By early 1976 we had sold maybe 150 computers. Not just through the Byte Shop but through other little stores that were popping up all around the country. We would drive around California, just walk into a store, and ask if they wanted to carry the Apple I. We did sell a few that way.
But this was nothing. Because we were watching other companies that sprang up around Silicon Valley at this time. And one of them, Processor Technology it was called, was supposedly selling more than a thousand units a month of their SOL-20 computer. It was the hit of the hobby computer world. It was also the hobby computer that supported a keyboard, which is how they designed it after I showed the Apple I at a main meeting at Homebrew. The Apple I started that trend.
Lee Felsenstein, the guy who emceed the Homebrew meetings, had actually designed the SOL. And Gordon French worked there. So we heard things.
I thought the Processor Technology SOL computer wasn’t that impressive. Steve and I were sure we could sell more than what they were selling. But by then we had a prototype of the next Apple, the Apple II, and it was ten times better than the Apple I.
With that computer, we knew we could easily sell as many computers as Processor Technology if we just had the money to build them.
The Apple II, which I started working on almost as soon as the Apple I was complete, was a phenomenal improvement over what I’d done before. I knew I wanted to have a computer that did color, for instance. I had built the Apple I from the beginning with chips working at the frequencies you would need to generate color on an American television, and I had planned to add color. But though I’d designed the Apple I so I could add a color to it, I decided it would be better to design a fresh computer instead.
You see, the add-on to color wasn’t just a matter of buying more chips. It was a matter of efficiency and elegance of design. I wanted to design color from the ground up, not just as an add-on to an existing computer. That way, the Apple II would be designed with color ability on those chips from the start.
Another Apple II improvement I thought of was to design the whole new computer around text and graphics, with all of it coming out of the system’s own memory.
So rather than having a whole separate terminal to do the on-screen stuff and other memory to do the other computations, I decided to combine all the memory into one bank—one section of DRAM. A portion of the DRAM the microprocessor used could also be continually tapped for whatever needed to be displayed on the screen.
In doing this, I knew I would save some chips. In fact, the Apple II ended up with half as many chips as the Apple I in the end.
It was also quite a bit faster. Remember how I told you how the Apple I had to constantly keep the contents of its DRAM memory alive by refreshing them? Well, by now I had faster DRAM chips. And instead of the microprocessor being able to access (write from or read to) the RAM once every millionth of a second, these new chips could do it twice every microsecond.
In fact, it even worked out that the microprocessor could access the RAM in one-half of a microsecond (millionth of a second) while the circuitry that refreshed the RAM could access during the other half. That’s why the new computer I designed, this Apple II, actually ran faster. It was also smaller and cheaper. And that is always the goal with me.
The Apple II had countless improvements over the Apple I. Some people consider the Apple II to be a second design built from the Apple I, but I want you to know that that is not so. Not so at all.
The Apple I was not a computer designed from the ground up. It was a quick extension of my ARPANET terminal to a microprocessor, with virtually no electronic innovations except for the DRAM.
The Apple II, on the other hand, was designed and engineered from the ground up. Also solely by me.
Looking back now, I could’ve done the Apple II first—color and all—but I chose to go with the design I could come up with most quickly.
It’s true that both machines brought striking advances to the computer world. The Apple I made history by being the first personal computer that could work with a keyboard and a display. But the Apple II brought color, high-resolution graphics, sound, and the ability to attach game paddles. It was the first to boot up ready to use, with BASIC already built into the ROM.
Other computers eventually caught up, but it took years for them to match what I’d done. Eventually every one of them would have to offer that same list of features.
The Apple II was the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.
But no one had seen the Apple II yet. I was still finalizing it, and we were still working in our houses at this point. I was working out of my apartment and Steve was working the phones in his bedroom. We were still testing computers in his garage. I was still building calculators at HP, and I still thought this was just a hobby. I was still planning on working at HP forever.
But it was very soon after delivering the Apple I boards to Terrell that I had a working Apple II. And like I said, it wasn’t just twice as good. It was like ten times better.
By August 1976, I had completed it—the board, I mean, which was the center of the Apple II. I remember that so well because that was the month Steve and I flew out to the PC ’76 show in Atlantic City.
