Upgrade - 623: Road to the Apple II: A Complete Computer (Part 3)

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Clear the kitchen table. Bring in the color TV. Plug in your new Apple 2 and connect any standard cassette recorder or player. Now you're ready for an evening of discovery in the new world of personal computers. Only Apple 2 makes it that easy. It's a complete, ready to use computer, not a kit. At $1,298, it includes features you won't find on other personal computers costing twice as much. Welcome back to designing California. That was from Apple's

introduction ad for the Apple 2. And finally, on today's episode, we're going to talk about the Apple 2 and what it offers. And to do that, of course, I am joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. We are back in time to finally tell the story of what Woz has been working on. It doesn't just spray colors on a hotel room. TV screen. All right. So one of the threads I wanted to follow, obviously, is the development of Apple and the relationship and the business. But I have been alluding to the fact that in the background, Waz has been working on his next invention, right, which will become the Apple II. And I thought for this episode, we could talk a little bit about that process of what Waz was doing and how the Apple II came to be. Because throughout the story we've been telling about

1976, which is built around Apple using the Apple One design to create a product that could sell, was has moved on to the next one, which will be the Apple II. And just as the work that he had done building a video terminal had crystallized his work building the Apple One, where he's like, oh, I can take the computer and the video circuitry, put them together and have a computer that had video circuitry on it. Oh, yes, yes. for this it was also the case that display

innovations drove the work on the Apple 2 because Waws wanted color some PC makers offered color add-on cards but Waz wanted to make a computer that could offer color right out of the box he wanted you to be able

to plug his computer into a color TV which keep in mind color TVs weren't even that common 10 years before a lot of people bought color TVs for the moon landing, ironically not in color. Why then? Why did they do that? People were just excited. They wanted to upgrade their TV to a better TV for that time. But if you've ever wondered, which you probably haven't,

but I did. Why all those characters on Star Trek wear brightly colored uniforms? The answer is because NBC wanted to advertise that they were putting their shows in color. So they had a brightly colored Star Trek. That was one of the reasons that Captain Kirk wore the bright gold shirt. I guess like kind of in the way that people will upgrade their television for the Super Bowl or something like that. Like you've got people coming over, you want to get a better TV. It's the exact same motivation. And look, Walter Cronkite was in color. It's just that the vision from the moon was not in color.

But Walter Cronkite was in color. Considering they shot the moon landing in a TV studio, you could have used color. You know what I mean? Right, really, seriously. Wild. Okay. This is not an a historical podcast, but it's a historical podcast. So Wallace says, you know, color TV.

It's great. I want a color computer out of the box. His big breakthrough, technically, involved taking advantage of the effect that he was going to integrate the video side and the computer side into a single hole. So remember, the Apple One, he was like, okay, I got this terminal that will connect

to like the ARPANET. It's just a dumb terminal, but it's a keyboard and a TV out. And he's like, and I have a computer. It's like, oh, I can put them together. But it was still sort of like both things were together on the circuit board. For this computer,

he's going to integrate it all into a hole. And then he has a real leap of imagination where he realizes that unlike all the computers that had been built before the personal computer, which were shared systems, personal computers were personal.

They had single users. And this is an important technical understanding. People are slow, way slower than microprocessors. Even microprocessors in 1970s. are way faster than people, right? Okay. So Waws created a ticking clock that let his computer switch

between using memory to draw on the screen and executing commands on the microprocessor. Okay. So the computer moves so fast that it can very efficiently draw a line on the screen and then do some work and then draw a line on the screen. He literally uses the display itself

via his expertise in designing, display circuitry as the ticking clock. When the computer is drawing one line of the display, everything is focused on drawing that line. In the interval, when that line is not being drawn and the display is going back to draw the next line, because that's how these things work, is they're like a line at a time firing off and you fill the whole display and you do that every 25 or 30 times a second, right? It's happening really fast, but not fast for a computer processor.

