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Apple Inc

Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, he was an electronics hacker. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were known as outcasts while they were in high school. As a kid Stephen Wozniak would become so engrossed in mathematical ponderings his mother would have to shake him to bring him back to reality. By 1975, he was working at Hewlett-Packard and helping his friend Steve Jobs design video games for Atari. Wozniak had been buying computer time on a variety of minicomputers hosted by Call Computer, a time-sharing firm run by Alex Kamradt. The computer terminals available at that time were primarily paper-based; thermal printers like the Texas Instruments Silent 700 were state of the art. Wozniak had seen a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine on how to build your own computer terminal. Using off-the-shelf parts, Wozniak designed the Computer Conversor, a 24-line by 40-column, uppercase-only video teletype that he could use to log on to the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt commissioned the design and sold a small number of them through his firm.

Aside from their interest in up-to-date technology, the impetus for "the two Steves" seems to have had another source. In his essay From Satori to Silicon Valley (published 1986), cultural historian Theodore Roszak made the point that the Apple Computer emerged from within the West Coast counterculture and the need to produce print-outs, letter labels, and databases. Roszak offers a bit of background on the development of the two Steves’ prototype models.

On June 12, 2005 at Stanford University's 2005 Commencement Address Jobs said, "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors,...