We got on the plane in San Jose, and Steve and I sat together with the Apple I and II with us on board. And the funny thing was, a bunch of the people we knew from Homebrew, who now worked at all these little competing computer companies, were seated around us on the same plane. We could hear them talking in advanced business talk—you know, talking about proposals and using businesslike acronyms we’d never heard before. We felt so left out of these discussions.
But inside, we knew we had a secret. A big secret. Maybe we weren’t part of the business-type groups, but we knew had a better computer. Actually, we had two better computers. The Apple I and the Apple II. And no one in the world knew about the Apple II yet.
When the show started in Atlantic City, I was lucky because I didn’t have to hustle the Apple I at the booth. I’m not a sales type. Steve Jobs and Dan Kottke did that. I was upstairs getting the very last BASIC sequences finished up.
The show was full of young, barely financed companies like Apple. The proprietors looked like us. I mean, there weren’t any nicely dressed company executives, company owners, or company managers really attending the show. It was a pretty sloppy group of people, come to think of it.
They were in our business and most of them were competitors. We were all friends, but we were still competitors.
Even though we didn’t let the Apple II out of the bag at that show, there was one guy not associated with any of these companies or businesses who saw it. He was a convention guy setting up a projection TV for the convention goers. Steve and I went down the first night, after everyone else had left, and met with this projector technician. I think we had told him to stay. It was probably about 9 p.m. You see, I had this different method of generating color and I was still amazed at how many TVs it worked with. In fact, I never found a TV that it didn’t work with. But I figured that a projector might have different color circuitry that would choke on my color method. I wanted to see if the Apple II would work with it.
So I hooked the Apple II prototype up to this projector and it worked perfectly. That technician, who was seeing every low-cost computer in the world as he was setting up the show, told me that of all of them, this was the only computer he would buy.
I only smiled. The Apple II wasn’t even announced yet.
After the show, the biggest, earthshaking Eureka moment ever was the day I got Breakout, the Atari game, working on the Apple II.
I had put enough capability in BASIC that you could read where the game paddles were. It could sound the speaker as needed, and it could plot colors on the screen. So I was ready.
I sat down one day with this little blank board with chips on the top side of it and little red and blue wire-wrapped wires all soldered underneath and connected it with some wires to transformers and then connected it all to my color TV.
I sat down and started typing in BASIC the commands I needed to make one row of bricks—just like the ones in Atari’s arcade game—and it worked! I had a row of bricks. I played around with different color combinations until I had the brick color that worked.
I made eight rows of bricks lying side by side. I figured out the right colors, I figured how the bricks should be offset to look more realistic. Even and odd rows. And then I started programming the paddle. I made the on-screen paddle go up and down with the game control knob. And then I put in a ball. I started giving the ball motion. Then I started telling the ball when it hits bricks, here’s how it gets rid of the bricks and here’s how it bounces. And when it hits the paddle, here’s how it bounces and here’s how it changes direction vertically and horizontally.
And then I played with all these parameters and it only took a half hour total. I tried dozens and dozens of different variations of things until, finally, I had the game of Breakout completely working on the Apple II, showing the score and everything.
I called Steve Jobs over. I couldn’t believe I’d been able to do it, it was amazing. I sat him down and showed him how the game came up with the paddle and the bricks. And then I said, “Watch this.” And I typed a couple of BASIC statements, changed the color of the paddle, and the color of the bricks, and where the score was.
I said, “If I had done all these varieties of options in hardware the way it was always done, it would’ve taken me ten years to do. Now that games are in software, the whole world is going to change.”
That was the exact moment it sank in. Software games were going to be incredibly advanced compared to hardware games—games that were hardwired into arcades and systems like that.
These days, the graphics are so great in games. They have gotten incredibly complicated and huge in size. If they had to be in hardware, there wouldn’t be enough time in the universe to design them.
I thought, Wow. Nobody in the club is ever going to believe that an arcade game could be written in BASIC. It was a first in the world. I put a secret into my Breakout game for the Apple II, too. If you hit CTRL and Z on the keyboard, the game went into a mode where the paddle would always jiggle but could never miss the ball.
What a great feature. It tricked people into thinking they were just really lucky in hitting it. The paddle was so shaky and jiggly that a person could never tell it wasn’t really because of their own skill and their own movements that they were hitting it.
One day I sat down with John Draper (Captain Crunch, remember?). We were at Homebrew right after the main meeting, the time people could demo stuff.
