welcome back we've just talked about the first personal computer being the AL te but it was a rinky dink device that you couldn't really do much with except for toggle the switches and look at the light so now we're going to talk about what was in some ways the first personal computer for all of us something you could just take home and use and of course that's the Apple computer Steve wnc the co-inventor of it was one of those people at the very first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club A friend had shown him the flyer that said if you're interested in doing these things if you've been making electronic devices come to the meeting on Wednesday night and Steve wnc showed up he was a very shy very geeky kid whose father was a engineer at locked the AA space company and his father would take him to work and show him how to use all the components of electronics he says what uh was said one of my first memories is is my dad taking me to the workplace on weekends showing me the electronic parts and wnc figured out how to do Boolean logic in a circuit with onoff switches Andor Gates all of those things he also studied computer manuals this is when he's in early in high school ninth 10th grade in order to design office computers using fewer chips that was one of his Specialties he could make magic with very few microchips which was important before Moore's laws kicked in and uh microchips were expensive he went to a school called Homestead High School and he was quite the prankster even though he was so shy he made a bomb ones out of a metronome one of those musical things that goes click click click and counts the beats in the music uh it would he put it uh it wasn't really a bomb but it was supposed to look like one he put it in his locker and let it tick and when they broke open the locker the Headmaster found it ran it into the field and threw it out and then wnc and his friends were laughing and he actually had wnc Center the juvenile detention Center for one night during which wnc taught his other inmates how to take the electrical wires from the light socket and put them on the bars of the uh cells so that they would shock the wardens when they came to open the doors uh he goes down the street one day and meets a kid who's four or five years younger than him Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs was also at Homestead High School W it just graduated and and Steve and he talked about things sitting on the curb in Los Altos the town in Silicon Valley a little bit south of uh Palo Alto uh in Los Altos they'd sit on the curb and they'd talk about Electronics they talk about making uh things they'd also talk about Bob Dylan they were infatuated with Bob Dylan and they started going around trying to score the bootleg tapes that people would made of Bob Dylan concerts uh and they bonded over all the work they did together uh Steve had grown up the adopted child of a uh auto mechanic his father told him when they were making a fence around his backyard that you had to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence and Steve said why nobody will ever see it nobody will ever know his father said yes but you will know and that was an important lesson in Steve's life he said my dad he cared about doing things right he even cared about the parts you couldn't see and for Steve Jobs and this you see an Apple computer over the years Beauty mattered even the beauty of the parts you can't see he was a perfectionist in that way he goes off to read college Steve Jobs does and uh it's an expensive school he's doing partly to stick it to his parents who could barely afford it but finally Steve drops out but having dropped out he just stays there at College anyway living with friends and a me he said he got to sit in on the classes that he wanted to take instead of having to take the classes he didn't want to take so he took C classes in calligraphy and art and music and dance calligraphy where he learned how to make beautiful fonts which is why the Macintosh had such great fonts when it finally came out and he said the minute I dropped out I could do things that were interesting and it allowed him to stand at the intersection of the Arts and Sciences because he studied the Arts but he was a computer geek in 1971 he and his friend Steve wnc come up with the greatest of pranks it's called a blue box Esquire magazine that year had written a story about if you create this electronic box and it has various tones to it you know boop boop then you can make longdistance calls for free if you figure it out and wnc and Steve Jobs went to one of the libraries at Stanford found the Bell System manual that they had tried to recall that told you how to make these tones and wnc was able to make one that was digital and allowed you to hack into a pay phone make the tones and do la longdistance calls and so they do it it's called the blue box and they even try it out once calling the pope and the Vatican and saying that they were Henry Kissinger fortunately whoever it was who was answering the phones at the Vatican didn't really believe them but the cool thing was the longdistance call worked and they didn't have to pay for it it was the start of a story partnership I mean they're great Partnerships in Silicon Valley we talked about Bob noise and uh Gordon Moore and Andy Grove huet and Packard or another and of course Bill Gates and and um Paul Allen will become one of those but one of them was Steve Jobs and wnc and they had very different talents Steve Jobs was a marketer somebody who knew how to make money off of things and knew how to make them beautiful love the design of products was was a hardcore engineer especially a hardware engineer so they pulled their talents they started making the blue box $40 worth of parts and they could sell it for $150 a piece then at one point uh they're trying to sell it to somebody in the parking lot of a pizza joint the person pulls a gun takes their money takes the blue box and so they quit for a while trying to sell the blue box but Steve Jobs later told me if it hadn't been for the blue boxes it wouldn't have been an apple because it showed them how they could combine their talents where W would invent an engineer things and jobs would figure out how to package them and Market them uh Steve Jobs ends up after dropping out of college and doing the blue box uh getting deeply into Zen Buddhism and taking a pilgrimage to India to find his Guru uh his Guru taught him many things including to stare without blinking which was trust me and not nerving talent that Steve had he'd stare at people and say don't be afraid you can do it or he' mind mess with the people when he gets back he goes to work at Atari Atari had just come out with the game pong he's making a lot of money there were ads