Right. Okay. It works faster. So he's doing this time sharing thing. In that interval, the microprocessor hurries up and does everything it needs to do. And then the display draws the next line. So the ticking clock is the lines of the display, not the frames of the display. The lines in a frame on the display.

So it's happening very fast. But again, megahertz, kilohertz, megahertz, like these are thousands of cycles, a second, way faster than a human being, or a TV. So this is a leap never made before because so few people were designing personal computers. So the computers that were being designed were being designed with the principles of computers of old was thanks, no, no, no, this whole thing is based around this being

plugged into a TV. And that was the leap. He integrates the display into the process flow of his computer. And people have argued, I think it is a decent argument that this defines what a personal computer is. The idea that it's a merging of a computer and display output in a single user environment where you can switch between what's on the screen and what processing needs to be done because you're not a microcomputer, you're not a mainframe computer, you are just a single

appliance, basically, tied to a display. Okay. Not optional, tied to the display. So this is the genius moment. This is the thing that he works out. I think so. That the computer is, even at this stage, already faster than the, say, as you said, like 30 frames a second, that would be needed to draw on a screen effectively, right, if we're boiling it down.

So he has worked out that the computer is moving so quickly that it is able to do more processing within the time period of where it's waiting for the television to catch up with it, essentially. So he's able to kind of do so much more in the Apple II itself while waiting in between the moments where it needs to draw upon the television screen. It's very clever. It's very clever stuff. Yeah. I mean, the 6502 processor that was used in the Apple 2 runs at a little bit over a megahertz. Okay.

So a megahertz is a million per second. Right. And you only need 30 for the screen. Well, you need more than that. You need 30 times 525 in terms of NTSC, right? Yeah. But that's just 15,000. Yeah.

So, Waz's got a ticking clock. The clock ticks 15,750 times a second. But his processor ticks a million times a second. So it's like human beings are never going to notice what he's doing. Yeah. But it enables him to integrate into a single computer. And this is important. it's integrated.

The breakthrough is that the display is part of the process of being a computer, instead of it being a thing the computer offloads too. And that makes a difference for a personal computer. Also, Wazda is this amazing hack to make it in color. He makes sure that the Apple II's video circuitry runs at exactly four times the speed of the standard TV frequency, right? So, okay. So they're going to do it a little bit more than you originally thought

because they have to do not just 15,000, they have to do 63,000. But you are still a lot of headroom. Not close to a million. Now, his video circuitry is monochrome, but what he realized is the way that NTSC video works, by dropping pixels at specific times in the cycle, quarters of a time of the cycle,

the dots come out red, green, or blue. And he learned this from somebody at Atari, who had used it for Pong. Unbelievable. If you think about all of this, like this is a cathode ray tube, you know, being drawn on by a gun,

and he's using it as his ticking clock, and he's hacked the way it draws on screen to be able to get red, green, blue combinations thereof in order to do color. So this kind of breaking it down into these parts, it highlights now when we go back to PC76, why people were so blown away when they would see this thing operating in a hotel room?

In the terrible hotel room. Yeah, exactly. Because now we're understanding just how different this was to the things like the soul. It's a breakthrough. It's a breakthrough. And if you recall, the origins of the Apple One were Waas looking at somebody else's computer circuit board design and saying, I could design that with fewer chips, right? It's like, name that tune. I can make that computer in five chips.

