In Part 1 of my interview with Premium True reader Dan Sokol, I told you of Steve Wozniak’s long-time friend, how they met back in the earliest days of personal computing, and how he was the “World’s First Software Pirate”. This is the long-delayed Part 2.
Again, the story will be largely told with a transcript of my talk with him in late November 2024. I have also added some context [in brackets] here and there, and then some analysis to bring out the key points.
DO read Part 1 first if you haven’t already. Part 1 ended that Part 2 would include “what Steve Wozniak says about all of this.”
Well, that is not happening the way I hoped, at least yet. He may choose to weigh in after he reads this page.
After speaking with Dan, I did pop Woz a note to say I’d be writing about him as “IMO, he’s a forgotten figure in early computing, and I’d like to be part of changing that.”
Woz replied: “Dan is extremely deserving of this. I will get back to you with lots of input. I’m busy right at this moment though.”
Busy was an understatement: he’s been swamped, including international travel, and speaking in Denver last week. Except for one thing, which will be included below, he hasn’t made any input yet …dang it. I simply can’t wait for him anymore, so let’s get into it.
More on Homebrew
Randy Cassingham: Anything else you want to…?
Dan Sokol: I’m thinking about it. You know? Uh, Homebrew was such a rare….
RC: Convergence. Yeah.
DS: And I look back and so here’s a room full of actual anarchists. So anarchistic that they couldn’t agree on a name for the club.
RC: (laughs)
DS: Not only that they couldn’t agree on, on the necessary paperwork — who was going to do it, what it was going to say to actually make the club official, so that we could stay at SLAC without, you know, because we had to be an official club.
And, you know, 50 names on the board. They each got one vote? That kind of thing?
RC: Yeah, well, you’d think French would just naturally be handed the mantle.
DS: No, it was…. Oh, come on…. People’s Computer Company [in Menlo Park, which was founded by Dennis Allison, Bob Albrecht, and George Firedrake], who is that?
RC: I don’t remember.
DS: Yeah, he was the guy. He would start and talk uh and RMC. Another brilliant engineer. Uh, with a very strange family past, but a great guy. And, Uh, I tried to put him to work back, oh, around 2000 when I was doing Best-of-China [dotcom] but we lost our funding.
[I found reference in Homebrew newsletters that Lee Felsenstein ran most of the meetings at SLAC, and asked Dan about it. “Yes, correct,” he replied, and confirmed that’s the name he was trying to think of. Felsenstein went on to design the Processor Technology SOL-20 Computer, and then the Osborne 1, the first mass-produced portable computer, as well as the architectural design of the follow-on, the Osborne Executive, which was my first computer. Lee didn’t list any involvement in his bio with the People’s Computer Company.]Which brings us to the major part of this series. The details I wanted to be published. Why, in Woz’s words, “Dan is extremely deserving of this.”
Sokol’s Contribution to the Apple-1
DS: So at Homebrew, that’s how that’s how I met Woz, except it goes a step further. Woz complained to me that as a technician at Hewlett Packard [where he worked before co-founding Apple Computer], he could not get parts. Now in that era of the mid-1970s, parts, and when I say parts, I’m talking about engineering parts: capacitors, resistors, pots, integrated circuits. If you were an engineer, you would call Hamilton Avnet, you would call any one of the distributors, and you talk to a salesman and you’d say who you were, you were an engineer. I need a sample of [whatever] for a personal project.
“Oh no problem. OK I’ll get you a half a dozen,” and the next day the salesman would come take you out to lunch, and then hand you a handful of parts. It was a wonderful era for engineers who were also hobbyists. But Steve was just a technician; he couldn’t get parts. And Steve was too honest a guy to steal them out of the supply cabinet at Hewlett Packard. I took pity on Steve. AMI, where I was working, was the second source for Motorola’s 6800 line of chips. Unbeknown to Motorola, my cousin, Neil, worked at Motorola, in Austin, where these chips were designed.
So this is a Side Story but anytime Motorola had a mask update, they were supposed to share it with us immediately, but they never did. They always waited. Neil would call me and tell me that there’s a mask update [for example] from version E to version F on layer four. And I’d go in and tell the Fab guys, and they’d stop the line and then they’d call [Motorola] and say, hey, where’s our update? And Motorola, “Oh! Well, it’s coming! You’ll get it tomorrow! FedEx!”