John had never played an arcade game before.
I said, “Here. Play this game.” I showed him how you turned the dial so the paddle went up and down. And he sat there and played it. Everyone in the room watched him for about fifteen minutes. The ball was going so fast, and he, even though he didn’t really know what he was doing with the control, kept hitting it. People just thought he was a superior game player.
After about fifteen minutes, he finally won the game. And all of us were congratulating him like he was the best game player in the world. I don’t think he ever knew it was a setup.
In the spring of 1976, as I was working on the Apple II, Steve and I got into our first argument. He didn’t think the Apple II should have eight slots. Slots are connectors you can plug extra circuit boards into in case you want to expand the functionality of the computer. Steve wanted only two slots—one for a printer and one for a modem. He thought that way you could build a cheaper, smaller machine that was good enough for today’s tasks.
But I wanted more slots, eight of them.
I had the idea that there would be a lot of things people would want in the future, and no way did we want to limit people.
Usually I’m really easy to get along with, but this time I told him, “If that’s what you want, go get yourself another computer.” There wasn’t a single chip I could save by reducing the number of slots from eight to two, and I knew people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any computer.
I was in a position to do that then. I wouldn’t always be. A couple of years later, Apple went on to design the Apple III, which was just a disaster, and it had fewer slots.
But in 1976 I won that argument, and the Apple II was designed and eventually came out the way I wanted it to.
I remember coming in one day to HP—where I was still working—and showing the other engineers the Apple II. I demoed it doing color swirls. The other engineers would come up to me and say this was the best product they’d ever seen. And yet HP still couldn’t find a way to do it right, a way to do this kind of project.
One day my boss, Pete Dickinson, told me that some people in my calculator division had created a new project that had gotten through levels of corporate approval to build a small desktop machine with a microprocessor, DRAM, a small video screen, and a keyboard. They even had five people assigned to write BASIC for it.
The awful thing about this was they all knew what I had done with the Apple I and even the Apple II. Yet they had started up this project without me! Why would they do that? I don’t know. I think they just saw what they wanted to do as a project was what I’d done.
But I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell. Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measely printer interface engineer. Something tiny.
I told him, “My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators.”
After a few days, I was turned down again.
I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive. Where he’s happy. The only thing I can figure is there were managers and submanagers on this computer project who felt threatened. I had already done a whole computer. Maybe they bypassed me because I had done this single-handedly. I don’t know what they were thinking.
But they should’ve said to themselves, “How do we get Steve Wozniak on board? Just make him a little printer interface engineer.” I would’ve been so happy, but they didn’t bother to put me where I would’ve been happiest.
Like I said before, we needed money. Steve knew it and I knew it.
So by that summer of 1976, we started talking to potential money people about Apple, showing them the Apple II working in color in Steve’s garage.
One of the first people we showed it to was Chuck Peddle. Remember him? He was the guy from MOS Technologies who’d sold me the 6502 processor I designed the Apple I around the year before at the WESCON show.
By this time Chuck was working at Commodore, a consumer electronics company rumored to be shopping around for a personal computer to sell. I remember I was so impressed to meet him after the role his chip, the MOS 6502, had played in the Apple I. We’d opened Steve’s garage to the sunlight that day, and he came walking in wearing a suit and a cowboy hat. Wow, I was excited to see him and couldn’t wait to show him the Apple II. This was a very important person in my mind.
I typed in a few BASIC programs, showed some color spirals on-screen, showed him how many chips and how it worked and everything. Just to show him what we were doing. Chuck was in good spirits throughout the meeting, laughing and smiling. He told us we should make a presentation to the company bigwigs, which we did a few weeks later.
I’ll never forget how, in that conference room, Steve Jobs made what I thought was the most ridiculous statement. He said, “You might just want to buy this product for a few hundred thousand dollars.”
I was almost embarrassed. I mean, there we were, we had no money, we had yet to prove to anybody there was going to be any money in this thing. Steve added, “A few hundred thousand dollars, plus you have to give us jobs working on this project.”
Well, we left and heard back a few days later that, no, they’d decided they would build their own machine, it was cheaper. They didn’t need to support fancy things like color, sound, and graphics, all the cool things we had. Chuck Peddle, in the garage, had told us he thought it was possible for them to do their own computer in four months. I didn’t see how anyone could, but I guess after he saw the Apple II, it would be a lot easier to design something like what he wanted.
