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FIGURE 1.10
Steve Jobs (right) convinced Steve Wozniak they should go into business selling
the personal computer Wozniak designed. They named their company Apple Computer.
(© Kimberly White/Corbis)
The controversy over Altair BASIC did not slow the pace of innovations. Hobby-
ists wanted to do more than flip the toggle switches and watch the lights blink on the
Altair 8800. Steve Wozniak, a computer engineer at Hewlett-Packard, created a more
powerful personal computer that supported keyboard input and television monitor out-
put. Wozniak's goal was to make a machine for himself and to impress other members of
the Homebrew Computer Club, but his friend Steve Jobs thought of a few improvements
and convinced Wozniak they should go into business (Figure 1.10). They raised $1,300
by selling Jobs's Volkswagen van and Wozniak's Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator,
launching Apple Computer. Although the company sold only 200 Apple I computers, its
next product, the Apple II, became one of the most popular personal computers of all
time.
By the end of the 1970s, many companies, including Apple Computer and Tandy,
were producing personal computers. While hundreds of thousands of people bought
personal computers for home use, businesses were reluctant to move to the new com-
puter platform. However, two significant developments made personal computers more
attractive to businesses.
The first development was the computer spreadsheet program. For decades firms
had used spreadsheets to perform financial predictions. Manually computing spread-
sheets was monotonous and error-prone, since changing a value in a single cell could
require updating many other cells. In the fall of 1979, Bob Frankston and Harvard MBA