RC: “How’d you know?” (laughs)
DS: They wanted to know SO bad but I… you know. Meanwhile I took samples out of stock, since I was the general foreman of the test area, and I took a couple of each of the 6800, the processor, the parallel port, the serial port, the programmable chips, the RAM chips, you know, whatever, threw them in a shoebox and handed them to Woz at the next meeting.
He used those, along with the 6502s that he and I bought at the very first Computer Fair. I went with him to the Computer Fair because two engineers at AMI found out I was going and said, could you buy…. Everyone could buy— MOS Technology was letting you buy a 6502 and the two thick manuals, one was a programmer’s manual, the other was a hardware manual, for 35 US dollars.
[I popped Dan a note since I remembered him saying, maybe at dinner later, that this was in San Francisco, but it wasn’t recorded and thus not in the transcript. He replied to confirm that yes, it was San Francisco.]DS (continued): So I went with Woz and bought a set, gave the chips to Woz. He wanted the chips. But the books went to the engineers at AMI. So I got [a] hero award for that. But that’s how I met him. The next week he came to the next meeting at Homebrew.
[My guess here is that while a pair of the manuals went to AMI engineers, the other set went to Woz, since he went on to write BASIC for the 6502, completing it before he designed the Apple-1 board.]RC: And that was for the Apple-1?
DS: That was for the Apple-1, yeah, and he handed me a bunch of H-P gold-plated prototyping boards, which I kept in a box until somewhere in the mid-90s when I had a fire in the garage and they were destroyed so yeah, I never used them. I never needed them. But, you know, it was a trade. And Woz and I became friends at that point.
My Analysis
I’m going to drop out of the Interview for now to put some context on all of this, in large part because Dan’s memory differs from Woz’s.
First, Woz confirmed to me that he gave those breadboards (prototyping boards) to Dan, the ones Dan says were in trade for the 6502 chips, which to me is confirmation that Dan paid for them.
To clarify Dan’s discussion of the Motorola 6800 chip and the MOS Technology 6502 chip, this part is pretty well known. The Altair was based on the Intel 8080 chip, introduced in April 1974, and Woz wasn’t interested in that processor; he had first focused on the Motorola 6800, announced in March 1974, but at $175 — equivalent to about $1,115 today — it was way too expensive for the Apple-1.
That’s why the 6502, at just $35 (actually $25, the equivalent of $145 today; the two printed manuals were $5 each), was so exciting: it was simpler, faster, and cheaper than the 6800, and Woz wanted one bad. This crucial moment Dan speaks of is when Woz first got his hands on a couple of them, allowing the breadboarding design of the Apple-1 to proceed. Dan was the one who got them for Woz.
If you look at the Apple-1 board pictured, you can see the white 6502 processor in the lower left, in position A7. Just to the left of that is a “Motorola” 6820 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA). I put Motorola in quotes because the photo shows that it was made by the “second source” manufacturer that Dan worked for: AMI. Samples of this chip were almost certainly among the various parts that Dan provided to Woz, what he remembered as the ports and such: the peripheral interfaces.
Woz’s memory, and thus the commonly told story of the design of the Apple-1, is that Woz “got the 6502 chips from Chuck Peddle,” the former Motorola engineer who was the chief designer of the 6502 chip for MOS Technology.
Dan’s story differs on one key point: he says he provided the 6502 chips that Woz used when breadboarding the Apple-1. I believe Dan, even though when I told Woz that I was going to tell this story here, he replied quickly:
I went to CES in 1975 after hearing that the 6502 microprocessor would be there. I had no microprocessor of my own, at all. MOS Technology had a suite in a hotel, away from the CES floor and products. Up in that hotel room, I paid cash for a 6501 ($20) and maybe also for a 6502 ($25). I also paid $5 for a manual. Chuck Peddle and his wife were handing these processors over to those of us who paid for them. [emphasis added]
I started on the manual right away. I loved the instruction set for base address registers and offsets. You could advance through an array by increasing the 8-bit offset registers. The base address system reminded me of what I admired greatly about the IBM 360 architecture. I was familiar with the 8080 instruction set and to me this 6502 was by far the best.
I converted my TV terminal design into its own computer/terminal combination with the 6502 processor and 4 KB of static RAM chips that I borrowed from a work-mate, Myron Tuttle, at HP. At that time 3 companies came out with 4 Kbit DYNAMIC RAM chips. These cost maybe 1/4 of the static RAM chips, and memory was the greatest cost of a computer. One company with DRAM’s was Intel but I figured I could never afford anything from Intel.
