In 1971, Wozniak and a close friend, William Fernandez, built a small 8-bit computer made out of logic ICs. Fernandez (above left) holds the computer in his hand.

The cream soda computer was before useful microprocessors so I created the processor itself out of TTL chips. This was an era where shift registers, counters, ALU’s were around in 4-bit flavors. In the end, I added chips to play with this simple 8-bit processor, just like the Altair, although I had no expansion bus that I can remember. The start was to create an instruction set. I used two common 4-bit ALU chips, I think. The minimal processor of this sort needed some arithmetic commands and at least one branch-on-condition. I created instructions that were either arithmetic between the one register and memory, and at least one branch or zero or branch on overflow instruction. Not much more as I recall. I was able to enter a program which took a 4-bit number in the lower 4 switches and multiply it by a 4-bit number in the higher 4 switches and display the result in 8 LED’s. But inputting code bit by bit wasn’t super useful. Still, it did work and was a good prelude to my thinking 5 years later with the Apple I and Apple ][ computers. You always move forward and the world of hobby computing was being born around devices not much more than my cream soda computer. Oh, and my computer had 256 bytes of static RAM in 8 chips I got from Intersil.

Woz demonstrated the board to an enthusiastic Homebrew audience and then tried to interest Hewlett-Packard, his employer, in making personal computers. However, the company doubted there was much of a market for the machine.