in all the local newspapers in Silicon Valley they just said have fun make money and then they showed you how to apply to Atari Steve shows up at Atari dressed in a hippie Garb sort of a saffron robe from India and he said he's not going to leave the lobby until he got a job Al alorn the engineer goes to the guy Nolan Bushnell I told you about who was the person who owned the firm and said look let's take a chance let's hire this guy Steve was uh not the easiest employee he called everybody around him dumb shits and he said their ideas sucked and yet he had a certain Charisma to him he managed to be compelling in his saffron robes and walking around barefoot in India his Guru had taught him if he ate only vegetables and Grains and didn't eat meats or anything else uh then he wouldn't have body odor and so Steve did not use deodorant and often didn't shower Al alorn said that was a mistaken Theory so I put him on the night shift Steve learned a lot he said at Atari but mainly how to keep things simple the great instructions avoid ball missing ball in order to get your high score or insert quarter avoid Klingons no manuals and W would come visit in the evenings come visit from his job at uh hulet Packard down the street where W was working and uh they got ass signed or Steve Jobs got assigned by Al alorn to make a single version player of PG that's because W had already made one that you could use on a home TV set and by assigning it to W he knew that by assigning it to Steve Jobs Al Alor knew that Steve would get W to help him and indeed they did the one player version of pong in fact Steve Jobs told Steve wnc you got to do it in for days so we can get back to the apple farm where they were working hence the name of the company they end up founding and was at one point said hey you got to be crazy it can't be done in four days Steve kept saying you can do it you can do it well I said I know how to engineer things you don't it'll take me more than four days Steve used that trick of steering without blinking he said don't be afraid you can do it w said he just got so freaked out by that he went back to his workbench stayed up for three nights and ended up coding the game of breakout so he's there right after they finish the game of breakout in March of 1975 at that first meeting of the home brew Computer Club W goes by himself having just finished the game and everybody's talking about the new Al there's a copy of it there it's on cover popular Electronics but W is too shy to talk to people about he kind of sits in the back has to introduce himself at one point when they call on him he said he worked at UL packet and was working on video games uh but they passed around a specifications sheet for the new Intel microprocessor and was looked at it and he saw something that you and I probably wouldn't fully understand he said he saw that it had instructions for adding a location in me memory to the a register and then for uh taking things out of uh that memory uh and subtracting the memory from it he said whoa wait a minute that's the most exciting thing to discover ever because he figured out you could use that little uh ability that little uh uh Power of that microprocessor in order to help make an easier better computer and so he does he takes a bad a little video monitor like a small TV set and circuits and he takes the Intel 880 microprocessor and on Sunday June 29th working late at night 1975 he types onto a keyboard he's very wigged up to the uh circuit board and then the video monitor and he types in and boom the letters he typed pop up on the video screen as W said it was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on the screen right in front of them a keyboard and a monitor and a circuit had been integrated a microprocessor and designed for an easy to make machine for hobbyists was was too shy to stand in front of the Homebrew Computer Club at the next meeting and show off his device but he stood in the back and he let people come see it he had all the the specifications the schematics the design for it and he handed it out for free I wanted to give it away for free to other people that was the was mentality that was not the Steve Jobs mentality Steve Jobs as with the blue box Steve Jobs shows up at The Homebrew computer club with W helps carry the video monitor that they're going to use to show it off and Steve thought differently he thought we can build and sell these things so Steve Jobs goes to the bite shop a neighborhood computer store and says we're willing to sell you this computer and of course the owner said fine but they've got to all be assembled you can't just sell me the components and think that people are going to solder and you know pull them together I don't have hobbyist here I have people who want computers and so they did they made an Apple computer that had everything integrated into it and by the time they're doing the Apple 2 the next version Steve Jobs did not spend a lot of time worrying about microprocessors he left that to wasc inste he went to Macy's and studied the queing art and he said how would you put it all all together so somebody could just take it out of the box and it would work up until then all these uh computers that hobbyist were building you had to put your own keyboard and connect it to the Circuit then you had to get a monitor and connect it he said no I want everything to be connected that's the way the bite shop wanted it and as Steve Jobs said quote my vision was to create the first fully packaged computer we were no longer aiming for with a handful of hobbyists who like to assemble their own computers in other words we're taking a huge leap here it was no longer for the hobbyists and the hackers and the heath kit building set we were soon going to have a personal computer when you could have on your own and it would be for people who didn't want to assemble it themselves it was going to be an allinone device and so they do they make the Apple too which becomes hugely hugely successful the company goes public wasak and Steve Jobs become rich but even with the Apple 2 there was one thing missing before it be could become part of a true computer Revolution the screen it didn't have an easyto use interface it wasn't really simple for an average person to use it you had to type in command you had to learn the commands you had to know s for display slot assignments and T for set time and B for basic and tutors to explain it to you it was all a rather intimidating user interface and that's leads us to The Next Step a really huge leap in the personal computer and all computer revolutions which is easy to use interfaces intuitive graphical user interfaces unlike the one that was on all other computers at the time all personal computers and even the good selling Apple too thanks