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model from one of the established manufacturers. But he was broke, so he sat down and began designing his own home-made machine.

Woz wanted to build something comparable to the desktop computer he used at Hewlett-Packard, where he worked at the time. The desktop was called the 9830 and sold for $10,000 a unit. Its biggest advantage was that it used BASIC, a computer language that closely resembles normal English. BASIC alleviated a lot of complications: a user could sit down, turn on the machine and begin typing, which wasn't always possible with other computer languages.

BASIC - an acronym for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code - had already been adapted by software pioneers Bill Gates and Paul Allen for use on the Altair. (Gates - soon to become America's youngest billionaire - and Allen went on to found Microsoft, probably the world's most powerful software company.) The language was compact, in that it required very little computer memory to run, an essential requirement for microcomputers. Woz began work on his new computer by adapting BASIC to run with a microprocessor - a sort of mini computer brain, invented earlier in the decade, which packed all the functions of the central processing unit (CPU) of a large computer on to a tiny semiconductor chip. The invention allowed the manufacture of smaller computers, but attracted little attention from traditional computer companies, who foresaw no market at all for PCs. All the action in those days was with mainframes.

Woz's prototype was first demonstrated to the self-proclaimed radicals at the Homebrew Club. They liked it enough to place a few orders with Woz and Jobs. Even more encouraging, the local computer store, The Byte Shop, placed a single order for $50,000 worth of the kits.

The Byte Shop had been one of the first retail computer stores in the world. From its experience with its customers it knew what would sell: a fully assembled, inexpensive home computer. The idea was suggested to Jobs, who began looking for the financial backing necessary to turn the garage assembly operation he and Woz now ran into a real manufacturing concern.

How the two Steves raised the money for Apple has been told before. Traditional manufacturers turned them down and venture

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