Ep. 1: Apple I

Morgan Hale

In July of 1976, at a meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak hooked up a single printed circuit board to an inexpensive Sears keyboard and plugged it right into a standard television screen. Now, to the room full of hobbyists, this was a, a complete shock. People back then were used to microcomputers like the Altair 8800, where you programmed by flipping row after row of physical toggle switches and watching tiny red LED lights blink back at you. Here was a board that actually displayed text on a television screen at sixty characters per second.

Morgan Hale

Wozniak, or Woz as everyone called him, had not originally planned to start a commercial company. He just wanted a low cost computer terminal for his own personal use so he could play games and write code. He initially wanted to use a Motorola 6800 processor, but at one hundred seventy five dollars, it was far too expensive. Then, in late 1975, MOS Technology introduced the 6502 processor for just twenty five dollars. That dramatic price drop made Wozniak's entire project economically feasible. He adapted his circuit design and actually offered the completed computer board to his employer, Hewlett Packard, five separate times. Hewlett Packard turned him down on all five occasions.

Morgan Hale

Wozniak was perfectly content to just hand out his circuit schematics to fellow hobbyists at the club for free. But his twenty one year old friend Steve Jobs saw something else entirely. Jobs recognized the commercial potential and convinced Wozniak that they should manufacture and sell printed circuit boards together for others to assemble. On April first, 1976, along with Ronald Wayne, they officially founded the Apple Computer Company.

Morgan Hale

To raise the thirteen hundred dollars in initial capital needed to order blank circuit boards, Jobs sold his beloved Volkswagen Type 2 microbus, and Wozniak sold his prized HP 65 programmable calculator. They set up an assembly process in the Jobs family garage, hand soldering chips and stuffing components onto circuit boards day and night.

Morgan Hale

When you look at Apple today, a multi trillion dollar global icon launching polished devices at carefully staged keynote events, it is, it is wild to reflect on where it started. It started on a workbench in a Palo Alto garage, built on a sold van, a sold calculator, and a hand soldered motherboard.

Morgan Hale

The major breakthrough for the brand new company came when Steve Jobs demonstrated a prototype to Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop, a pioneering computer retail store in Mountain View, California. Terrell was impressed by the machine, but he made one very strict condition. He was not interested in buying bare circuit board kits that hobbyists had to solder together themselves. He told Jobs he would order fifty units at five hundred dollars each, paid cash on delivery, but only if the boards came fully assembled.

Morgan Hale

That fifty unit purchase order meant Jobs needed thousands of dollars worth of electronic parts right away, money Apple did not have. So Jobs took the written purchase order to Cramer Electronics, a national parts distributor. He convinced the credit manager to give him the components on net thirty day terms, explaining that he would build the computers, deliver them to Terrell, collect the cash on delivery, and pay off the credit account within thirty days. The credit manager called Terrell to verify the order, Terrell confirmed it, and Apple secured its parts.

Morgan Hale

The Apple 1 officially went on sale in July 1976 at an introductory price of six hundred sixty six dollars and sixty six cents. Why that specific figure? Wozniak later explained that he had no idea about any biblical association with those numbers. He simply liked repeating digits, and it represented a one third markup on their five hundred dollar wholesale price.

Morgan Hale

The computer was delivered as a preassembled motherboard with built in video display terminal circuitry. Leaving buyers to supply their own wooden or plastic case, power supply transformers, ASCII keyboard, and composite television monitor. If users wanted to save and load programs without retyping hexadecimal machine code by hand each time, Apple offered an optional seventy five dollar cassette interface card, which came with a free tape containing Wozniak's Integer BASIC interpreter.

Morgan Hale

By placing video display terminal circuitry directly onto the motherboard, Wozniak established Apple's foundational design priority: making computing visual and accessible. Tracing how this motherboard established Apple's template of prioritizing direct display output over raw switch toggles, brought to you by Jellypod AI, the generative media creation studio.

Morgan Hale

Apple manufactured roughly two hundred Apple 1 boards in total before officially discontinuing the system on September thirtieth, 1977. By then, Apple was offering trade ins and discounts to persuade Apple 1 owners to return their boards in exchange for the new Apple II. Apple actually destroyed most of those returned boards, which is why surviving units are so extremely rare today, with authentic boards fetching hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars at auction.

Morgan Hale

The Apple 1 was on the market for barely a year, but those two hundred motherboards proved that personal computing was ready for a display screen instead of a box of switches. It was the crucial step that set up everything that followed.