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With the first Apple ][ it was very important for me to have a manual that would
lead others to success and learning right from the get-go, even if the user had no
relevant experience. That’s how we learn. We start entering code others wrote to
see how it works and then over time we learn variations.
One of my skills has always been designing things with the absolute minimum
amount of chips. Before starting Apple, I saw the game of Pong at a bowling alley
and I thought it would be fun to try building it on my own. My version didn’t have
anything to do with Atari’s, but I did do it at least a year before they came up with a
home version of the game that worked with your TV.
All in all, I ended up with 28 chips for my Pong design. This was amazing because
it was back in the days before microprocessors appeared. Every bit of the game
had to be implemented in wires and small gates. There wasn’t a software program
that was loaded and executed, it was all hardwired.
I visited my teenage friend Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari, and showed
it to a group of engineers there. And they loved it! Later on, Steve called me
to say that Atari wanted to do another Pong-like game. Atari’s founder Nolan
Bushnell wanted me to do it because he knew how good I was at doing designs
with the fewest possible chips. Nolan had been complaining that the Atari
games were going higher and higher in chip count, approaching two hundred
chips for a single game. He wanted them to be simpler. And he’d seen how
good I was at that.
They wanted a one-player version of Pong, but with bricks that would bounce the
ball back to the paddle. It was called Breakout, maybe you remember it? So not
even thinking about it, I said, “Sure.” Atari wanted it using the fewest chips possible
and I was up for the challenge.
The whole game was implemented in four days and used only 45 chips. |