History of Apple/Mac
Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple, he was an electronics hacker. As a kid Stephen Wozniak would become so engrossed in mathematical ponderings his mother would have to shake him to bring him back to reality. Geek! Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were known as outcasts while they were in high school; by 1975, each had dropped out of college (Reed College and UC Berkeley, respectively). Wozniak found a job at Hewlett-Packard and helped his friend Steve Jobs design video games for Atari. Wozniak had been buying computer time on a variety of minicomputers hosted by Call Computer, a time-sharing firm run by Alex Kamradt. The computer terminals available at that time were primarily paper-based; thermal printers like the Texas Instruments Silent 700 were state of the art at the time. Wozniak had seen a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine on how to build your own computer terminal. Using off-the-shelf parts, Wozniak designed the Computer Conversor, a 24-line by 40-column, uppercase-only video teletype that he could use to log on to the minicomputers at Call Computer. Alex Kamradt commissioned the design and sold a small number of them through his firm.