I saw the Commodore PET, the computer they came up with so quickly, a few months later at the West Coast Computer Faire, by the way. It kind of sickened me. They were trying to do something like what we’d shown Chuck in the garage that day, with a monitor and programming and a keyboard, but they made a real crappy product by doing it so quick. They could’ve had Apple, you know? They could have had it all if they’d had the right vision. Bad decision.
It’s funny. I think back on it now—the Apple II would turn out to be one of the most successful products of all time. But we had no copyrights or patents at all back then. No secrets. We were just showing it to everybody.
After Commodore turned us down, we went over to Al Alcorn’s house. He was one of the founders of Atari with Nolan Bushnell, and he was the one who’d hired Steve to do video games there two years before.
Now, I knew Al knew me. He knew I had designed Breakout, the one-player version of Pong. I remember that when we went to his house I was so impressed because he had one of the earliest color projection TVs. Man, in 1976, he would have been among the first people to have one. That was cool.
But he told us later that Atari was too busy with the video game market to do a computer project.
A few days after that, venture capitalists Steve had contacted started to come by. One of them was Don Valentine at Sequoia. He kind of pooh-poohed the way we talked about it.
He said, “What’s the market?”
“About a million,” I told him.
“How do you know?”
I told him the ham radio market had one million users, and this could be at least that big.
Well, he turned us down, but he did get us in touch with a guy named Mike Markkula. He was only thirty, he told us, but already retired from Intel. He was into gadgets, he told us. Maybe Mike would know what to do with us.
The very first time I met Mike, I thought he was the nicest person ever. I really did. He was this young guy. He had a beautiful house in the hills overlooking the lights of Cupertino, this gorgeous view, amazing wife, the whole package.
Better still, he actually liked what we had! He didn’t talk like a guy who was hiding things and thinking about ripping you off. He was for real. That much was obvious right away.
What a major thing this was.
He was truly interested. He asked us who we were, what our backgrounds were, what our goals were with Apple, where we thought it might go. And he indicated some interest in financing us. He was talking about $250,000 or thereabouts to build 1,000 machines.
Mike was just talking in normal commonsense terms about what the future of a new home computer industry might be like. Now, I had always thought of the Apple computer as being something for a hobbyist who wanted to solve a work simulation or play a game.
But Mike was talking about something different. He talked about introducing the computer to regular people in regular homes, doing at home things like keeping track of your favorite recipes or balancing your checkbook. This was what was coming, he said. He had a vision of the Apple II as a real home computer.
Now, we’d already been kicking around this idea a little, of course. I mean, out-of-the-box and ready-to-use was something Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop had asked for. And we were planning on doing that, as well as a plastic case. We had even planned to hire a friend of Steve’s, Rod Holt, to build a switching power supply. That kind of power supply was so much more efficient than what was previously available—we knew it would generate less heat. That was necessary if you were going to fit a board and our power supply into a plastic case.
But when Mike agreed to sign up, he told us, “We’re going to be a Fortune 500 company in two years. This is the start of an industry. It happens once a decade.”
I believed him only because of his reputation and position in life, you know? He was the sort of person who if he said it—and you can tell sincerity in a person—he really believed it. I thought Fortune 500 might be out of the range, though. I mean, a $5 million company would be immense and unbelievable.
But if somebody knows how to make certain judgments better than I do, I don’t try to use my own logic and reasoning to challenge them. I can be skeptical, but if someone really knows what they’re talking about, they should be trusted.
It turned out that even Mike was underestimating our success. But look, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Well, after Mike agreed to do our business plan—after he started working on it—he asked to talk to me. He said, “Okay, Steve. You know you have to leave Hewlett-Packard.”
I said, “Why?” I mean, I’d been at HP the whole time I’d designed the Apple I and Apple II. And all the time I was moonlighting, I set up interfaces, did the color, the graphics, wrote the BASIC, just did the whole thing. I said, “Why can’t I keep doing this on the side and just have HP as my secure job for life.”
But he said, “No, you have to leave HP.” He didn’t give me any reasons. He told me I had to decide by Tuesday.