This remains a motivator for Waaz. He likes simplifying. And that has benefits to the computer, to the heat, the energy, the speed, the efficiency, and the cost. to make it. So he wants the Apple 2 to have fewer chips than the Apple 1. Because the Apple 1 was really those two devices

in one, the chips from the TV terminal and the chips for the computer, he's going to make one integrated thing. It should make it cheaper and faster, and he can use a single set of memory to be used in both of them. That's a big deal too. He also

is working on adding support for sound and having a speaker attached to the computer because the Apple one was silent. He's going to put faster RAM in this thing, and he's going to build in support for Basic, a simple programming language. He built this version of Basic himself. It is encoded ultimately in a ROM,

which is read-only memory. But just to be clear, other computers in this era, if you wanted to program on them, you had to do something like turn them on and then load off of a tape, the operating system, which would be like basic programming. Or in some of them, you had to just turn them on and then type in the operating system for half an hour, and then you could use it. So this is going to come literally if you turn it on, you could just start typing in programs

because it's in the read-only memory, basic programming language. As Was told, I believe David Pogue for his Apple, first 50 years book, it wasn't just twice as good. It was like 10 times better. You would say that. I could call the Apple 10. Apple X. It's a little too early for that. Then there was the issue of expansion, which I mentioned in our last episode. Waz wanted the Apple 2 to come with eight expansion slots, which would allow people to add all sorts of functionality to the computer after the fact. Make it much more flexible. We can't wait to see what you do with it to coin a phrase. Because it could be anything. Things that Waz didn't even think about. Things that Waz thought. about but thought, I can't put that in every one, but people who need it could add it after the fact. And I think anybody who knows anything about Steve Jobs, the guy who never wanted like buttons or switches on anything, was opposed to expansion slots. Absolutely, he was. He thought it only

needed two, one for a printer and one for a modem. What else could you do? So they thought about this, but was one and he was absolutely right because those slots opened up the enormous potential of the Apple II. I don't even know how many expansion cards I had in my Apple II. I think it was at least four or five. And was told Walter Isaacson in the Steve Jobs biography, I knew that people like me would eventually come up with things

to add to any computer. So he really is thinking of this as a platform for other people to build on top of, which was another great insight and is why he was right to fight jobs on this. So what were you putting into those slots?

Like if we jump forward in history, because I, again, like this is just not something that I experience. So, like, I can't think, you know, you have eight slots on the Apple II. What would go into them over time? So the Apple II didn't come with a floppy disk drive, and we'll be talking about that later. So one of the slots you put the disc controller in, which was designed by WAS. Yep.

And then you put your floppy disk on the outside. You run through a little door in the back, and then the floppy disk sit there, and then that's how you use the disk drive. Printer. You get a printer card and then attach your printer to it. But obviously the monitor, the display, that was taken care of by an different... That was taken care of, although you could, I think, buy a display card and add maybe a different kind of, like an RGB display or something. A more advanced display down the line. A more advanced display in that era anyway.

I had a modem card. Okay. So Jobs was right about that printer and modem. There were a bunch of things later. Like for a while, I was doing as a teenager, I did some contract work for a local company doing data entry for a database they wanted. And that was all working in CPM, which is a totally different operating system. you could get a CPM card and put it in there, and you could basically reboot the Apple II into CPM

and use WordStar and use a database and all these programs that didn't run on standard Apple computers. So there's a lot of flexibility for stuff like that. My modem card was like a sound card too. It would play digitized audio at a quality level that the Apple II speaker couldn't. Yeah, all sorts of stuff like that that you could think of that were for specialized or general interest.

I think there was an 80 column card at one point, which basically you could, instead of the original display was 40 characters across, but you could take it up to 80. Everything got a little smaller, but you could see more words on the screen. Lots of stuff, lots of expansion was there.

So Was was absolutely right to do that. And he created a whole market. This is the thing that now it almost seems obvious to us, which is he created an accessory market. And the accessory market, by creating that platform, helped the Apple 2 be more than Apple ever anticipated it could be, because people could build on top of it.

And that was a huge insight that Waz had that he was proven right about. Over the series so far, we've spoken about the importance of the future of computing being that these things would sit inside of boxes, that they were designed to be all in one. And it goes back to that ad that I read at the beginning of the episode. So why don't we take a break now, and when we come back, we can look at what was this case and how on earth did they get there? Hey, everybody, it's us from a different time when we're telling you about that you're listening to Design in California.