Another company was MosTek, in Texas or Arizona, but I had no connections to them. Dan Sokol stood up at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting and offered 4 Kbit DRAM’s from AMI, at an affordable price. I bought 8 of them and went to my computer, adding the refresh logic, which amounted to about 5 chips. You need sequencing addresses over time to refresh DRAM’s but I already had regular counters for the TV horizontal and vertical, so I used those counters for refreshing. I had other efficiencies built into how I managed this.
So I called Dan to say Woz was pushing back. “He has a terrible memory!” was his reply. I brought up Woz’s plane crash and resulting amnesia, but that’s not what he meant (but he did rush to the hospital when he found out about it, and got Woz’s mother to demand he be transferred from the tiny local hospital to a bigger hospital where they had neurologists to treat him properly — another side story that shows how involved Dan was in Steve’s life for so long).
Dan’s story to me was crystal clear, no grasping at details. I am quite sure Steve is wrong, and here’s why: as he writes above, he remembers it as going to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. In the 1970s, CES was a twice-yearly event: January in Las Vegas, and June in Chicago. Neither is the correct timing, and neither jives with Dan’s memory of driving to a “computer fair” for the chips.
And where were those chips first sold, in person, such as at a computer fair? At Wescon (the Western Electronics Show and Convention), which was in San Francisco — right up the road from Silicon Valley — which started on September 16, 1975. Right in line with the timing for the Apple-1 design to be completed, on or about March 1, 1976. I even suggested Wescon to Woz, but he stuck with his memory that it was CES. I’m quite sure he’s wrong.
Too, it’s well documented that “When MOS Technology arrived at Wescon, they found that exhibitors were not permitted to sell anything on the show floor. They rented the MacArthur Suite at the St. Francis Hotel and directed customers there to purchase the processors.”
“I thought I bought the chips and manuals,” Woz replied, “but Dan could have fronted them. I had money for them. The only way I wouldn’t buy them myself was if I didn’t have money on me.” [emphasis added]
So I believe Dan’s memory: that he provided the peripheral chips like “a couple of each of the 6800, the processor, the parallel port, the serial port, the programmable chips, the RAM chips, you know, whatever, threw them in a shoebox and handed them to Woz,” and then got the crucial 6502 chips to complete the design, to allow the breadboard to be tested. It was everything Woz needed to start and complete the design of the Apple-1.
Flexibility
Woz’s design was genius, especially for the time. As you can perhaps see from the final production version pictured above, the Apple-1 board was designed to work with either the 6502 or the Motorola 6800 chips. In the upper left (E3) you can see a dashed outline area for some extra parts for “6800 only” — in case a 6800 processor was used. (Position C1 also calls for a 7404 chip when a 6800 is used.) But of course he absolutely preferred the 6502, which was (in his opinion) not only better, but obviously much cheaper.
Woz isn’t wrong-wrong: it’s nearly certain that Chuck Peddle was in that suite at the St. Francis when the chips were handed over. He just unfortunately doesn’t remember how he got to Wescon, indeed that it was Wescon and not CES, and who fronted the cash. That was Dan.
In my opinion, this changes the history of the Apple-1, and thus personal computing, in a tiny way. Dan Sokol helped Woz with the parts he needed to create the Apple-1. Sokol is thus an integral part of early personal computing history, and the story of his direct involvement hasn’t been told …until now.
Dan Sokol should be made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum to recognize his influence on the technical and social environment of the early personal computing era.
Yes, There Is a Part 3
Part 3 should conclude this, and it is actually all written up, but this was getting long enough. You don’t want to miss it, because what happens when you get two brainy geeks together as good friends and let them stew together in a pot for decades?
You get pranks, that’s what! Lots of them.
And I have some of the stories. Coming next Monday! Which gives Woz 6 full days if he wants to weigh in “about all of this.” Because I definitely have what his mother had to say about the pranks!
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Best series yet!!
Not much of a proof point, but I’m Dan’s stepbrother. His father married my mother in 1974. Dan was very clear in the mid-1970s that he got chips from his (Dan’s) work that Woz either couldn’t afford or couldn’t get and gave those chips to Woz. I’m quite sure that Dan’s recollection is correct and accurate.
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Thanks for the confirmation. FWIW/For the Record, I did confirm with Dan you are who you said you are before approving this. -rc
Am I the only reader who is itching for the prank stories?
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No. 🙂 -rc
No!
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See? 🙂 -rc