iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith Page A

disk drives the size of dishwashers attached to it. There were some wires hanging loose with engineers working on them. And I thought, Wow, here's a computer actually being designed and built. That was a shock for me to see.
Another shock turned out to be that I had walked in the wrong door, that I wasn't at the Data General company at all, but at a smaller company called Tenet. Allen and I both filled out applications for jobs as programmers—and you know what? We got them.
We got to program in the language FORTRAN, and also in machine language, which is nearest to the lowest-level language (Is and Os) a computer can understand. We got to know that computer so deeply that summer. We really got into the depths of its architecture. Personally, I didn't think much of the architecture inside, although they ended up building something pretty good—a working computer, a fast computer, a low-cost computer for what it was. I mean, it cost more than $100,000, and those were 1970 dollars. I was impressed by that. It had an operating system that worked well and several programming languages.
Now, of course, in no way was that Tenet computer like our computers today. It had no screen for a display and no keyboard to type into. It had lights you had to read off a front panel, and it took information from punch cards. But for the time being, yeah, I guess it was pretty cool.
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Tenet actually went out of business the next summer—I stayed for the duration, having decided not to return to school that year after all—but my time there turned out to be really fortunate.
You see, during the summer, I remember telling one Tenet executive how I had spent the last few years designing and redesigning existing computers on paper but could never build one because I didn't have the parts.
One time, at my old friend Bill Werner's house, I got Bill to call up a chip company, but he could never get them to give us free parts, never. But I asked this Tenet executive, and he said, "Sure, I can get you the parts." I guess he had access to sample parts, and that was what I needed.
To help him avoid having to get me tons and tons of parts— parts I would need to build some kind of existing minicomputer—I decided I would build a computer that was just a little one with very few chips.
I'm talking about, like, about twenty chips—which is veiy, very few chips compared to the hundreds it would have taken to build a normal computer at the time.
Now, I had this other friend, Bill Fernandez, who lived down the block. I started hanging around at his house, and we just started putting together this little computer I designed (first on paper, of course) piece by piece, bit by bit. He helped me by doing all kinds of things—like soldering, for instance.
Anyway, we would do this in his garage, and then we'd ride our bikes down to the Sunnyvale Safeway, where we would buy Cragmont cream soda, and then drink it while we worked on this machine. That's how we started referring to it as the Cream Soda Computer. All the Cream Soda Computer was, really, was a little circuit board that allowed you to plug in connectors and solder the chips I had to the connectors. This board was tiny—I would say it was no larger than four to six inches.
Like all the computers at the time, there wasn't a screen or a keyboard. No one had thought of that yet. Instead you'd write a program, punch it into a punch card, slide it in, and then you'd get your answer by reading the flashing lights on the front panel. Or, for instance, you could write a program that would tell the computer to beep every three seconds. And if it did, then you would know it was working. It turned out just as I had designed it, with few chips because I didn't want to ask that executive for too many free samples. So it was just the most minimum thing you could even call a computer. What I mean by that is, it could run a program. It could give you results.
The other significant thing about it was the fact