And I went and thought and thought and thought. I realized I had a lot of fun designing computers and showing them off at Homebrew. I had fun writing software and I had fun playing with the computer. I realized I could do all those things for the rest of my life. I didn’t need my own company.
Plus, I felt very insecure in starting a company where I would be expected to push people around and run their affairs and control what they did. I’m not a management kind of person. I told you before: I’d decided long ago that I would never become someone authoritative.
So I decided I wouldn’t do Apple after all. I would stay at HP for my full-time job and design computers for fun.
I went to the cabana—Mike had a cabana on his property—on ultimatum day and told Mike and Steve what I’d decided. I told them no. I’d thought about it, and I’d come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to leave HP.
I remember Mike was very cool about it. He just shrugged and said, “Okay. Fine.” He was really terse about it. It was like he thought, okay, fine, he would just get what Apple needed somewhere else.
But Steve was upset. He felt strongly that the Apple II was the computer they should go with.
Within a couple of days my phone started ringing. I started getting phone calls at work and home from my dad, my mom, my brother, and various friends. Just phone call after phone call. Every one of them told me I’d made the wrong decision. That I should go with Apple because, after all, $250,000 is a lot of money.
It turned out that Steve had talked them all into calling me. Apparently he thought I needed an intervention.
But it didn’t do any good; I still was going to stay at HP.
Then Allen Baum called.
Allen said, “Steve, you know, you really ought to go ahead and do it. Think about it. You can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you can be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich.” He told me he thought it was absolutely possible for me to start a company and stay an engineer. He told me I could do it and never get into management.
That was exactly what I needed to hear. I needed to hear one person saying that I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart, as an engineer, and not have to be a manager. I called Steve Jobs right away with the news. He was thrilled.
And the next day I came in early, walked over to a couple of friends at HP, and told them, “That’s it, I am going to leave HP and start Apple.”
Then I realized, Oh, you should always tell your boss first. So I went over to tell him quickly, but he didn’t show up at his table. I waited and waited, and finally it was like four in the afternoon, and he still wasn’t at his table. Everybody kept coming up to me as I waited there, saying, “Hey, I hear you’re leaving,” and I didn’t want my boss to hear it from someone else.
Finally my boss showed up near the end of the day. I told him I was leaving to start my own company. He asked me when I wanted to go. I told him, “Right away.” So he took me over to human resources and they interviewed me and all of a sudden I was gone. It was that quick.
But I never doubted my decision. I mean, I’d made my decision. Apple was the main thing for me from that point on.
Just before we met Mike, Steve and I made plans to move Apple from his house and my apartment to a real office. We had something like $10,000 in the bank from the Apple I sales, so we were able to do this. The office was on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, just a few blocks away from where the huge Apple campus would eventually be on Bandley Drive.
Then, when Mike joined us, we had even more money in our account. We moved into our little office. There were about five or six desks around. There was a little room to set up a lab bench to do some testing and debug work. It was a real long lab bench. And we had our key staff in place. Steve, me, Mike Markkula, Rod Holt, and, now, a guy named Mike Scott.
We’d hired Mike Scott to be the president just before Mike Markkula got there. (So now we had two Steves and two Mikes.) Mike, or “Scotty,” as we called him, was a guy with experience running things. He came from National Semiconductor, where he’d been a director.
I think a lot of people have forgotten him today, but Mike was Apple’s president and leader for four years—he took us public four years later.
We had this idea that we would announce and show the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire, which was about four months away. The Faire, started by Jim Warren, another Homebrew member, would be in San Francisco in January of 1977.
So I had four months to finish things up. I was completing the 8K bytes of code we had to release to Synertek, the company that was going to make the ROMs for the Apple II. Those were the ROMs that would make it an Apple II running BASIC.
Then there was the project surrounding the plastic case. We were going to be the first computer ever in a plastic case. I did not have to deal with this at all, thank god. It was a rough project. Steve Jobs, Rod Holt, and Mike Scott dealt with that. They had a guy in Palo Alto who was signed up to make plastic cases for us. The process was time-consuming and laborious, and it turned out there was a limit to what this guy could do. He was using a process to build the cases, but it turned out he could only do a really small number per day.
It was only about three days before the West Coast Computer Faire that we got our first three plastic cases as samples. They came in, and we actually assembled the whole complete computer with the board inside. It sort of looked like what the Apple II would look like, and now we could show it off at the Faire.
