Woz works Christmas
| Filed under History, Steve Wozniak; 2 comments. |
Christmas is this week, and whether or not you have friends and family to spend it with, ideally you’re not spending it with co-workers: the holidays are a vacation from our day jobs, if any.
Unless you’re Steve Wozniak.
Forty-two years ago, Woz spent Christmas developing the a 5.25" floppy disk drive for the Apple II. It was 1977 — Apple’s first year in business — and the first Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to be held in Las Vegas was just a week or two away. For Woz, there would be no yule logs or holiday shopping or Christmas lights or Christmas vacation — only floppy toil.
Woz’s labor paid off, as the resulting Disk II drive propelled the success of the Apple II. "It cost just $140 in components, but sold for $595", reports Cult of Mac — that’s $552 and $2,347 in 2019 dollars. Yet it was still "the cheapest floppy disk system ever sold up to that point", states Wikipedia.
CC BY-SA 3.0 All About Apple
Like a Jelly of the Month Club subscription, Woz’s work is the gift that keeps on giving. Disks produced for the Apple II floppy drive continue to be imaged to this day, ensuring that classic software is preserved for Christmases to come.
Stickler fact correction: Apple Computer, having been incorporated on April 1, 1976, would have been in its second year as a company when Woz was finishing up the Disk ][ during Christmas of 1977.
I thought Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977; before that, it was a business partnership, yes?