The Atari/Apple Connection
The Atari/Apple Connection
- by Marty "Retro Rogue" Goldberg

(Source: www.classicgaming.com)

Steve Jobs as he looked several years before he walked through the doors of Atari.

In the several years since the birth of Atari, Nolan Bushnell's company had grown. With a large stable of engineers, technicians, and other employees, it was an atmosphere of freedom and partying. Nolan was where he wanted to be - the head of a successful research and development firm, making entertainment products. Everyone from the ground up was involved in the games, the workers were encouraged to play them, competition in development (and playing) was encouraged - Nolan even had a hot tub installed for employees to relax in.

It was in to this scenario that a scruffy, smelly, bearded, long hair "hippie freak" walked in. The receptionist told Al Alcorn "We've got this kid in the lobby. He's either got something or is a crackpot." Al learned the kid was there for an interview, and the kid proceeded to lie - giving the impression he had worked at Hewlett-Packard, and had a bunch of technical knowledge that he didn't. Al was so impressed with the kids desire to be hired that he gave him a job for $5.00 and hour as a technician - basically fixing and tweaking coinop designs. Al had encountered the infamous "reality distortion field" that was to become legendary in Silicon Valley. The field of one Mr. Steven Jobs.

Steve Jobs had just come off a rather disappointing college "career". Graduating from high school in the spring of 1972, and with a pocket full of money obtained from selling blue boxes at the radical U of C - Berkeley dorms, he had attended Reed College in Oregon. Rarely attending classes and eventually getting heavily in to Eastern philosophy and religions with his friend Dan Kottke, he soon began a spartan life of Roman Meal cereal, and primal therapy sessions. Steve began immersing himself in a hippie "culture" that had already seen it's glory days, in an attempt to obtain it's spirit and sense of belonging - a theme that would haunt him through out his life because of his difficult childhood.

Within a year and a half, he dropped out of Reed and moved back to California when he had seen the add for engineers at Atari. And so in 1974, Steven Jobs became employee number 40 at Atari. As many of the other 39 employees soon found however, Steve didn't make the same impression on everyone. With the freedom at Atari, Jobs was able to walk around and get involved in people's work, going so far as to call them dumbshits to their faces when he didn't like something. Walking around barefoot, putting his dirty feet on people's desk, and calling people names while at the same time professing interest in heading to India to find a guru didn't fly well.

Alan decided to put him on the evening shift, where he would do the least interaction with people. Steve did catch Nolan's attention however, because of Steve's ability to get his assignments done earlier than most. And he admired Steve's ingenuity to try and get Atari to fund a trip to India. Steve had approached Alan about Atari funding a trip for him to India to do "spiritual research", and Alan said absolutely not. But his tenacity persevered and Nolan, Alan and Steve worked out a deal whereby they would fly Steve to Germany to help fix a grounding problem they were having in the Atari coinops ship there, and he could go to India from there. Steve flew over, shocking the Germans with his appearance but fixing the problem in two hours (thanks to a demonstration Alan had given him before he left), and went off to India from there. He'd be back in Nolan's graces soon though.

A successful Nolan Bushnell with home Pong

Shortly before Steve left for his trip, two Atari engineers had cooked up something that was to make an even greater impact than the original Pong had. They had decided to try and come up with a home version of Pong. Nolan put Alan on the project with them, and Atari's entry in to home video gaming started.

Woz (as Steve Wozniak is often referred to) had made his own home pong system, after spending countless hours playing the arcade Pong at a local bowling alley. Designing it using random logic methods, he wound up using even less chips than the arcade version. Beside onscreen scoring, he added a special feature - a switch could be used to turn on and off phrases that appeared on screen when either player missed the ball - these phases including "Damn it" and "Oh shit". Atari liked the design enough that they offered to hire Woz away his job at Hewlett-Packard. He turned them down, because he felt he already had his dream job - designing calculators at HP. It was a stumbling block Steve Jobs would encounter later in getting Woz to fully commit himself to Apple.

Irregardless, Atari had made the decision to go with a single chip version of home Pong that it's engineers had been designing.