Finally, in the days before the West Coast Computer Faire, Mike Markkula explained how we would all have to dress up nicely, how we should appear and look, how we should act. He coordinated how we would talk to people and show them things.
Of course, on the side, I started thinking of how I could do a prank at the show. First, I wrote a little joke program that would tell jokes about people’s ethnicity. Then I set up a huge prank that would take a lot more effort than just a regular joke. And I thought I would play this joke on the big company that started it all for me. I’m talking about the company that made the Altair: the MITS Corporation.
Well, we had a list of everyone who was going to show computers and equipment at the West Coast Computer Faire, and I thought it was so strange that MITS wasn’t going to be there.
I thought, What a great opportunity to pull a prank on them!
I got an idea from something I’d read in the Pentagon Papers. There was a part in there all about political trickery and a guy named Dick Tuck who played dirty tricks, clever little psychological tricks like putting out fake memoranda, fake notices to alarm people that were written in such a way that they couldn’t really be denied as being lies. So I decided I’d put out a fake memo of my own—a fake ad, like a leaflet, for a fake product from MITS. After I heard from Mike Markkula that we were going to hand out twenty thousand brochures for the Apple II, I realized it would be possible to get thousands and thousands of fake ads out.
The first thing I did was call Adam Schoolski, who was a thirteen-year-old phone phreak when I’d first met him a few years earlier. He’d gone by the handle Johnny Bagel. Anyway, I told him that I wanted to do this prank but didn’t want to do it near the San Francisco Bay Area. I had a lot of good experience with pranks by then, and I knew that you don’t get caught if you keep people out of the loop, you don’t do things nearby, and you keep a level of secrecy. And this was going to be a major prank, I told Adam, because I wanted to print up eight thousand leaflets to distribute. I was able to come up with the $400 I needed to print eight thousand copies on different colors of paper.
Adam and I made it together. The product we made up was called the Zaltair. You see, there was a new company at the time, called Zilog, that was making a chip that was compatible with the Intel 8080. It was called the Z-80, and at the time there were lots of hobby computers coming out that were built around it. They were called the Z-this and the Z-that. All these companies were always using Z words. So I came up with the Zaltair, a made-up computer that was also built around the Z-80.
I came up with all kinds of dumb computer-y Z words, too. Like Bazic. And Perzonality. Then I needed copy for the leaflet. I looked in a computer magazine, Byte, for an ad that was the worst ever. And I found it. It was from a company called Sphere. And it said dumb stuff like, “Imagine this. Imagine that. Imagine some other thing.” So I wrote copy that said, “Imagine a race car with five wheels.” I made up the stupidest things any idiot dork would laugh at, but if they saw it in a nicely done leaflet with good fonts, they would think it’s all real and legitimate. Imagine something going faster than the speed of light. Imagine a banjo with six strings. I came up with the dumbest things.
Also, I made a play on what was called the S-100 bus, the connection the Altair used to plug in expansion boards. I named the Zaltair’s equivalent the Z-150 bus. I wrote, “We have 150 slots. We call it the Z-150 bus.” I even said it was compatible with the S-100 bus, but with 50 extra pins. If you think about this, these are just the dumbest statements, but I knew people would read stuff into it as if these were fantastic advances, just because our leaflet was going to look so professionally created.
Then I decided to make this prank on the MITS Corporation look like Processor Technology had done it. After all, they did a competing computer, the SOL. I got this idea from my experience at the University of Colorado, when I was able to make it look like another guy had jammed the TVs in my class. Two pranks for the price of one! So the way I did this was I made up a totally phony quote that would raise anybody’s eyebrows. They would think, Whoa. What the hell is he saying? I attributed it to the president of MITS, Ed Roberts, and put it at the top in italics.
The quotation was completely and utterly nonsensical: “Predictable refinement of computer equipment should suggest online reliability. The elite computer hobbyist needs one logical option-less guarantee, yet.” You see? The first letter of each word in those two sentences spells out Processor Technology!
