Apple I
It was 1975, in the intellectual ferment of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley. Steve Wozniak, a discreet but passionate figure at these electronics hobbyist meetings, had cobbled together something unusual: a computer he wanted to show the other club members. His friend Steve Jobs, whom he’d met four years earlier, immediately sensed something more than just an enthusiast’s project.
The heart of this machine was based on a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz. Wozniak had the idea of integrating a video interface directly into his system, capable of displaying 24 lines of 40 characters on any standard television set. This was far from obvious. The machine came with 4 KB of RAM, expandable to 8 KB, with dynamic shift registers managing the display.
Everything changed when Paul Terrell showed up. This owner of the Byte Shop, a computer store in Mountain View, ordered 50 machines outright. Jobs and Wozniak looked at each other: they had neither the money nor the infrastructure to produce anything at that scale. Wozniak sacrificed his precious HP-65 calculator, Jobs his Volkswagen van. With this money and a 30-day credit negotiated with suppliers, they launched into the venture.
Contrary to the legend of the family garage, the reality of production proved more prosaic. The boards were manufactured and wave-soldered in a real factory, probably Santa Clara Circuits. The famous Jobs family garage mainly served for final testing and assembly. Daniel Kottke, Jobs’s friend, spent his evenings testing the machines while Wozniak intervened to troubleshoot the trickiest cases.
The Apple I hit the market in a form that surprised people. No case, no keyboard, no screen: just a bare motherboard that the buyer had to complete according to their means and desires. Paul Terrell was stunned when he received his order. He expected complete computers, not circuit boards. The price was set at $666.66, not out of provocation but because Wozniak loved repeating numbers.
On the software side, the Apple I remained spartan. A small monitor in ROM allowed direct entry of programs in machine language. Wozniak then developed his own BASIC interpreter, inspired by his experience at HP with calculators. But this BASIC had some flaws: impossible to manipulate decimals or numbers beyond 32,767, a limitation that would also plague the first version of the Apple II.
The audio cassette interface, added later, turned into a nightmare. Liza Loop, the first official buyer, struggled like many other users with her Apple I that refused to cooperate. Wozniak, brilliant with digital electronics, floundered a bit when tackling analog electronics. The Apple II would fortunately benefit from the support of other engineers to fix the problems.
Nevertheless, Wozniak incorporated remarkable technical innovations into his design. He cleverly diverted the video circuit counters to refresh the RAM, a technique he would refine on the Apple II. The video circuit kept its mysteries: certain parts remained obscure, even for Wozniak, who may have drawn inspiration from Don Lancaster’s “TV Typewriter,” published in Radio-Electronics in 1973.
In the end, fewer than 200 Apple Is came off the production lines. A modest score that in no way foreshadowed the tidal wave that would follow. Today, between 30 and 50 specimens survive in private collections or museums. Some come from Apple employees who recovered them in the 1970s from unsold stock or customer returns.
The Apple I was never a commercial success, but it forged something infinitely more precious: experience. Jobs and Wozniak learned on the job the ins and outs of computer design, production, and sales. Every flaw in the Apple I was a lesson for the Apple II, which would break all records with more than 6 million units sold over sixteen years.
This first machine, beyond a technical anecdote, embodied the idea that a computer could address the general public, escape from laboratories and universities to land in the average person’s home. The Apple I opened a breach through which millions of other machines would rush.
It also testified to that blessed era when a few electronics enthusiasts, armed only with their ingenuity and a few thousand dollars, could shake up an entire industry. The story of its creation perfectly captured this alchemy between Wozniak’s technical genius and Jobs’s commercial instinct, a recipe that would propel Apple to unimaginable heights.