Having no retail channels to speak of, it was 1972 all over again with Nolan and company trying to shop the product around. Nobody was interested, after the flop of Magnavox's Odyssey unit several years ago. However, when on the way out of an unsuccessful meeting with Sears, a sporting goods buying manager by the name of Tom Quinn stopped Nolan just outside and said he was very interesting in buying up as many pong consoles as Atari could produce. Apparently he had seen the product during a visit to Atari several months before, and was very enthused even if the top brass weren't. They struck an exclusivity deal and Nolan now had a huge distribution network for home Pong under the Sears name of Tele-games. They started shipping in 1975 and were immediately a huge success, selling $40 million and giving Atari a profit of $3 million. Best of all, Atari was truly in the forefront of cutting edge entertainment.

By that time, our young Mr. Jobs had come back from India. Not finding what he was looking for, he got re-hired by Atari - this time convincing Nolan to give him an engineering job at the plant in Los Gatos. It would again, however, be during the night shift.

However, what he still lacked in actual electrical engineering knowledge - his friend Woz made up for. At this time, many of the arcade games were being designed at a research facility that Nolan had bought in Grass Valley (where the Atari 2600 and the 400/800 computers would eventually be developed as well). The designs would come out of there to Los Gatos, where Steve would "tweak" them by doing things such as adding circuits to add different sounds. Woz had spent so much of his HP paycheck money playing Atari coinop games, that Jobs came up with an offer he couldn't refuse. Join him on his late night working hours and help when he needed it - in return Woz could play all the games he wanted for free.

Breakout

Nolan eventually had an idea for yet another pong type game that year - this time for one where the player breaks away at a wall with the ball. He offered the project to Steve with an agreed payment of $700. Jobs, in his usual bravado, said he'd have it done in a couple of days. Nolan also said there'd be a bonus - if he could keep the number of costly TTL (logic chips) down, he'd get a bonus for each one below 50. Steve quickly found himself incredibly underqualified to be able to design something so complex. So, he called on his friend Woz to help him out with the offer that they'd split the $700.

I would gladly have designed the BREAKOUT game for Atari for free, just to do it. I thought that Atari was one of the most important companies in the world and it was an honor to be close to them. I thought that they would be, in the arcade game business, what Microsoft is now.
-Steve Wozniak

Wozniak had designed it by hand, under the continuing pressure of Jobs to get it done quick (though he wouldn't say why). At night, while Jobs would wirewrap the design, Woz played the first driving coinop game - Gran Trak 10. After a 4 day non-stop marathon, Woz's Breakout prototype was finished. Wozniak was able to get the number of TTL's down to a startling 36. Jobs took the prototype back to Nolan who was very impressed. Alan on the other hand, knew Steve could never have designed something like this on his own. Even though he admired the design, and admired Jobs for getting the job done, he still did not care for him. Either way, they gave Jobs the $500 plus the bonus - which turned out to be a total of $5,000! Jobs turned around paid an unknowing Wozniak the original $350 they had agreed upon. Nolan eventually found out about Wozniak's involvement and offered Wozniak a job at Atari any time he wanted, to which Wozniak declined because he enjoyed his job making calculators at HP to much. The prototype they built, however, was never used. Wozniak's design had been so compact that Atari's technicians couldn't figure out how to mass produce it, and therefore had to re-design it. However, Nolan had another hit on his hands irregardless and Breakout was introduced to the public.

"I was on a plane going to a user group club in Fort Lauderdale to promote the Mac.... Andy Hertzfeld [another Apple developer] had just read 'Zap!,' a book about Atari which said that Steve Jobs designed 'Breakout.' I explained to him that we both worked on it and got paid $700. Andy corrected me, 'No, it says here it was $5,000.' When I read in the book how Nolan Bushnell had actually paid Steve $5,000, I just cried."
-Steve Wozniak

