Apple celebrates garage history

If there's one machine that more than other shaped the future of the computer business, it almost surely is the Apple I.

And what do you get when you bring together four of the team -- including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak -- behind that groundbreaking computer? A lovefest.

That's what was on display on Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, as several hundred Silicon Valley veterans and youngsters alike showed up for a panel discussion called 'Apple in the Garage' celebrating Apple's 30th anniversary.

That anniversary was in April, but as part of the ninth annual Vintage Computer Festival, Wozniak, Apple employee No. 6 Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 8 Chris Espinosa, and veteran Apple employee and original Macintosh team member Daniel Kottke got together for an afternoon of storytelling about the earliest days of Apple and its seminal computers.

Last year, festival organisers, including Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn computer museum in California's Santa Cruz mountains, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak appeared at the event as well, and to some, Saturday's event was a suitable bookend for a historical look back at the birth of personal computing.

And on Saturday, many of those in attendance were happy just to hear the four panellists tell stories about the creation of the Apple I in 1976, and its successor, the Apple II in 1977.

"We thought it would be a shame if we didn't have a birthday party for Apple with a cake," Damer said at the beginning of the discussion. And indeed, he had brought along a birthday cake adorned with a digital print of Apple's original logo.

But before anyone could eat the cake, the panellists took the audience down a memory lane of poignant Apple history.

Espinosa, for example, recalled how he had begun working for Apple while still in high school, and that he still counts himself lucky -- he still works at Apple today -- to have worked alongside such technology luminaries.

"It was really interesting being 14 and 15 years old and having my hobby being hanging out with guys who were" changing the face of technology, Espinosa said. "I didn't really know that this wasn't the way 14-year-olds spent their high school years."

Apple's roots
Kottke recalled how he had become friends with Steve Jobs -- who was not present at Saturday's event to the dismay of some in attendance -- when they were college students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He said the two had bonded over Eastern philosophies and that Jobs had not talked about his computer work.

But upon being invited to Silicon Valley, Kottke said he visited Jobs' house -- the home of the famous garage where Jobs and Wozniak started Apple -- and the first thing he found was Jobs' sister watching The Gong Show on TV and plugging chips into Apple Is.

Wozniak said that the early Apple team didn't have a telephone, and that Jobs was essentially running the entire business from his bedroom.

"It was a nice, warm place to meet people," Wozniak said of the Jobs' garage.

Wigginton remembered that in those days, many of today's computer industry luminaries hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club because it was a way to have access to working computers.

"Nobody could afford their own computer," Wigginton said. "It's amazing to me that owning your own computer was considered impossible."

For his part, Espinosa joked about why he had gone to work for Apple rather than for another computer company. "Scott Computer was too far away to work because I only had a bicycle," he said. "So Apple was much better for me because it was much closer."

He also said that when Apple began working on the Apple II, the team acquired its own building, though it didn't have any furniture beyond some telephones.

"When you're in a building with nothing but telephones and Steve Wozniak," Espinosa said, alluding to Wozniak's storied history building blue boxes, "you know you're going to have some fun."