And we are still doing our Kickstarter. That's why these are in the upgrade feed. If you have not become a supporter, we would like to ask you to consider that, having listened to these episodes. You can also raise your pledge and get some cool stuff all over at designed.fm through the end of June. so you've still got plenty of time. And we would love to get your support for the next year of Design in California, which we're doing now, Mike.

We're doing it. Yeah, we're halfway through the campaign now. We're past halfway. This is the penultimate episode in the Road to Apple II series. So there's one more after this. That will be the final one in the campaign period. But the Kickstarter campaign runs all the way through

to the end of June, like Jason mentioned. We are committed to making this show. And so now every dollar, that we receive is helping us make the project better. We still have things that we want to do. We have processes that we want to work out. And the safety of knowing how much money we have raised makes us feel confident in decisions that we're making

that will make this podcast better overall. And we're both very committed to making it the best it can be. And we're looking forward to over the coming weeks, really kind of nailing down our process now, safe in the knowledge that we have the resources to fund the year easily. So thank you so much for your support. Yeah, can't wait to get started at the production work of the actual show. And, you know, obviously we've already heard from people like there will be,

when it's all set and done, you will get a code that will allow you to join and sign up for the member version. If you do support us that way, we will do a feed that will be preloaded with these episodes, as well as our Apple at 50 episode of Upgrade that will become, you know, retroactively designed in California episode. and then we'll roll forward from there. So all starting the planning process, really excited. And yes, every dollar that gets pledged helps us devote time to this and also have a budget to do good stuff to make the show better, which is a big part of what we're trying to do here.

So check it out, design.com. If you've backed already, have you considered going up? You can. You can give us more money and you get more for it. If you have not yet backed, then please do. That is over at designed.fm. And now back to the show. Welcome back to design in California.

We left Steve Jobs thinking there needs to be a case around this thing. I don't want it in a cigar box. I don't want it screwed to a piece of wood. Tie it to some driftwood, send it out there, see who buys it. Nobody. And among the other things in that case, they need a power supply. They need a way to power this thing because, again, it's not meant to be a kit. You can't like just say, hey, home brewers, bring your own power supply.

And this is interesting. This is an interesting little story because it's analog technology power. Waz doesn't care. Waz is a digital man. He really is. And Jobs being jobs, he doesn't want a good power supply. He wants like a great power supply. Most importantly, he wants a power supply that runs so cool.

Maybe you could not have a fan in the computer? Typical Steve Jobs, right? Yeah. Everybody knows that he hated fans. They're too noisy. To this day, Apple tries very hard to sell computers without fans, even though fans are very good at keeping computers cool and letting them run faster. But it's so great if you don't have one.

I know, I know. I know. This is the conundrum. Well, back in the 70s, computers that were in cases, not out in the open air, needed fans. And fans were noisy. So Steve Jobs didn't like it. But Waos, not an analog guy. Power supplies are super analog.

Waz's brilliance is not going to save the day this time. Okay. So Steve Jobs ass around. And eventually a friend at Atari, those Atari connections come back again, says, I know a brilliant analog engineer. His name is Rod Holwell. Not Holt is a character. Okay. He is almost universally described

in all books about Apple's history pretty much the same way. As Steve Jobs put it, he was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been through many marriages and was an expert on everything. That's a description. He loves socialism almost as much as he loved motorcycles.

Okay. You're getting a picture of this guy. Yeah. he tells the Steve Jobs kid a very high hourly consulting rate to build the power supply and Steve Jobs says okay yes later Rod Hold said he just conned me like how can I tell you to go away if you agree to my demands so oh so the con is Jobs said yes yeah that's which is a strange con but it is in a way right how I got work for this but like jobs you know yeah he said yeah he said yeah Oh, come on. So Rod Holt, motorcycle Marxist, vitally important to Apple. Also, an adult among children.

