Soon after I was released from Lompoc, I settled back down and took special attention to Woz's new Apple II. I saw it's debut down in LA at one of their computer clubs (SCCS). It had an untold whopping 48k of ram, and an efficient way of storing programs using the popular Panasonic Cassette recorder. It had integer basic, and soon a floating point basic would be available.

At that time, Apple was selling the Apple II either in a molded case or as separate motherboard, power supply, and plugins. At that time, there was a parallel card plugin that worked with the 40 column el-cheapo dot matrix printer. The cost for the Apple II was $600 as a kit, or $900 in a case. Not sure if that included 48k or 16k or ram. My apple used the cheaper 4k rams and I piggy backed them to get 24k of ram.

I still had my free account on Call Computer, but wasn't on the payroll anymore, but I was spending time writing in Assembly Language for the 6502. I wanted to write some software that would both send tones and receive tones through the Apple II.

It became clear that I needed to design an interface board that would interface the Apple II to the telephone. I wanted ALL aspects of control to go to the computer. On-hook, Off-hook, Dialing, Tone detection of ANY frequency, and reliable voice detection I wanted to add for future voice recognition and a hardware FFT calculator that would input frequency domain on one end, and output time domain on the other, and do it instantly. Of course WOZ wanted to do it in software.

Woz was very supportive of my goals and soon offered me a Contract job at Apple to design a prototype telephone Interface board.

At that time, Apple was in this industrial park just behind Bob's Big Boy on Cupertino/Sunneyvale road (Eventually re-named "De Anza").

Rod Holt was the chief designer of the Power supply, and designed a super efficient power supply. Mike Markula and Mike Scott was the CEO's at that time. Randy Wigginton and WOZ had a separate lab a few doors down. Dan Kottke was the hardware technician and engineer, putting together the first Apple II's.

Rod was a chain smoker of the likes I haven't seen in a long time, so I avoided being anywhere near him, and dropped a hint to Jobs and Woz that I would like my work to take place without having to breath stale cigarette smoke. I eventually would up in Woz's domain, and had to put up with his silly pranks and snide comments on my electronic designs. I remember one day, when I was going over with Woz on my latest design, Jobs would stick his head in the door and say "Eeeeewww!!! ANALOG!!! _ Yukk Yukkk!"

Woz said, I got a great prank I want to pull on Jobs as soon as you get it working. Woz, of course told me that 3 chips were unnecessary and suggested that some of the ADC functions could be done in software if I removed the 8 bit latch and substitute a cheaper 6 bit DAC. The other two bits could come from the address line, and WOZ said if you poke into this memory location (or peek) to see the status, you could get and read the other two bits.

Now, we had it down to 4 chips and an analog Phase lock detector used to detect tones. We also made it controllable via one of the DAC's and later I wrote a software calibrator that would auto-adjust the optimum receive frequency. Woz's knowledge was amazing, as he was showing me some other great ideas, on cutting down the tone "Detection time". Woz's knowledge of Signal pattern recognition was brilliant. I'm still very honored to have worked with him.

Randy was working on other programming tasks and always was kidding me about any inefficient code I wrote and was always telling people that I would do dumb things. Thus came this 1+1 = 3 tale mentioned in HACKERS.

I was spending half my time wire wrapping the board and writing the Assembly Diagnostic code to test the hardware. Soon I had it working and set forth with the t writing the Assembly code that drove and operated the board. I needed "Listening" code to always be looking for tones when the board is active. I also needed tone generation code for transmitting touchtones, Modem tones, and Oh Yea, with the right tables, Multi-Frequency tones.

Then, I wrote the Integer Basic programs that drove the board and set it to do it's task. I wrote a little demo program to dial a number, wrote up a memo telling Woz how to demo it, and headed home to sleep. I was up half the night working on it, and left a note telling Woz I would be coming in late after getting some sleep. I left a
cassette on his desk.

The next morning, I get in just after lunch, after attending a Chem. lab at DeAnza College. As I walked in, Jobs jumped on me, started yammering and yelling at me about me calling him at home at all hours of the night, bothering his parents.

As I walked into the lab, Woz and Wigginton were laughing up a storm, then just as I was going to sit down, I smelled a skunk like odor and learned that Woz or Randy put Merlin scent on my chair.

Woz told me that the board worked well, and took great pride in telling me how he programmed it to call Job's parents number over and over all night long. Just then, Mike Scott, then CEO of Apple Computer (Then having about 15-20 employees), came stomping into my sterile workplace puffing on a big cigar, and I politely pushed him out and asked him to extinguish his cigar before coming in. Even today, there is folklore and tales at Apple Computer about this incident.

One day, Woz got tired of having to go all the way around the fence to get to the 7-11 store, so he cut a hole in the cyclone fence. At the nearby "Bob's Big Boy" where Woz was writing his latest designs on the napkins, Woz pinned a package of Alka Seltzer to every menu with a note: FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE while Randy was distracting the waitress.

The Lab was more like a high school electronic lab, as students were coming and going. One day, I arrive at work and see this cassette
marking the load address... And it was Bob Bishop's Lunar Lander.
The idea was to land at zero velocity. I spent most of the morning trying to land it without crashing. Of course Woz landed with zero velocity every time.

Of course the Phone Board never became a product even though I had written Modem program, answering machine system (back then, it wasn't called "Voice mail".

A few years later, Andre Sousson flew me back from New York to make a build 3 more boards because Apple was re-considering marketing them, but due to lots of pressure from the Phone Company NOT to market the board, Jobs decided he didn't want to take the risk. This was because the board was so flexible and could send out ANY tone, they were afraid that the board could be used for "Naughty tones".