Wozniak's garage workshop

The lessons learned building the Breakout prototype for Atari were not lost on Woz. Not long after Breakout, Woz started on a combination television "typewriter, or TV terminal. Using the lessons learned from interfacing game electronics with televisions (use in his Pong and Breakout projects), and parts scavenged from Atari, the project quickly took on a life of it's own when he started attending Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Homebrew was ground zero of the personal computer industry, where the hobbyers who would go on to found the industry met and discussed their latest projects and technical info. His designs changed as he sought to build a computer that would impress the others at Homebrew. Jobs saw the computer and talked Woz in to marketing it with him, and the two set out to build them in his garage. With a fellow Atari employee by the name of Ron Wayne, who lent his skills as well as came up with a logo - the trio formed Apple Computers on April 1st, 1976. Eventually selling 50 of them, Woz immediately started work on designs for an Apple II computer which was completed the Fall of the same year.

The Apple II was even more a direct reflection from his experience working for Atari. The idea for his color graphics scheme came directly from ideas while he was working on Breakout and thinking of how to do it in color. And the rest of the design of the computer came from Woz's wish to be able to produce Breakout through software rather than hardware.

I decided that I had many of the parts available to have a BREAKOUT game on this computer, in software. Arcade games had just barely started appearing with microprocessors. Maybe. In the case of the Apple ][ I was the designer and I'd written the BASIC. So I took a bold step, not knowing if it was even possible, to consider programming BREAKOUT in BASIC! I had to add at least one paddle. I decided to use a timer chip. The microprocessor could count how rapidly a capacitor charged and determine where your hand controller was turned to. But by now timers could be obtained 4 on a single chip. So I built in 4 paddles for virtually no extra parts. I added a speaker, with 1 bit of sound. Just enough for beeps and clicks in the game of BREAKOUT. I added commands in my BASIC to draw colors on the screen. Then I sat down one evening and started writing BREAKOUT in BASIC. I started by drawing some bricks. I didn't like their position and size so I changed a couple of numbers in my program and saw the effect. I played with brick color mixtures and found some that I liked. I completed the whole game in this way. In half an hour I'd played with more options that I could have in a lifetime were I dealing with hardware.

-Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc. founder

Jobs set about his marketing campaign again and approached Commodore to buy it from them and manufacture it. The Tramiel family turned him down, and instead turned around and bought MOS Technolgoy, the manufacturer of the 6502 microprocessor that happened to be in Woz's computers. The proceeded to develop their Commodore PET computers.

Our young Mr. Jobs then returned to Nolan with a proposition the same proposition to either invest, manufacture, or even buy it outright. They wound up going to Alan Alcorn's home and demonstrating the Apple II on his projection TV. However, Atari was stretched to thin to get in to the hobby computer market at the time.

So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we' ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No'. So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'
-Steve Jobs, on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

An Apple II with monitor

However Nolan did point him to a venture capitalist friend by the name of Don Velentine, who in turn puts Mr. Jobs in touch with a man by the name of Mike Markkula who becomes their chief investor, gives them structure, and provides the professional direction they needed. Changing the case design from the hobby wooden block of the Apple I to a high density, sleek, molded plastic showed the direction the computer would go - becoming a home appliance of sorts. The first "personal computer" that was built for the average person to use.

The Atari connection didn't end there though - Mike wanted to make sure everything was there for ease of hookup. Since Woz didn't care to design the TV connector or the power supply (which used analog electronics, very different from the digital electronics Woz was used to), they had to find someone else. Jobs went to his old boss Al Alcorn for help, who in turn put him in touch with Rod Holt - an analog engineer at Atari. Holt remembers Al telling him "Steve is a nice guy. Help the kids out." Being paid $200 a day, he worked days at Atari and nights at Apple, eventually coming on to Apple full time.

By the time the Apple II was released in 1977 Nolan, Al, and many of the original employees at Atari were on their way out the door of the company they helped build. Selling the company to Warner in 1976 to help fund it's programmable gaming console (built off a 6502 microprocessor as well), they found themselves in increasing conflicts with the Warner brass and their pure business mentality. Jobs and Woz however, were just getting started. Finally convincing Woz to quit HP and work at Apple full time, the Apple II cracked the personal computer market wide open and established Apple as one of the most successful technology companies of it's time. And the rest is history....