The Apple I

40 years ago, on July 29th, 1975, Steve Wozniak booted up for the first time the computer he designed and built on his own.

At the beginning of March 1975, in Menlo Park, Gordon French hosted in his garage the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club, where the Altair was demoed.

Wozniak participated with his friend Allen Baum and his imagination was struck most of all by Altair’s Intel 8080 microprocessor. Suddenly, he had an insight.

As stated in Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs”:

“[Wozniak] had been designing a terminal, with a keyboard and monitor, that would connect to a distant minicomputer. Using a microprocessor, he could put some of the capacity of the minicomputer inside the terminal itself, so it could become a small stand-alone computer on a desktop.”

That same night, after the HCC meeting, Wozniak started to sketch out (on paper) the schematics of what would later become the Apple I.

For months every night Wozniak would head back to Hewlett Packard (where he was an employee) to labor on his project, figuring out which components to use, and how, and to write the software code.

Then, at the end of July, the young engineer reached a milestone. As he recalls in Isaacson’s book:

“I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen.”

He showed his computer to Steve Jobs, who peppered him with questions about its potential and expandability, helped him obtain components and showcase it around.

Nine months later, on April 1, 1976, Wozniak and Jobs met with HP colleague Ron Wayne in his apartment, and drew up a partnership agreement: Apple was born.

Note: The image of Wozniak in ASCII ART is from the Instagram account of Verde Binario, the MIAI (Museo Interattivo di Archeologia Informatica) in Cosenza, Italy.