Couldn’t be the real flag. It did fly all the time. I gave away a lot of my stock to do the right thing, very rare but true. I didn’t go into all this for the money.

Brian, this is Steve. I hope that I can get to see you, but if not, best wishes anyway. I do remember your name when I see this and I remember the two Fort Lauderdale visits as great ones. The parts that I recall might differ from your own. I remember your BBS and was very impressed. The second trip was the week that the Macintosh was introduced and I brought Andy, Burrell, and Bill Atkinson along as a special gift to your club and the one in Washington D.C. (if I remember correctly) where the projector almost didn’t arrive in time. I remember crying on the plane coming into Fort Lauderdale but I won’t say why here.

I get to hear back very often from people that I apparently made a positive difference in their lives, with special gifts or sponsorship. Many of them turn out very successful and I hope that they’ve been influenced positively. I’ve mostly forgotten these incidents. There are many many of them. Plus, they are part of my ‘way’ and not individually special. I am so glad that you remember this good thing.

Nice to get your good letter. I hope that you far exceed all of your heroes. You can call me a friend, but I won’t be able to spend a lot of time and probably won’t have much to teach you. I assure you that I rarely have a free moment and that too many people are looking for my time.

Your goals and achievements certainly impress me. I hope that no matter how many things you accomplish and no matter how successful you are, that you always enjoy a little popular music. Singers inspire what we want to be in life and how we want to live our lives as much as any heroes.

I think that the web is more user friendly than software is. I hate SPAM. I don’t think that companies take responsibility for their software or hardware. Customer support matches voice mail menu systems for helpfulness these days. Someday that should all change to favor the customers first.

I wish I could. I always look back favorably at the US Festivals.
They were the best ever. You’ll hear that often from people that attended

I’m surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out
when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform
at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We
should do what we can to accept the other platforms. All the best people
in life seem to like LINUX.

Sinclaire kept coming out with very inexpensive, great, products. Many of them I bought. I think that he did have some marketing, if not the longest life products. I even bought a ZX80, and later the Timex version.

My own BASIC was the hardest task of developing the Apple I and ][ computers. I’d never studied compiler/interpreter writing and had only practiced my ideas on paper before. I’d read some good books on the subject. I’d never programmed in BASIC before the Apple I. I just sniffed the air and decided that the games that would drive personal computers were written in BASIC. I picked up a manual at Hewlett Packard and used their variant of BASIC as my model. Either they had good substring syntax or I evolved my own based on theirs, but I much preferred it to the DEC style that Microsoft went with, using LEFT$ and MID$ and RIGHT$ functions. I laid out my syntax charts and made a decision to take floating point out so that I could finish slightly sooner and have the first BASIC for the 6502 processor ever. I mainly wanted it to be able to play games. Then I knew it was good enough for whatever else. I also wanted to program solutions to my Hewlett Packard engineering problems. That’s where I worked as an engineer designing calculators.

I could go on. The BASIC turned out extremely modular, so I could easily add something by adding some syntax descriptions in near-text form, and write routines for the new functions or ops that were needed. The language didn’t have to be rewritten.

Experimenting with blue boxes to make calls anywhere in the world while at Berkely in 1971-1972, I encountered a few Dial-a-Jokes in the world. I never used the blue box to save money on phone calls, I was an ethical hacker.

So while working as an engineer at Hewlett Packard, designing scientific calculators, I started the first Dial-a-Joke in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was before you could buy answering machines or even telephones. I had to rent a very expensive machine made for theaters, and eventually had to quit because I couldn’t afford it. I got so many calls that I had to keep changing the number. Anyone with a similar number would get 100 calls a day. The best known numbers that I had were (408) 255-6666 and (408) 575-1625. I operated Dial-a-Joke out of my Cupertino apartment, where I did a lot of the Apple designing (I designed every bit and wrote all the code including BASIC myself). I used a thick Eastern accent, like Russian, and used the name Stanley Zebrezuskinitsky when I took live calls.

I wanted to give the first Apple I, on a PC board, to Liza LO*OP of the LO*OP Center in Cotati, California. I took Steve [Jobs] up there and she showed us how she rolled a PDP-11 around to elementary schools and told the students how a computer was just a collection of programs written by people and didn’t have a mind of it’s own. 4th through 6th graders. I admired this and wanted to give her the first one. Jobs actually made me buy it, if you can believe that, for $300. I did and gave it to Liza. The one being advertised must be number 2.

I didn’t totally quit. I always kept a small employment status at Apple. I should ALWAYS be a part of it. But I’m non-political and could not run a company or manage people well. Its not my thing.

Thanks for your confidence. I know that I’d have done things differently, but I wouldn’t want to say that things would have turned out better. It’s a hard question.

Many feel that I, the sole inventor and engineer of some incredible products and software and even our Apple ][ BASIC, that kicked this whole revolution off, deserves the most credit. Well, I’m happy that people and books generally accept me as a good engineer. I don’t need the political credit. That seems to go with whoever is currently “in office” and that part is not for me.

The personalities and incidents are accurate in the sense that they all occured but they are often with the wrong parties (Bill Fernandez, Apple employee #4, was with me and the computer that burned up in 1970) and at the wrong dates (when John Sculley joined, he had to redirect attention from the Apple III, not the Mac, to the Apple ][ ) and places (Homebrew Computer Club was at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center).

