A Calculator and a Dream
Apple started with two guys and a few hundred dollars each.
Wozniak sold his prized HP-65 calculator for $500 to fund the first batch of PC boards. He only got $250 because the buyer disappeared. Jobs pitched the idea: build boards for $20, sell them for $40. That was the entire business plan.
"Steve Jobs just said wow, we should sell these PC boards. Build them for $20, sell it for $40. We'd have to come up with a few hundred bucks each and that was tough."
Four Days Without Sleep
The breakthrough came from exhaustion. Wozniak was at Atari, running on zero sleep, when he spotted something on the factory floor.
Jobs had dragged him into a project that needed to ship in four days. Arcade games took six months. They stayed up for four straight days and nights. Both got mononucleosis from the sleep deprivation. But Wozniak's half-conscious brain saw a color-shifting game on a black-and-white TV and started connecting dots.
"We stayed up without sleep for 4 days and nights. We both got mononucleosis. But while my head was half awake and half asleep, I saw this thing on the factory floor. All the games were black and white TVs. This one game was going back and forth changing color."
The One-Dollar Chip That Changed Everything
Color TV required complicated calculus and hundreds of parts to generate color. Wozniak did it with a single digital chip.
He remembered high school electronics. He put ones and zeros into a cheap chip, cycling them in patterns. The engineering textbooks said it shouldn't work. He built it anyway. When a blue dot appeared on screen, then a yellow one, he called Jobs over. They were shaking.
"I came up with this little method of taking a little one-chip digital, putting ones and zeros in it. Would this little idea with a $1 chip work? I could type something in the memory and a blue dot pops up. I type something else, a yellow dot pops up. I called Steve Jobs over and that was a Eureka moment."
Years Ahead of Everyone
The Apple 2 didn't just have color. It had graphics. Pixels. Almost photographic images on a screen. Nobody else came close.
IBM's attempt at color was a joke. They let you change the color of your letters and their background. That was it. No real graphics. Apple had pure pixel-level color rendering on an affordable home computer. It took years for anyone to catch up.
"Nobody would have ever expected color on an affordable computer, much less the graphics that we had. We even had pixels so you could almost have photographs on a screen. It was so far ahead of its time that everybody else was going to have to sit back and figure out ways to do it."