Then, on the reverse side of the paper, I put a comparison chart. That was the common way magazines like Byte would compare computers. How fast are they? How big are they? How much RAM do they have? What processor do they use? Well, in my chart I made up the dumbest categories. Like, I had a category just generally called “hardware.” A computer would get from 1 to 10. Then, software. I rated these computers on uniqueness, on personality, on just the dumbest, most generic terms you would never see a computer rated on. I gave the Zaltair a 1 in every category, of course, and I always made the Altair come in second. Then all the computers that were actually better than the Altair would rate behind that. That way, it looked like they were worthless by comparison, even though anybody at that show probably knew that the competitors were so much better. Of course, I included the Apple II.
I hoped it would look like MITS was lying in their comparison chart anyway.
I realized that, man, this was so big, and there was no way I could get caught at this thing. I couldn’t let it happen. I had two young friends, Chris Espinoza and Randy Wiggington, who knew about it—they were teenagers back then. And I told each of them that, no matter what, they could never tell anyone about it. Even if you get called by the police and they tell you that your partner told them everything, you should still deny everything. We are going to stonewall this, I told them, and never ever admit it to anyone.
Adam Schoolski lived in Los Angeles but he came up for the Faire. And when the four of us got there with the eight thousand handouts, we saw these huge tables where all the companies were putting out their brochures and flyers. We brought two thousand in at first and just set them on a table like what we were doing was normal. And then we went around the Faire, kind of chuckling a little.
But Adam came up to me an hour later and told me the whole box was gone. Carton and everything. Gone.
So we went to our hotel and got another box of two thousand and brought them in. We stood around and watched until eventually some guy walks up, looks at one of the handouts, then picks up the box and takes it away. So we realized that a representative was there from MITS after all, intercepting them!
Now, we went back to the hotel and got a bunch more handouts. This time we didn’t just put the carton down. Instead we carried them in our hands, under our coats, in our backpacks, and we put them in pay phones, corners, tables and everywhere. All over the Faire. We would find stacks of handouts—other companies’ real handouts—and slip a few of ours underneath. So if somebody ran over right away, they wouldn’t think we had slipped in bad stuff. Onesy, twosy, and we didn’t get caught.
Thank god Steve and Mike didn’t find out I’d done this. Mike, at least, would’ve said, “No, don’t do pranks. Don’t do jokes. They give the wrong image to the company.” That’s what any professional type would’ve said. But hey, they were dealing with Steve Wozniak. I did take work seriously—I had engineered a fantastic product, and everyone knew it—and I was serious about starting a company and introducing a product. But to me, that goes along with having fun and playing jokes. I’d spent my whole life like that. If you think about it, even a lot of the personality of the Apple computer was about fun. And that really came about just because my style was to have fun. Jokes make things worth doing.
I couldn’t stop laughing the next day at Apple when Steve saw the comparison chart and started talking all positively about how we actually didn’t perform too badly in the comparison. We were pretty lousy, of course, like everyone else but my made-up Zaltair, but he said, “Hey, we didn’t do too bad, because, after all, we rank better than some of the others.” Oh my god. Randy Wiggington had to run out of there, we were in such tears of laughter!
And the next night, which was the regular Wednesday night Homebrew meeting, I couldn’t wait to see if people had caught on. Sure enough, someone held my thing up in the air and started talking about the Zaltair, saying he’d called the company and this was a fake. A hoax.
It turned out about a third of the people in there, a couple hundred, had actually gotten the handout. So it did get around.
About a week later, Gordon French, who started Homebrew and by now had left his job at Processor Technology, was kicking around Apple to see if there was any consulting work he could do for us. I remember thinking he was just such a nice, pleasant, easygoing guy.
I took the opportunity and said to him, “Oh, did you ever hear about that Zaltair that got introduced?” I could barely hold my laughter when I asked him.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “That hoax. And I know who did it.”
Randy and I both perked up at this. I said, “Who? Who did it?”
He said, “It was Gary Ingram at Processor Technology. He has a strange sense of humor.”
This was exactly what I’d hoped for! Someone else getting the blame—and that someone else happened to be at our rival, Processor Technology. So it was a success.
I said, “You know, I heard there was kind of a code in the handout.” And I pulled the brochure out and looked at the letters like I was discovering this for the first time. “P…R…O…C…”
I’m sure that for years and years after this, everyone thought Processor Technology had done it. I never admitted it to anyone until many years later, when I was at a birthday party for Steve Jobs.
It was there that I presented him with a framed copy of it. As soon as he saw it, Steve broke up laughing. He’d never even suspected I’d done it!