Steve Wozniak recounts early Apple history and his role in creating color graphics for personal computers. He describes selling his HP-65 calculator to fund the first Apple board, collaborating with Steve Jobs on selling assembled units, the intensive four-day Atari project, and the eureka moment when the first Apple II prototype produced colored pixels (blue and yellow) using a low-cost one-chip technique that made color and graphics affordable.
Questions this video answers
Sold it for $500 but only received $250.
Four days.
A blue dot and a yellow dot appeared when writing to memory.
Chapters
First, the Apple get started. How did that whole dream get started the first day? Well, the first day, I mean, I had this computer that I was giving away all the designs for. Freely. Freely, yeah. Steve Jobs just said, wow, we should sell these PC boards, build them for $20, sell it for $40, and we have to come up with a few hundred bucks each. And that was tough. I had to sell the most valuable thing I owned, my Hewlett Packard 65 calculator. Sold it for 500 bucks, and I only got 250. The guy never showed up again. So we put a few hundred bucks in to make this PC board. And then we got a little bit bigger interest. The owner of the local store had been looking over my shoulder at the computer club. And this thing is actually running software and programs. And so he decided he wanted to buy the complete things all built. And we didn't quite supply the Apple one. Completely built. We didn't have time to get cases and power supplies done. That was the Apple ii. That was later. And when the Apple II came along, yes, Steve and I both looked at each other. It was the day that I had come up with this little idea in my head when I was in a dreamy state. You know when you lose sleep, how you get a little creative thinking. I was down at Atari and we had a job. Steve came to me, he said, you have to design this project in four days. And back then, a game, an arcade game, was not a program. It was not software. And it would take six months. So I had to do it in four days. Wow, I was great. I said, I don't know if I can do this. We stayed up without sleep for four days and nights. We both got mononucleosis, the sleeping sickness, and delivered it. But while my head was sort of half awake and half asleep, I saw this thing on the factory floor of Atari. All the games were black and white TVs. This one game, it was going back and forth, changing color, and my eyes couldn't quite focus. I was so tired. And so I went back to a lab bench. Steve was wiring up my design on one side of the lab, and I'm on the other side thinking, color television. I remember how the frequencies go from high school electronics. What if I. And then I came up with this little method of taking a little one chip digital, putting ones and zeros in it, cycling around 1 0, 1, 0, 1 0, up, down, up, down, up, down. I could make it look like color tv. Would it work? It doesn't. It's not the formulas. They have all this complicated calculus and hundreds of parts and thousand dollars to generate col. You know, in TV stations. Would this little idea with a $1 chip work? And the day that I actually built it, the first Apple II prototype and I could type something to memory and a blue dot pops up on the screen of the tv. I type something else in the memory, a yellow dot pops up. I called Steve Jobs over and you know, that was a eureka moment. We were shaking. This is so big. All the colored games are now going to be on computers. Everything is done. So that all started with you, the color. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. That was a really incredible. That's probably my best patent, bringing color to the world. You're not in Kansas anymore. That's why we chose a six color logo for our first logo from Apple. We were the ones that brought color because nobody would have ever expected color on an affordable computer, much less the graphics that we had. And we even had pixels so you could almost have photographs on a screen. No, it was so far ahead of its time that everybody else was going to have to sit back and figure out ways to do it. IBM on the PCs did a horrible, horrible attempt at color. They just said your letters can be a certain color and their background can be a color. But we really didn't. They didn't really do graphics pure like we did.
