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bought his first 6502 from Peddle’s wife at the San Francisco trade fair.) While Wozniak made modifications to the Apple, Peddle had called at Jobs’s garage and had demonstrated the KIM-1, a single-board microcomputer developed by MOS Technology to help train engineers who would use the 6502 in elevators and household appliances. In the interim MOS Technology had been acquired by Commodore Business Machines, where Andre Sousan was vice-president of engineering. Both Sousan and Peddle were convinced that a computer like a modified Apple would allow their new employer to jump into the microcomputer field. Jobs also had his price. He wanted $100,000 for Apple, some Commodore stock, and salaries of $36,000 a year for himself and Wozniak.

In fact, a sale would have brought more money than either had ever contemplated and also relief from a year of fourteen-hour workdays. But the more inquiries Jobs made about Commodore, the more suspicious he became. He asked about Jack Tramiel, Commodore’s founder, who in the early seventies had been roundly cursed by the electronic-calculator industry for leading a savage price war and operating a chain of stores called Mr. Calculator. Jobs soon learned that when Tramiel started to bargain, he often fell back on a favorite saying: “There’s one thing closer to me than my shirt and that’s my skin.” Jobs was unimpressed. “The more I looked into Commodore the sleazier they were. I couldn’t find one person who had made a deal with them and was happy. Everyone felt they had been cheated.” For their part, Tramiel and Commodore Chairman Irving Gould decided they did not want to acquire Apple. Sousan recalled: “They thought it was ridiculous to acquire two guys working out of a garage.”

Yet Commodore’s approaches were the subject of long discussions between Jobs and Wozniak and there were bitter disagreements about how any proceeds should be divided. Jerry Wozniak entered the arguments and made his feelings quite clear. Mark Wozniak recalled the strength of his father’s opinions. “Dad got Jobs to cry a couple of times. He said he was going to make the little sonuvabitch cry and that’d be the end. He told him, ‘You don’t deserve shit. You haven’t produced anything. You haven’t done anything.’ It came close to the end.” Jobs felt miserable, was convinced that Jerry Wozniak sorely underestimated his contributions and told the younger Wozniak, “Woz, if we’re not fifty-fifty you can have the whole thing.” Eventually Jobs’s instincts prevailed and Commodore and Apple went their separate ways.

While the founders of Apple were fending off suitors, they were also busying themselves with further modifications to the computer. Jobs thought a quiet machine without a fan would sell better than some of the noisier computers that used fans to cool power supplies that were as hot as toasters. Wozniak had never been that interested in power supplies: When he and Fernandez developed the Cream Soda Computer it was the power supply that failed. When he and Baum designed the Data General Nova, they hadn’t even bothered to design a power supply. The power supplies for the Apple were afterthoughts. Power supplies were something to be plugged in at the last moment, something that could always be fished off a shelf at Haltek. The only time it was necessary to worry about a power supply was when it threatened to send a bolt of volts streaking through the computer—and blow out every sweetly tuned piece of digital electronics.

Power supplies belonged to an older, stodgier branch of electronics whose basic rules hadn’t changed that much since the early days of radio. Power supplies, like regulators and transformers, were analog devices, and there was an emotional and intellectual division between analog and digital electronics. Youngsters like Wozniak were much more interested in digital electronics, where change was more rapid. Their conceptual world was framed in terms of highs and lows and 1s and 0s and their lives circulated around handling solutions that were presented to them by the semiconductor manufacturers.

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