Stories go that he recognized early, like what motivated WOS and did a lot of managing up, including holding WOS to some higher standards as the Apple II was being built. And I think Waus probably had respect for Rod Holt because he was not only older, but an accomplished engineer.

in an area that Was was not an expert in. So I think Rod Holt ends up being a good counterbalance for Waws saying, you know, you can't do it that way. Because Holt has seen some stuff. And he has some cred. So I think that he's able to manage Waws at a level that maybe would have been harder for somebody like Steve Jobs who might not know some of the technical details and might have let some stuff go. Whereas Rod Holt was comfortable saying, you can't do it that way. You just can't do it that way. Holt designs the power supply.

And as Steve Jobs wanted, it is groundbreaking. It switches the power off and on. Again, you're talking about we can do this fast, faster than humans. Switches the power often on thousands of times a second, which allows it to remain cooler. Steve Jobs said later, that switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic board was. Rod doesn't get a lot of credit for this in the history books, but he should. Every computer now uses switching power supplies, and they all rip off Rod's design. That's Steve Jobs talking.

But I have good news for Steve Jobs, wherever he might be today, in whatever dimension he resides. Rod Holt gets credit in history podcasts, if not the books. So Rod Holt is a name I did not know until we went through this document. Do you know much about what happens to rod kind of into the future? Does he remain at Apple? He remains at Apple for quite a while, yeah. Absolutely. He kind of settles in there. But for the Apple, too, this is the big moment, is that that power supply, which does run cool enough that Steve Jobs can not put a fan in the Apple too, even though, you know, they sold ad on fans. Let's just be clear. Other companies sold ad on fans to make it run cooler. But yes, especially if you put a lot of cards in there, it got kind of hot in there and you need to blow some air through it. But it was a big deal. And remember, Steve Jobs is trying to imagine

how do I get everything in a case? Yeah. And you've got to have that power supply. And ideally, you've got to have it so he doesn't have to put a fan in the case. So it's all part of what Rod Holtz is doing here. Key person and having the analog engineer on the team filling out a part of Apple's product competency

that Steve Wozniak doesn't have. So at this point, in the Apple 2, we have two big breakthroughs. We have the way in which WOS has worked out to put graphics on the screen. Right, which leads to a bunch of other stuff like more efficient use of memory and fewer chips. And then he's also adding, yeah, sound and some other stuff like that. With he's essentially, we'll call it the ticking clock, right? The way that he has worked out

how to kind of have the processes draw and process, draw and process. And now we have Rod Holt's power supply, which also, I think, hilariously is switching on and off. It's all about on and off. This machine. It's all about on enough. It's all thinking about the fact that these devices run so fast that you need to change your way of thinking, right? The idea that even the first Apple 2 in the mid-70s ran at a megahertz, and a megahertz is a million cycles a second. It's slow. We all work in gigahertz now, but like at human scales, it's impossibly fast. And they were taking advantage of that scale. Well, I guess it's that funny thing of the Apple 2 sitting in between the existing technology that it came before, both electricity and TVs, right? So it's

faster than a TV and it's faster than electricity in a way, but it doesn't require the constant flow of electricity. It's able to do whatever it needs to do. I'm not an electrician, but it's able to make this switch and power so it can sip the power as it needs it. Stay cool and not constant. So meanwhile, Steve Jobs is looking for a case, right? Steve, Steve learned the lesson of the Apple One. I mean, yeah, nobody's been more excited about a hunk of plastic. So the Apple One lesson, it was supposed to make it easier for hobbyists to build their own computer. Then Paul Terrell at the bite shop funds to make it a project to assemble motherboards. But even then, it doesn't have a case, it doesn't have a keyboard, doesn't have a display. And he understood, Jobs did what Terrell was saying when he was like,

I really want a complete package. I want it with a case and a keyboard and a display. He was also undoubtedly influenced by the Saul, which he saw in Atlantic City in its metal box looking like a piece of industrial equipment. He's like, all right, we are ahead because of Wasa's sky. skill, but Saul is complete, pre-assembled. It's an appliance, right? Sheet metal appliance. So he knows they got to do this. This next computer has to be that. And what Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, is my vision was to create the first fully packaged computer. We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who liked to assemble their own computers, who knew how to buy transformers and keyboards. For every one of them, there were a thousand people who would want

the machine to be ready to run. I know we've gone through, obviously, the many breakthroughs they've had. But what? We're less than two years? It's months, Mike. It's months. From the beginning of the company? It's months. Really?

