By this time they had other competitors, in addition to the Altair, most
notably the IMSAI 8080 and Processor Technology Corporation’s SOL-20.
The latter was designed by Lee Felsenstein and Gordon French of the
Homebrew Computer Club. They all had the chance to go on display during
Labor Day weekend of 1976, at the first annual Personal Computer Festival,
held in a tired hotel on the decaying boardwalk of Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Jobs and Wozniak took a TWA flight to Philadelphia, cradling one cigar box
with the Apple I and another with the prototype for the successor that Woz
was working on. Sitting in the row behind them was Felsenstein, who looked
at the Apple I and pronounced it “thoroughly unimpressive.” Wozniak was
unnerved by the conversation in the row behind him. “We could hear them
talking in advanced business talk,” he recalled, “using businesslike
acronyms we’d never heard before.”
Wozniak spent most of his time in their hotel room, tweaking his new prototype.
He was too shy to stand at the card table that Apple had been assigned near
the back of the exhibition hall. Daniel Kottke had taken the train down from
Jobs and Wozniak took a TWA flight to Philadelphia, cradling one cigar box
with the Apple I and another with the prototype for the successor that Woz
was working on. Sitting in the row behind them was Felsenstein, who looked
at the Apple I and pronounced it “thoroughly unimpressive.” Wozniak was
unnerved by the conversation in the row behind him. “We could hear them
talking in advanced business talk,” he recalled, “using businesslike
acronyms we’d never heard before.”
Manhattan, where he was now attending Columbia, and he manned the table
while Jobs walked the floor to inspect the competition. What he saw did not
impress him. Wozniak, he felt reassured, was the best circuit engineer, and the
Apple I (and surely its successor) could beat the competition in terms of functionality.
However, the SOL-20 was better looking. It had a sleek metal case, a keyboard, a
power supply, and cables. It looked as if it had been produced by grown-ups.