the derring-do and moxie to build his own computer. The programmers who wrote software disagreed. In an open letter to hobbyists, published in the Homebrew newsletter, Bill Gates, one of the developers of the original BASIC for the Altair, complained that though most of MITS customers possessed a copy of BASIC, only about one tenth had actually bought the program. “Without good software,” Gates wrote, “and an owner who understands programming a hobby computer is wasted. . . . As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software.” Gates’s spirited defense of programmers’ rights fell on deaf ears though one club member did respond: “Calling all your potential future customers thieves is perhaps ‘uncool’ marketing strategy.”

Marketing was another thing that Wozniak couldn’t be bothered with. Most of the features he gradually added to the Apple conformed to his personal wishes. He added circuits for game paddles and sound so that Breakout could be presented in its full glory. Letters appeared on the screen in upper case because most of the keyboards used by Homebrew members could only cope with capital letters. Wozniak even wrote a routine to convert lower case to upper case. “We weren’t thinking very far ahead. We were going to put on a lower-case keyboard but we didn’t have time to get to it.” Similarly, the computer was designed to display only forty characters in a line because television screens couldn’t cope with any more.

Wozniak was not even certain that he wanted Jobs to sell his color computer. At the time Apple was formed, Wozniak had reached a verbal arrangement with Jobs and Ron Wayne that he would own all the rights to improvements in the Apple. For a time he entertained the idea of selling his enhanced version to the manufacturer of the Sol Terminal, Processor Technology. “I wasn’t sure that it was an Apple product.” The entire Wozniak household was skeptical about Jobs. Leslie Wozniak heard about him as “this schlunky looking guy with bare feet and dirty hair,” while her parents harbored more serious doubts about their older son’s business partner. Jerry Wozniak encouraged his son to think about other allies and offered to put him in contact with some of his own acquaintances. “We wondered about Steve Jobs,” Jerry Wozniak recalled. “We thought he was the type of person who felt he should always start right at the top and didn’t care to work his way up.”

These domestic clashes came to a head when, in the fall of 1976, two representatives from Commodore Business Machines arrived at Jobs’s garage and offered to buy Apple lock, stock, and prototype. The prospective purchasers were familiar faces. Both Chuck Peddle and Andre Sousan had previously dealt with Apple, and the former had led the team that designed the MOS Technology 6502. (Wozniak had