What If

A ‘Breakout’ Moment

Although Wozniak did not invent the personal computer, he was the first to build affordable desktop machines that ordinary people could use. How this happened is a fabled story. Students at the same high school in northern California, Wozniak and Jobs were friends (though they were separated in age by five years, they’d had the same high school electronics teacher). In the early 1970s, they teamed up on a number of electronic ventures. The first gained them fame as geeky pranksters, as they figured out how to use a blue box to make free long-distance telephone calls (an illegal activity also known as phone phreaking). Not long after that, they designed a video game that was a close cousin of Atari’s wildly popular Pong (Jobs worked for Atari at the time and brought in Wozniak as a consultant). The game Jobs and Wozniak designed was called, aptly, Breakout. Not long after that, Wozniak invented a machine—the Apple 1—that broke away from the standard model of computer design.

Connectivity Nobody Else Could Imagine

Even if you didn’t know anything about computers, or about their intricately designed digital circuits, or about the hidden binary world of 1s and 0s coded on tiny chips that make computers compute, you would’ve known that there was something different about Wozniak’s Apple 1 simply by looking at it. At a time when most computers were refrigerator-sized or larger, Wozniak’s hand-built computer was breathtakingly small, featuring a single circuit board. Wozniak could also "talk" directly to his machine by typing commands on a keyboard and reading feedback on a TV screen, which was far easier than interfacing with punch cards, clunky teletype machines, or panels with toggle switches and blinking lights.

If you did know a thing or two about computers—as did the electronic enthusiasts gathered for a meeting of Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, where Wozniak first showed off his Apple 1—you would have been dazzled by much more: How was it possible that Wozniak had built it with only a few dozen chips on a single circuit board (most of the emerging microcomputers at the time were designed with multiple boards and many more chips)? Did that MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor (which contained the central processing unit) really cost only $25, about $150 less than the popular Intel 8080 or Motorola 6800? And had he really installed a little program on those tiny read-only memory chips—that is, the chips that retain information even when the power is off—so that the computer would know how to boot up and automatically interface with the keyboard?

"People who saw my computer could take one look at it and see the future," Wozniak wrote in his autobiography. "And it was a one-way door. Once you went through it, you could never go back."

Stepping Into an Uncertain Future

At first, very few people wanted to follow Wozniak into  that uncertain future. He tried to give his machine away—not the hardware and software, but his design specs, schematics, and code. Everything the other techie do-it-yourselfers would need to build it themselves. "I took it as my goal to design a very simple, affordable computer, which I knew how to do, and give it to the others," Wozniak said in an interview with The Henry Ford for its Collecting Innovation Today Oral History Project. "And I did, I passed it out for free. No copyright notices, no nuthin.’"

With Wozniak unable to find many people interested in his Apple 1 blueprints, Jobs, showing his early genius for converting invention into product, suggested they sell ready-made printed circuit boards. Even starting small, with the idea that they would sell boards to club members, friends and a few shops, the cost of the first production run was almost more than they could afford. In a fundraising move that’s become legendary, Wozniak sold his beloved HP scientific calculator, Jobs his Volkswagen van, and together they raised the $1,300 they needed to get started.

Eventually the Apple 1 expanded to include printed circuit boards pre-assembled with all the components. A local computer store placed an order for 50 units. Given their limited financial resources, it’s not surprising that Wozniak and Jobs did not package the Apple 1 with a power supply, case, monitor, and keyboard. But at the time the omission of these parts did surprise The Byte Shop owner, Paul Terrell, when the first lot of Apple 1s arrived at his store. "He had expected something more finished," author Walter Isaacson wrote in his biography Steve Jobs. "But Jobs stared him down, and he agreed to take delivery and pay."

Those original Apple 1s retailed for $666.66 ("as a mathematician, I like repeating digits," Wozniak has said by way of explanation). In today’s dollars, that’s about $2,800, relatively cheap for a microcomputer at the time. Less than a year later, Wozniak had re-imagined his Apple 1, considerably improving on it with the introduction of the Apple II. This machine was far more advanced and elegantly designed than the Apple 1, supporting color display and featuring a single case with a built-in keyboard, mouse, and integrated power supply.

Pursuing & Preserving Innovation

With more than 4 million units sold between 1977 and 1993, the Apple II is considered by many to be one of the best personal computers of all time. Its spectacular success is a tribute to Wozniak’s brilliance as an engineer, his drive to keep iterating and improving on an already visionary design. But it is also a sign of the times in which we’re living: The latest pioneering technology always steals the glory from innovations that come before.

"Devices often land in the dustbin before they are given the opportunity to be considered as objects relevant to future museumgoers," says Communications and Information Technology Curator Kristen Gallerneaux, who traveled to New York City’s Bonham auction house in February 2015 to acquire an original Apple 1 computer for The Henry Ford for a record-breaking $905,000. "The Apple 1 is especially precarious in this way: when the Apple II was released in 1977, an exchange program allowed Apple 1 buyers to mail their original purchase in for an upgrade. Many Apple 1’s were scrapped as a result."

The Apple 1 The Henry Ford acquired is one of the original machines sold to The Byte Shop, and one of the few still fully operational. With its vintage Sanyo monitor and crudely constructed wooden box for the power supply, the antiquated look of this Apple 1 can make the brilliance of Wozniak’s invention seem impossibly distant and remote from our own modern lives, with our moment-by-moment dependence on keys and screens and connectivity.

That is, until we step back in time to join Wozniak on a summer night nearly forty years ago, when he was in the final moments of finishing his computer. After debugging a program, he tapped a few keys and at last letters appeared on his little black-and-white TV screen. As he wrote in his book, "It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them." The machine had 4K of RAM, an impressive amount of random access memory at the time. Today that’s only enough to send a short text, nothing much longer than "Hello, world."