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capitalists had difficulty seeing beyond appearance and philosophy. It was a clash of cultures. Jobs and Woz didn’t look like serious computer manufacturers; wearing their hair long, with the standard uniform of jeans and sandals, they looked like student radicals. One venture capitalist, sent out to meet Jobs at the garage, described him as 'this renegade from the human race'. When they finally did find a backer he asked for their business plan. The two Steves looked at each other and then at their new partner. The what?

The first public showing of what was called the Apple II was at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in April 1977. The tiny company’s dozen or so employees had worked through the night to prepare the five functioning models that were to be demonstrated. They were sleek little computers: fully assembled, light, wrapped in smart grey cases with the six-colour Apple logo discreetly positioned over the keyboard. What would set them apart in particular, though, was their floppy disk capability, which became available on the machine in 1979.

The floppy disk – or diskette – is a data storage system developed for larger computers. The diskette itself is a thin piece of plastic, protected by a card cover, that looks a little like a 45 rpm record, and is used to load programs or to store data. Prior to the launch of the Apple II, all microcomputers used cassette tapes and ordinary cassette recorders for data storage, a time-consuming and inefficient process. The inclusion of the floppy disk system gave the Apple II a competitive edge: users would no longer need to fiddle about with tapes and recorders. The use of diskettes, as well as the simple operating system that Woz had built into the computer, encouraged other companies to write software for the new PC. It was that, more than anything else, which boosted the Apple II out of the hobbyist ghetto. The new Apple spawned a plethora of software: word-processing packages, graphics and arts programs, accounting systems, computer games and so on. The launch two years later of the VisiCalc spreadsheet, a business forecasting program, made the Apple particularly attractive to corporate users.

Even Captain Crunch wrote software for the new PC. At the time, in 1979, he was incarcerated in Northampton State Prison in Pennsylvania for a second phreaking offence. While on a rehabili-

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