Steve Jobs and Wozniak began designing video games

Steve Jobs

Parents are the biggest culprits that for many years have seen video games as products that only time wasters children. However, years ago, when personal computers did not even exist, and when large companies today were only one project in a garage, the gaming world was something reserved for the few geniuses.

The genius of the new era, the geniuses who did not leave a dent on the great progress of a war but to create entertainment, to create what never imagined. And among them he was the one that seemed to have devoted solely to create computers, tablets and smartphones, Steve Jobs. Although it may seem a lie, Jobs initially worked for Atari, who in the 70s completely dominated the small universe around digital entertainment. Working there, and together with whom later founded Apple, they came to design the game Breakout, which was then not only software, but a complete machine that even included the joysticks.

Steve Jobs
Image Source: Google Image

But let’s go back a few years ago. When Steve Jobs was still in high school, he was able to meet William Hewlett, the founder of the HP (Hewlett Packard) company. So impressed was this with Steve, who offered him an internship in the company during the holiday season, he is later hired as a summer employee.

There he met other workers, Stephen Wozniak. These two were introduced by which it was Steve Jobs best friend and classmate, Bill Fernandez, who in turn had also helped Wozniak with the creation of a computer in the garage of his parents’ house. This would be the beginning of a great story we all know. However, along the way there have been many important in the world of technology that so far unaware events.

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A request for Atari

Although Jobs began studying at the university, high costs made him leave, and as a listener only attend some classes that interested him. After two years, he returned to California, where he got a employed in Atari Inc., the largest video game company at the time. Nolan Bushnell was the founder of the company and was working on a variant of the classic game Pong, in which two players play a kind of game of tennis where the only items that appear on screen are a sphere and two lines that racket. At that time, for they, of course, but video games were digital, still were far from being what they are today. They were constructed by a system TTL chips. These chips digital systems had a problem, and that each change in the design of a video game meant having to change everything manually, so often had to remove and solder new chips. It was a task engineer, and more typical of someone who knows how to build it from someone who knows schedule. Reducing the amount of chips had become essential. Steve Jobs was commissioned to design the video game machine, and had a period of four days, which would charge $ 750, plus another $ 100 for each TTL chip that got deleted.

And here it is where you can see how the now deceased founder of Apple Company has become one of the protagonists in the world of technology. Instead of designing it himself, he turned to his friend Steve Wozniak, who at that time was still working at HP. He offered half of what was going to win, $ 375, and hid what they would earn for each TTL chip that was eliminated. The result was much better than expected. Although Steve Wozniak went days without sleep working on the new design, he got the final machine had 50 TTL chips less than the initial, finishing the design with a total of 42 chips. Jobs introduced the design Atari, and he won $ 5700, of which only gave $ 375 to Wozniak. Worst of all is that the company failed to understand the design. Finally, they commissioned the project to another engineer, who completed the 100 TTL chips. Wozniak said years later that the most likely someone trying to make any changes in its approach, and therefore not reach understand.

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In 1976 it ended up throwing the market Breakout, but by then, Apple Computer and was founded weeks before, and it took only a year to launch the second computer, the Apple II, beginning a story that expands to the present day. Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, the two great creators of Apple, began to emerge as manufactured and designing video games, and was Breakout, the game that many now known as Arkanoid, breaking the bricks, the first project faced together. Already at that time they made the difference, possibly more than they did in recent years.

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