The Woz takes a trip down memory lane

Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak took part in a panel discussion on Saturday called 'Apple in the Garage', at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, celebrating the Mac maker's 30th anniversary.

Several hundred long-time Silicon Valley veterans and youngsters alike showed up for the talk. Apple's anniversary was really back in April but as part of the ninth annual Vintage Computer Festival, Wozniak was joined by Apple employees Chris Espinosa, Randy Wigginton and original Macintosh team member Daniel Kottke for an afternoon of storytelling about the earliest days of Apple - including the creation of the Apple I in 1976, and its successor, the Apple II in 1977.

Kottke recalled how he had become friends with Steve Jobs - who was not present at Saturday's event to the dismay of some in attendance - when both were college students at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He said the two had bonded over Eastern philosophies and that Jobs had not talked about his computer work.

But upon being invited to Silicon Valley, Kottke said he visited Jobs' house - the home of the famous garage where Jobs and Wozniak started Apple - and the first thing he found was Jobs' sister watching The Gong Show on TV and plugging chips into Apple Is.

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Wozniak said the early Apple team didn't have a telephone, and that Jobs was essentially running the entire business from his bedroom. "It was a nice, warm place to meet people," Wozniak said of the Jobs' garage.

Wigginton remembered that in those days, many of today's computer industry luminaries hung out at the Homebrew Computer Club because it was a way to have access to working computers.

He said: "Nobody could afford their own computer. It's amazing to me that owning your own computer was considered impossible."

For his part, Espinosa joked about why he had gone to work for Apple rather than for another computer company. "Scott Computer was too far away to work because I only had a bicycle," he said.

Espinosa also recalled how the carpeting in the building where Apple began working on the Apple II was a constant source of static electricity. Every time someone was walking over the carpet and touched an open Apple II case, he said, "you fried the keyboard chip". "So we spent an incredible amount of time replacing keyboard chips," he added.

Before co-founding Apple, Wozniak was working for HP, and he said that in order to protect himself from claims by HP that he was profiting off work the computer giant owned, he got the company's legal team to run the Apple I plans by every department. They all turned the project down, he said.

If HP had wanted it, said Wozniak, it probably would have been a commercial failure and might have set the PC business back significantly.

Wozniak added: "I don't want credit for designing the first [personal] computer. I just want credit for designing the first good one. [And for] publicising the fact that a computer could be attractive."

Daniel Terdiman writes for CNET News.com