1975 · Keyboard-to-Screen Prototype · Work 965 of 1,871
The engineering floor of a calculator maker in California at ten on a Sunday night in June, the floor dark between grey fabric partitions, one fluorescent tube above a single cubicle, on its desk a bare green circuit board crowded with small black chips, wires to a loose keyboard with plain unmarked cream keys and to a small portable television whose dark screen shows a short row of soft white glowing marks and a bright square cursor, an oscilloscope and a soldering iron, a young man of twenty-four at the keyboard seen from directly behind, face turned fully away, dark hair reaching his collar, in a plain brown flannel shirt.
Who
Steve Wozniak (born 1950) is an American engineer and co-founder of Apple. Born on 11 August 1950 in San Jose, California, he worked for about four years at Hewlett-Packard, in its calculator division. In his spare time he built a computer of his own, which he showed at the Homebrew Computer Club, a gathering of hobbyists in Menlo Park. On 1 April 1976 he founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs. Their first product, the Apple I, was a bare circuit board without a case for 666.66 dollars; buyers had to add a power supply, keyboard and display themselves. Only about 200 were made. In 1977 came the Apple II, also designed by Wozniak and promoted as a computer for ordinary people; with the spreadsheet program VisiCalc it became a bestseller from 1979. In 1981 Wozniak returned to the University of California, Berkeley, to finish his degree. In 1985 he received the National Medal of Technology, and in 2000 he was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame. Later he championed computers in the classroom.
The moment
On Sunday, 29 June 1975, at around 10 pm, Wozniak, as he remembers it, sat at his workplace at Hewlett-Packard, where he returned after hours to build his computer. In front of him lay a circuit board with 32 chips, connected to a keyboard and a screen. After about an hour of debugging a cursor stood on the screen; only when he swapped the program chips did typed letters appear. "I typed a few keys on the keyboard and I was shocked! The letters were displayed on the screen," he wrote later. In his words it was the first time anyone had typed on a keyboard and seen the character appear straight away on their own computer's screen. Hobby computers such as the Altair still showed their results through rows of lights. The picture shows that moment: a single fluorescent tube above one cubicle, a few bright marks and the cursor on the small screen.
The other side
The computer that became Apple was built after hours in another company's office. Wozniak felt bound to offer it to his employer first; Hewlett-Packard, he says, turned him down five times. His request to move from calculators to computer development was refused as well. In the end he was hoping for the rejection himself. He had wanted to give the design away; it was Steve Jobs who talked him into selling it. So a hobbyist's evening became a business, and the company at whose desk it began let it go.
What the sources leave open: Date, time and place rest on Wozniak's own memory (iWoz, 2006); there is no document from 1975. Wozniak speaks of a small black-and-white TV, Smithsonian Magazine of a monitor. There is no public-domain photograph from that time, so the picture shows him from behind; hair and shirt are assumed.