I did give a lot of stock to employees that were with us from the beginning, etc. I also designed 2 computers (the Apple I being the first typewriter model with a keyboard ever and the Apple II being too spectacular to detail :o) ), a mini OS, app software, my own BASIC, lots of interfaces (cassette, printer, serial, modem, floppy) and more. Heck, in the movie Ed Roberts had the Altair computer KIT and Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the BASIC. That’s the last real design any of the other principals did. The part about me being the only true engineer wasn’t played out much.

It’s funny, but even with all the things that aren’t said outright, a great number of people, like yourself, saw a lot of things in that movie that are totally true. The personalities were very accurately portrayed.

I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I’d been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That’s what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it.

I often wonder why I remained the person I always wanted to be, from late high school on. I wanted to be an engineer and then a 5th grade teacher and I wanted a computer someday and I wanted to be nice to people and I wanted to tell and make jokes and I wanted a family and home. It couldn’t have come truer for me.

Noble idea. They didn’t show it but I gave out schematics to my Apple I at the Homebrew Computer Club before Steve Jobs suggested starting a company. I’d gladly approve you being able to make a cheap one, but don’t know how it would be possible today. If it were possible, the Apple ][ is the way to go, I assure you.

Thanks. I agree with your values. Yes, I’m very lucky to have a clean light head with almost no major worries about things ever. I’m of the opinion that you have to develop your own keys to happiness from your own logic, and that one’s keys can’t be told to another who can’t ‘feel’ them. So I never take the opinion that the ways I found happiness (long before Apple) can be told to someone else (a child perhaps) and help them be happy. They have to find their own for it to work.

Steve Jobs felt that the early Mac should be very closed to have good control over what it was and did. But that left oversights like memory expansion. So the 128K ‘first’ Mac had to soon be replaced by the 512K model (as RAM prices dropped).

The original Macs had the signatures inside. It’s pretty cool. Despite the fact that my plane crash had taken me out of Apple and through college and into promoting rock concerts, many of the Mac team felt that they’d been so influenced by me that they included me among the signaturees.

Thanks very much. I’m glad to have inspired so many not for being in charge of the companies that make their products.

I actually like him and what he says. I couldn’t treat people the way he does but I’ve never witnessed it either. He’s quite intelligent and makes sense, although he doesn’t always listen fully. For example, I might be trying to help and he might hear it more as a worthless complaint. I do not oppose Steve in any way. I’m even amazed if he really pulls off Apple’s next decade successfully. I could never manage projects well, as Steve does, now that they are so complex with so many people involved.

First, you are accurately observant. I look back at the importance of making computers quite unlike any that had ever been done and can see how great that was. The Apple I was the first low cost computer to come with an alphanumeric keyboard standard. I just couldn’t see the waste and effort to build some general techie product that needed a lot more junk to start typing. And until you type, nothing is worth much. I’d been through the other computer paradigm my whole life before. Also, our calculators at HP had meaningful (to humans) keyboards when turned on. I also made the Apple I display on the cheapest device possible, your own home TV. I also wrote the BASIC for it. I only left out floating point after thinking hard in order to have the first BASIC for a 6502 and maybe get a little fame in my club. The Apple ][ was the first to have BASIC in ROM, the first to have DRAMs, expandable hugely on the motherboard, the first to have so few chips, the first to be completely built, the first with a plastic case, the first with color graphics, the first with hi-res, the first with sound, the first with paddles for games, the first to include built-in casette interface, the first to have color and game commands in the BASIC, etc. It was the third ever to look like a typewriter (the Apple I was the first). I’m especially that I helped the concept of computers are for games develop so early.

Steve and I are very different. Mainly, I want to be an engineer and make neat things for my own fun, forever. I told Steve and Mike Markkula that I wouldn’t expand Apple into a real company because I had to quit HP (I’d designed all the Apple stuff moonlighting for a year!). I loved HP. But I finally realized that I could do it and not have to run it. From the start, Steve wanted to run a company and learn the ways to. Otherwise, what was his contribution? He didn’t design any of it.

Steve’s management style has left a lot of bad impressions. I never saw it personally and it was different than I would have expected from knowing him. I don’t think that he was ever cruel to his daughter, at least as far as the movie. He may have indirectly been cruel to the mother. Well, here’s my take on that. All the people that lived in the Cupertino house with the two of them agreed that it was Steve’s child for sure. I’m assuming he didn’t like her idea to have the baby. But he wasn’t in control. I think that’s why he said “I don’t know” about why he was being this way. He couldn’t pinpoint the fact that he was being told by someone else what was going to happen. Does this make sense. It’s my theory. Taking that into account, it’s understandable. He had strong feelings to fight this baby thing and it came out the way it came out, maybe not exactly intentionally.

I don’t get a lot of insight into Steve’s behavior. A lot of it, or what infuences it, is more secret than in people like myself. But he always seems to be thinking well and just wanting to do things that make sense most of the time. Sometimes Steve doesn’t listen fully but he tries to.

I’m very glad that Apple is the only company that can make great strides in new directions. A few, like Sony, try but they are trapped by Intel and Microsoft. I’m only proud when people have a better life because they have good computers. When the industry makes positive changes that affect individuals I’m happy.