Steve Wozniak
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But Marcullo wasn't satisfied.
He was annoyed at how long it took to load his checkbook program from Cassette.
A cassette tape could read a thousand bits per second.
A floppy could read a hundred thousand bits per second.
A hundred times faster.
He told Wozniak they needed a floppy disk drive.
The Computer Electronics Show was coming up in January 1978.
Wozniak desperately wanted to go.
It was the industry's biggest event.
He asked Marcoule if he could go, if he finished the disk drive in time.
Markula, knowing how to motivate his star engineer, agreed.
That gave Wozniak two weeks to build a floppy drive.
Two weeks to design from scratch one of the most complex peripherals imaginable.
He'd never owned a floppy drive and never programmed one before.
The challenge would take a normal team of engineers months.
Wozniak had to work through Christmas and New Year's.
It would become his magnum opus.
Jobs got him one of the new 5.25 inch floppy drives.
Wozniak examined it, studied its schematics, and then came to a stunning conclusion.
Of the 22 chips in the standard controller, only two were actually needed.