The duo's primitive blue-box factory began to manufacture MF-ers on nearly an assembly-line basis. Jobs, whose sales ability was apparent even then, managed to find buyers who would purchase up to ten at a time. In interviews given since, they estimated that they probably sold a couple hundred of the devices. Under California law at the time, selling blue boxes was perfectly legal, although using them was an offense. They got close to getting caught only once, when they were approached by the highway patrol while using one of their own blue boxes at a telephone booth. They weren't arrested--but only because the patrolman didn't recognize the strange device they had with them.
The two Steves had grown up in the area around Los Altos, part of that stretch of Santa Clara County between San Francisco and San Jose that would later become known as Silicon Valley. They had both been brought up surrounded by the ideas and technology that were to transform the area: Wozniak's father was an electronics engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and helped his son learn to design logic circuits. When the two boys first met, Jobs was particularly impressed that Wozniak had already built a computer that had won the top prize at the Bay Area science fair.
It has been said that Jobs and Wozniak were the perfect team, and that without Jobs, the entrepreneur, Woz would never have outgrown Homebrew. Wozniak was, at heart, a hacker and a phreaker; at the club he liked to swap stories with Draper, and he once tried to phreak a call to the pope by pretending to be Henry Kissinger. Before a Vatican official caught on, he had almost succeeded in getting through. Jobs, on the other hand, was first and foremost a businessman. He needed Wozniak to design the products--the blue boxes, the computers--for him to sell.
The Apple computer happened almost by accident. Had he had enough money, Woz would have been happy to go out and buy a model from one of the established manufacturers. But he was broke, so he sat down and began designing his own homemade model.
He had set out to build something comparable to the desktop computer he used at Hewlett-Packard, where he worked at the time. That computer was called the 9830 and sold for $10,000 a unit. Its biggest advantage was that it used BASIC, a computer language that closely resembles normal English. BASIC alleviated a lot of complications: a user could sit down, turn on the machine, and begin typing, which wasn't always possible with other computer languages.
BASIC--an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code--had already been adapted by software pioneers Bill Gates and Paul Allen for use on the Altair. (Gates--soon to become America's youngest billionaire--and Allen went on to found Microsoft, probably the world's most powerful software company.) The language was compact, in that it required very little computer memory to run, an essential requirement for microcomputers. Woz began work on his new computer by adapting BASIC to run with a microprocessor--a sort of mini computer brain, invented earlier in the decade, which packed all the functions of the central processing unit (CPU) of a large computer onto a tiny semiconductor chip. The invention allowed the manufacture of smaller computers, but attracted little attention from traditional computer companies, who foresaw no market at all for PCs. All the action in those days was with mainframes.
Woz's prototype was first demonstrated to the self-proclaimed radicals at the Homebrew Club, who liked it enough to place a few orders. Even more encouraging, the local computer store, the Byte Shop, placed a single order for $50,000 worth of the kits.
The Byte Shop was one of the first retail computer stores in the world. and its manager knew that a fully assembled, inexpensive home computer would sell very well. The idea was suggested to Jobs, who began looking for the financial backing necessary to turn the garage assembly operation he and Woz now ran into a real manufacturing concern.
How the two Steves raised the money for Apple has been told before. Traditional manufacturers turned them down, and venture capitalists had difficulty seeing beyond appearance and philosophy. It was a clash of cultures. Jobs and Woz didn't look like serious computer manufacturers; with their long hair and stan- dard uniform of sandals and jeans, they looked like student radicals. One venture capitalist, sent out to meet Jobs at the garage, described him as an unusual business prospect, but eventually they did find a backer.