It's months. We're still only months? It's like six months. They are so wildly ambitious as a pair. That's unbelievable. The showing off the Apple II will be a year after they started Apple Computer. Wow. Okay.

I think one of the important things about this timeline, is to remember, we view it, this is what I said before, we view it as the Apple One happened and they did that and then they made the Apple II and did that. That's not what happened. It's all overlapping. The Apple One was designed.

Everything that happens with the making of the Apple One's in the garage and putting the chips in them and all of that, Waz already is done. He's moved on. He's already thinking about the Apple II at that point. It's happening fast, but it's also happening in parallel. They're productizing Apple One a little bit.

But Waz is building Apple too, and Jobs is starting to think, how do we make a product here? Yeah. That's the important thing. Okay. So Jobs knew, and this is one of those things that it's like, it's almost intuitive to Steve Jobs. It's one of his special powers that how a product was marketed and packaged determined how it was received, which is, by the way, why Apple is a leader in product packaging and sweats those details to this day. It's because Steve Jobs understood how it. a product is marketed and packaged is how it's going to be received.

So he asked Ron Wayne, the guy who had 10%, the tiebreaker, and designed that Isaac Newton logo, to design a case. But Ron Wayne was like, let's be realistic here and created something that could be made in a metal shop and it like had a plexiglass cover and like a roll top door, like an old desk that slid over the keyboard. And Jobs was like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what we want. Jobs, meanwhile, is thinking about this a lot. He's thinking about consumer products, right?

Because computers are not consumer products at this point at all. And he wants the Apple II to be a consumer product. That's his dream. So Steve Jobs is going to department stores. He's paying close attention to how consumer appliances are packaged. One of the real star products of the 70s was the Cuisinart food processor. Plastic case. Just iconic Hewlett-Packard calculators.

Ironic plastic cases. He's like, okay. Okay, this is what I'm going to do. Plastic case. Is this the first kind of evidence that we have of jobs kind of considering the Apple II to be more of a home appliance, like a thing for the rest of people? Yeah, I mean, it is kind of a wild leap, right? All the computers of this era, it's like the Saul or what Ron Wayne had designed,

something you could make in a metal shop. They're cheap and industrial shielded that are like not, not, friendly home appliances. They're like, they're more, less like a quezon art and more like a washing machine, right? And Jobs thought that sent the wrong message. Sheet metal is for heavy appliances. It's for your dishwasher. It's for your refrigerator. It's too industrial. He wants it to be something that would fit in a living room or a kitchen, which is why he's going to department stores and thinking about home appliances and kitchen appliances, which leads to the quezenart. So Jobs needs another designer.

because Ron Wayne's not going to do it. He pitches a guy named Jerry Manok, 33, so older than Jobs in Wozniak, used to work at HP, just went freelance. We know what that's like. You're picking up work. You've got to pick up work. He meets Manok at the Home Brew Computer Club. Manok sort of doing a similar thing to Rod Hold is like, well, I'll do it, but you've got to pay me in advance. just I don't know you know you have the money here

and it actually sounds like in the end he didn't get paid in advance but he got he took the job Jerry Manoch did and he designed what is the Apple two case he designed a low plastic case with a removable lid you pop off that offers just enough space a little just enough headroom to fit in those expansion cards okay it's compact it's got rounded edges it's designed more like a kitchen appliance than a piece of industrial machinery. Manok actually thought that it should have little handles, recessed handles on the side so you could pick it up. And Steve Jobs is like, no, no handles.

