Software Download | News IT | Nikon News | Android Download

 

Steve Wozniak

In 1970, Wozniak became friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs worked for the summer at a company where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.According to Wozniak's autobiography, iWoz, Jobs had the idea to sell the computer as a fully assembled printed circuit board. Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandkids they had had their own company. Together they sold some of their possessions (such as Wozniak's HP scientific calculator and Jobs's Volkswagen van), raised USD $1,300, and assembled the first prototypes in Jobs's bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in Jobs' garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and some computer games Wozniak had developed, similar to SuperPong but with voice overs to the blips on the screen.
Excerpt from the Apple I design manual, including Wozniak's hand-drawn diagrams

By 1971, one year after enrolling, Wozniak withdrew from the University of California, Berkeley and developed the computer that eventually made him famous. By himself he designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the Apple I.[3] With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists very interested in computing, one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over several years. Unlike other Home Brew competitors, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that immediately created buzz and drew a crowd when it was unveiled.

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed Apple Computer. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Their first product, the Apple I computer, was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except it had no provision for internal expansion cards. With the addition of these cards, the Altair could be attached to a computer terminal and could be programmed in BASIC. The Apple I was purely a hobbyist machine, a $25 microprocessor (MOS 6502) on a single-circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. It lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, or display, which had to be provided by the user. The Apple I was priced at $666. (Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500 plus a 1/3 markup, which is actually $666.67, rounding up to the nearest penny.) Jobs and Wozniak sold their first fifty system boards to Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop, called the Byte Shop, in Mountain View, California.

Visit Best Blog 2012 :

Comments :

0 comments to “Steve Wozniak”

Popular Posts

 
Copyright © 2011 Deni Blog All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | About | Sitemap