Tales of Silicon Valley: How the floppy got cheap Video

Tales of Silicon Valley: How the floppy got cheap Video Transcript

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>> Silicon Valley is full of stories, some pretty, some not. This is one of those stories. [ music ] ^M00:00:12 Bruce Daimer and Allan Mondell [assumed spelling] of the Digibarn, Hellhouse Steve Wozniak [assumed spelling] took his Christmas break to revolutionize the size and price of floppy drives.

>> In 1977 the first computer that had built in floppy drives was?

>> Well this was the Northstar Horizon, which was an S100 machine. That was also an open architecture standard, actually a lot bigger than the Apple, and a little bit earlier, and probably where, inspired Woz in many ways.

>> Yeah, built in floppies, what a concept.

>> Yeah.

>> And at the time Apple had come out with this machine, that's the only media format it supported, and cassette interface. This was actually Applesoft Basic made by Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sent to Apple and stamped Applesoft Basic.

>> Now keep in mind that this whole format, this was audio cassette. So people listened to their music in those days on these things. And putting data on it was a bit of a joke. It really didn't work very well, you had to sometimes load it three or four times, it would take like ten minutes to put in.

>> And there'd be an error. And the way that was the wave of the future was the floppy.

>> Yeah.

>> And so companies like Northstar had created integrated floppy drives, and this was the board to, was the floppy controller for one of these two drives. So you had to have two of these boards. So two of these monster boards.

>> Lots of real estate.

>> Lots of real estate, not necessarily the fastest and whatever, but look at all that. Now Steve Wozniak knew that Apple was gonna die if they were stuck on cassette tape. This was an expensive machine by the standards of the day, and to have only this was really terrible. So over the Christmas of 1977 there was a big show coming up in January, and the Christmas of 1977 Woz came up with this. Now look at this, count the chips. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight chips, how many are on there? I can't even make a guess. It's crazy.

>> Two of these equals -

>> Two of these equals one. This drive, see this drive one, drive two? So this drove two floppy drives. He figured out that there were a whole bunch of chips that were used to drive the stepper motors, and he said I don't need all those chips, I can just do it by varying the voltage to the stepper motor. So he got rid of a whole row of chips, and it just kept going from there. And so by January of '78 he had this working in prototype, they could show it at the show. And then I think by about June of '78 Apple shipped disc two. I don't know what's disc two because it's for the Apple too. Really good little floppy drive, so people started buying you know, this very cheap to make board with a good floppy drive. The profit on these is incredible, the profit alone. So overnight a tiny hardware innovation made a very profitable thing, and it made the computer useful, and it made a software industry explode around the computer.

>> Look for more tales of Silicon Valley at cnettv.com.