And then Jobs suggests that they chrome plate the interior of the case so it looks awesome when you open it up, which is a real Steve Jobs moment. I really like that. It's like, oh yeah, so you want to open it? Great. Well, what if we made it really good inside? Really shiny inside.

If you look under the motherboard, it's shiny. Just a genuinely demented idea. Jerry Man, I talked him out of that one. Because there is their thing, right? Of, like, what is the Steve Jobs thing? Of, like, paint in the other side of the fence. Yeah, or it's the, uh, what his father said, of the idea of the back of the piece of furniture that's against the wall

should look as beautiful as the part that's facing out. Which is still, like, it's still a nice idea. But the chrome plating might be a step too far. Like, making it look good inside when you open it is, is one thing. But chrome plating it is something. completely no it's been it's bananas just totally bananas so so keeping in mind ron wayne was like you'll make it in a metal shop jerry manox design requires it's plastic it requires complexity on a whole other level which is probably why nobody else is doing it in this period it needs to be made with injection molding

injection molding is you melt a bs plastic and then inject it into a metal mold the mold itself costs as much as a hundred thousand dollars which is about half a million dollars in today's money and it will take months to make that mold. Yeah, because it's worth noting that molding like this, which I assume at this point it was being done in America, which is not where you would have this done today. Yeah, you know, this is all, it's going to be done in the Bay Area, right? Like, this is a local product,

and this is at a time when that stuff is available at your local plastics company, basically, right? But even today, if you're making something like this in Asia, you're doing a similar thing. You're having a mold made, and it's very expensive, the tooling on making a mold is very expensive, but the idea is you pay for it once and you use it for a really long time.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, the problem is Apple doesn't have this kind of time. It is now early 1977. The Apple II is going to be ready. They're going to show it at the West Coast Computer Fair, which is a big new trade show in San Francisco in April. They do not have time.

It's a matter of weeks. but they have to do it. This is their coming out party. Everybody's decided this is the moment they're going to start showing off the Apple 2. It's got to be ready. Okay. So what are they going to do?

Why does it need to be at the West Coast Computer Fair? They had decided that this was the big coming out moment for the computer industry and they needed to be there. They're feeling the pressure, I'm sure, from the competition. And this is going to be their moment, but they have left it too late.

And I mean, look, once again, I'm going to point out this is a company that less than a year before was funded by the founders selling a van and a calculator. Okay? They have Mike Markola now. There is some adult supervision. There is some funding. But it is not a well-oiled operation. This is less than a year into Apple. They're kind of flying by the seat of their pants here.

And they've gotten to this deadline, but they're not going to be able to. to make a case suitable for a mass-produced product the way they want it in the timeline because the mold is going to take too long. So they go to Plan B, which is a process called reaction injection-injection molding, which is faster and cheaper. It uses a mold that's a lot easier and cheaper to make

than a metal one, but it is less reliable. That's why you wouldn't want to use this. want to use injection molding if you could and not this reaction injection injection molding which is like a cheaper process but it's cheaper and faster you got to do it so now they have a path to being able to produce

I guess a handful of models to be able to display it at the West Coast Computer Fair to sell directly to sell to buyers who is the West Coast Computer Fair for? Nobody knows. They've never held one

before. The people who doing it have no idea whether it will just be homebrew computer club nerds, whether it will be a little broader, or if, I mean, what if like every person who's interested in technology in Northern California or California

or the United States says, this sounds really exciting, I don't know much about computers, but let's see what's there. What if that were to happen? You got to be ready. You got to be ready. So in our next episode, which is the final episode in the season,

of the road to the Apple 2, the Apple 2 will be shown to the public for the first time at the West Coast Computer Fair, hopefully in a case. Hopefully in a case, and who will come through those doors to look at the brand new Apple 2? We will find out next time.