Steve Jobs on Apple II: Two Kids in a Garage Made Good

Of course, I'll never forget the day that I was down at the first professional engineering symposium of my life, and all of a sudden somebody comes out and they go over to the mic and they say, would Paul Terrell please go over to the door? So I get up and walk over the door and they say, you've got an emergency telephone call, you've got to go answer this phone, you know. So I go over to the telephone and I get on there and it's Kramer Electronics and the guy says, I just had a couple of guys in here. He says, I don't believe this. He said, they were in here to buy parts to build a computer and they had a written purchase order from you for 50 Apple One computers And these guys have convinced me that if I sell them the parts and give them thirty day terms, that they will build these boards up, they will deliver them to you, you will pay them COD.

You know, I thought, hey. That's the deal. God only knows where he built them, but he showed up on the doorstep on the day with with the parts. I wanted a computer my whole life. That was my big thing in life. But I could never get even near enough to actually toggle the switches and put my own programming. And all of a sudden, just realized, hey. Microprocessors, all of a sudden, it's affordable. I can actually build my own. And Steve went a little further. Steve saw it more as, you know, a product that you can actually deliver or sell and someone else can use.

I remember I remember driving down Highway 85. We're on the freeway, and Steve mentions I got a name, Apple Computer. And we kept trying to think of other alternatives to that name. We couldn't think of anything better. And also remember, I'd worked at Atari, and it it got us ahead of Atari in the phone book. Remember an Apple one was was not particularly usable for too much, but it was it was so incredible to be able to have your own computer. It sort of said, when you buy a computer, you don't want a bunch of switches and lights to toggle stuff in binary. You want a keyboard to start typing, and you want a video display to display all the characters. It was sort of an embarkation point from the way computers have been going in these big steel boxes with switches and lights to a completely assembled computer on a single board that you could be using within a few hours after buying.

Still, the audience had to connect it to their own video monitor, connect their own keyboard. Oh, yeah. Some people put them in these beautiful walnut cases, and some people put them in big metal boxes, and some people didn't put them in any boxes at all. And then having the club as a socializing gathering was a good way to show off. And I would hold the the PC board up in the air and answer a few questions, and some of the questions, what do you plan to add to it? One of the things I thought about was color, a simple technique for generating color based upon just studying TV when I was in high school. So I started thinking, I'm always thinking, how do you reduce the number of components? And I came up with a much more optimal design that was half the components and twice the power. Plus it had color, paddle, sound, all that in the end. That was the Apple two. Every few days, Woz would, you know, say, god, I've made incredible breakthrough.

Mean, I've saved a few chips here and there. And I remember this iterative process of watching him get to this incredible stage, but then figure out a way to take another few parts out and add three more features. And it kept getting better and better and better, and it was like polishing. Was like you had something really neat to start with, but then you just polished it. And polished it, it got better and better and better and better and tighter and tighter. And it it ended up, of course, being legendary. You know, our dream was to have a computer in a plastic case sort of as a statement against those big metal boxes. And then, Jerry Mannich was the person that designed the Apple II case. From the time I met Jerry Mannich to the time we had final drawings was three weeks. So we didn't, we didn't try a lot of things. We just did what what we thought would be great. And I think, you know, if you look at an Apple II today, it still looks good.

And that's that's not something that most products can say almost ten years after their introduction. We started small. We started with nothing. Two guys and $1,300. And because of that, we've had to depend very heavily on other people, the users, the dealers. And so we established a much better relationship with our dealers and our customers. And the dealers love the Apple too. I mean, the dealers from the very beginning loved it because they could just sell this one box for the first time. They didn't... Remember the early dealers used to have people in the back rooms assembling the kits for people that didn't want to assemble themselves. It was sort of a real hobby hangout. I had this retail store in 1975. We opened the bike shop, officially opened the doors.

I remember Steve one day came by and said, you know, this is insane. You know, you have to build these things. Somebody should make them assemble a computer, and this thing would just grow so much faster. We've helped create an entrepreneurial computer program. You can sit at home, write a program, and hope to make a million dollars off it. Just the way a a rock star could hope to cut a tape, make a record, and make a million dollars off that. I remember the first day this this real tall guy named Dan Fylstra was walking through Vanley I, which was the only building we had at that time, and with this diskette saying, this is gonna be a revolution.

You know? So what's that? He said, oh, it's it's... We haven't got a name for it, but it's sort of a sort of a way to put rows and columns of numbers together. It's sort of like a a a a visible calculator, you know, and that was what he was calling it at that time. And it would only work on one computer, the Apple two, because it was the only one of those personal computers that had enough memory. That was the first time that software sold hardware. So it was like the extra capability that had... That existed in our product really made a lot of things possible for Apple and put Apple into the leading position. When you buy an Apple, you can get almost any type of program you want regardless of what you wanna do. There's games. There's hundreds of games. There's there's probably a dozen word processors, probably a dozen databases.

It showed up in third world countries. It showed up at Standard Oil running their offshore oil platforms. It showed up in schools. You turn a six year old loose with logo, and before you know it, by the time they're in the second grade, they understand variables and, many sided polygons and the relationship between polygons and circles. And the curriculum says they aren't supposed to know that until they're in the eighth grade. There's just been a lot of people who've spent uncountable, enjoyable hours discovering, you know, all about computers and all about themselves messing around with an Apple TV. Every single step of the way, we knew that we were the leader.

We knew why. We knew why this product was the best one. It was totally obvious. We we changed... We upgraded the system from sets of floppies from integer basic to floating point basic to lowercase. So we went through many of those improvements, we always had to remember a huge body of... For our customers that were so important. We really care about the people that buy our our products. You know, we care about those people out there. Ever since the beginning, we sort of considered them, you part of the Apple family. And then we saw the same kind of resurgence, just an incremental kick when the two meat came out because there was a real pent up demand. It was obvious there was a pent up demand for a better Apple too. It provides more solutions for more people in terms of software and hardware put together to do a job than any computer in history in history.

We shipped more Apple twos in the first four years than all the computers ever in the history of man that had ever been shipped. There's a lot of resurgence of interest in the two. And and what's really interesting is you read more and more articles and you see more and more quotes about the apple two lasting forever. I think it all just stems from mostly Woz's perception of the universe, which is trying to make stuff really great and really simple. It's so neat, you know, it's so fun to see. I don't know what's gonna happen, but, you know, I can... I'm just watching these guys, you can just see those wheels spinning, and you know, oh, boy, they're they're going home working, and there's some good stuff that's gonna happen. I mean, it's everything from, you know, the first piece of machinery that brought computing to people to the, you know, sort of two kids in garage made good.