4 ms·

"company culture" may be overstating it a bit. It was just Steve and Woz, and someone had to write the serial numbers. Ron Wayne had already come and gone, and

"company culture" may be overstating it a bit. It was just Steve and Woz, and someone had to write the serial numbers. Ron Wayne had already come and gone, and Daniel Kottke didn't join Apple until the next year (although he had been a friend of Steve's for years). When I ran into Steve in June 1976 at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto (it's still there!) and he asked me if I could write a 6502 disassembler, it was pretty clear it was just the two of them. He wasn't even 100% sure on the company name yet, and tested it out with people he met. "My friend and I have this little company, we're calling it Apple Computer. Take a byte of the apple, get it?"

scarface74 5y ago
Out of curiosity and your story was interesting, I LinkedIn stalked you. You’ve had a long interesting career with a lot of overlapping jobs. Were you an independent contractor?
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Well thank you, I am flattered that you tracked me down. Yes, I kept bouncing back and forth between contract work and FTE over the years. It wasn't a grand plan to do one or the other. Since you're asking, I may as well tell more of this story. After Steve and I exchanged phone numbers, I thought the 6502 disassembler sounded like a fun project. So I went home and got to work on it. I didn't have a chip to test with, so I wrote out the code with pencil and paper and "tested" it by stepping through it mentally and writing the register and memory values at each step on a second sheet of paper. Kind of like what you would today call a "debugger". Then Steve called me: "Mike, I've thought about this. Your experience is all with mainframes. We're using a microcomputer, and it works on completely principles. It is nothing like those mainframes you've used. So I've decided that you couldn't possibly do this job." (It wasn't exactly a "job" at that point, like I said we were just a couple of scruffy hippies who ran into each other at the produce aisle, discovered we were both into computers and electronics, and got to talking.) I tried to explain that I'd coded in assembly and machine language on two or three different architectures already, and the 6502 looked like just another one to me, with a simpler instruction set. He said, "No, I've made up my mind. You couldn't possibly do this, so forget it." So I thought "Who is this Steve guy telling me I can't program? I will go visit this Apple Computer and show him my code!" I found their address at 770 Welch Road near the Stanford Barn, walked in and looked around. It didn't look like a computer company, all I saw was a row of switchboards and telephone operators. I asked one of them, "Where's Apple Computer?" She said, "Uh, this is their answering service." I thanked her and walked back out, shaking my head and telling myself, "These guys are flakes. They're never going to make it."
  - Stratoscope 5y ago
    Now back to your question about contracting. Not long before this, I'd read some business book that advised against getting stock in a company as an employee. The book said that as one individual, you couldn't really have much effect on the stock price, and you would be better off just negotiating a better cash deal. Something like contracting, or just getting a better salary. After all, this is the standard advice we give people joining startups, right? Get the cash, because that fabled upside is unlikely to ever happen. But sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I had pursued this Apple connection a bit more. I thought, "I might have become a billionaire!" And then I remember how much that book had influenced me. I probably would have told Steve, "You keep the stock. Just give me a little more cash." Based on how he treated some early Apple employees, I bet Steve would have been fine with that! https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+woz+you+give+him+zero https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+woz+you+give+him+zero
  - scarface74 5y ago
    What could have been. I never bought a real assembler for my Apple //e in the 80s. I wrote assembly by doing. call -300 !
    - ibiza 5y ago
      Was the mini-assembler moved on the //e? On our school's ][+ it was: call -151
      - scarface74 5y ago
        My bad. You’re right. Most smaller assembly language programs were loaded at $300. The first page of the text memory buffer was $400.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Your process reminds me of how I used to write 6502 assembly in high school—I didn't have the money to buy one of the macro assemblers I would see advertised in the Apple mags (let alone buy a computer of my own—I would stay after school to code in the computer lab), so I would write out my code on graph paper, and hand-assemble it (with a column to keep track of the memory address) and then type in the hex code in the monitor. I can remember thinking about an idea to write a relocatable 6502 program loader which would go through the code and rewrite addresses of memory references so that code could be loaded into whatever slot of memory was available for it to coexist with whatever Applesoft program was running next to it.

scarface74 5y ago

Out of curiosity and your story was interesting, I LinkedIn stalked you. You’ve had a long interesting career with a lot of overlapping jobs. Were you an independent contractor?

Stratoscope 5y ago
Well thank you, I am flattered that you tracked me down. Yes, I kept bouncing back and forth between contract work and FTE over the years. It wasn't a grand plan to do one or the other. Since you're asking, I may as well tell more of this story. After Steve and I exchanged phone numbers, I thought the 6502 disassembler sounded like a fun project. So I went home and got to work on it. I didn't have a chip to test with, so I wrote out the code with pencil and paper and "tested" it by stepping through it mentally and writing the register and memory values at each step on a second sheet of paper. Kind of like what you would today call a "debugger". Then Steve called me: "Mike, I've thought about this. Your experience is all with mainframes. We're using a microcomputer, and it works on completely principles. It is nothing like those mainframes you've used. So I've decided that you couldn't possibly do this job." (It wasn't exactly a "job" at that point, like I said we were just a couple of scruffy hippies who ran into each other at the produce aisle, discovered we were both into computers and electronics, and got to talking.) I tried to explain that I'd coded in assembly and machine language on two or three different architectures already, and the 6502 looked like just another one to me, with a simpler instruction set. He said, "No, I've made up my mind. You couldn't possibly do this, so forget it." So I thought "Who is this Steve guy telling me I can't program? I will go visit this Apple Computer and show him my code!" I found their address at 770 Welch Road near the Stanford Barn, walked in and looked around. It didn't look like a computer company, all I saw was a row of switchboards and telephone operators. I asked one of them, "Where's Apple Computer?" She said, "Uh, this is their answering service." I thanked her and walked back out, shaking my head and telling myself, "These guys are flakes. They're never going to make it."
- Stratoscope 5y ago
  Now back to your question about contracting. Not long before this, I'd read some business book that advised against getting stock in a company as an employee. The book said that as one individual, you couldn't really have much effect on the stock price, and you would be better off just negotiating a better cash deal. Something like contracting, or just getting a better salary. After all, this is the standard advice we give people joining startups, right? Get the cash, because that fabled upside is unlikely to ever happen. But sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I had pursued this Apple connection a bit more. I thought, "I might have become a billionaire!" And then I remember how much that book had influenced me. I probably would have told Steve, "You keep the stock. Just give me a little more cash." Based on how he treated some early Apple employees, I bet Steve would have been fine with that! https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+woz+you+give+him+zero https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+woz+you+give+him+zero
- scarface74 5y ago
  What could have been. I never bought a real assembler for my Apple //e in the 80s. I wrote assembly by doing. call -300 !
  - ibiza 5y ago
    Was the mini-assembler moved on the //e? On our school's ][+ it was: call -151
    - scarface74 5y ago
      My bad. You’re right. Most smaller assembly language programs were loaded at $300. The first page of the text memory buffer was $400.
- dhosek 5y ago
  Your process reminds me of how I used to write 6502 assembly in high school—I didn't have the money to buy one of the macro assemblers I would see advertised in the Apple mags (let alone buy a computer of my own—I would stay after school to code in the computer lab), so I would write out my code on graph paper, and hand-assemble it (with a column to keep track of the memory address) and then type in the hex code in the monitor. I can remember thinking about an idea to write a relocatable 6502 program loader which would go through the code and rewrite addresses of memory references so that code could be loaded into whatever slot of memory was available for it to coexist with whatever Applesoft program was running next to it.