Rod Holt, legendary Apple designer writing NowPublic, 40Y- mouse

Other aesthetics to which Jobs paid attention were the color of the keyboard, vents for heat dissipation (avoiding the need for a noisy fan), and a shape and color that would blend in with other items in a home or on a desk. He also hired an engineer who was good with analog circuitry (not Wozniak's area of interest) to design a reliable, lightweight power supply that would stay cool. The engineer, Rod Holt, was working at Atari at the time, but was convinced to help Jobs and Wozniak. He developed a new approach (for microcomputers) by taking household current and switching it on and off rapidly, producing a steady current that was safe for the expensive memory chips. The final design of this switching power supply was smaller than a quart carton of milk and was quite reliable. Holt also helped design the television interface for the Apple II.[3]


The new company was racing to have the Apple II ready for the First West Coast Computer Faire in April of 1977. Some last minute bugs had to be eliminated; because of a static electricity problem affecting a sensitive chip, the keyboards went dead every twenty minutes. Chris Espinosa and Randy Wigginton, two high school students who were early employees of Apple, had written programs to demonstrate the computer's color and sound. They were hurriedly working to duplicate these programs on cassette. People at Apple were working to fix blemishes in the computer cases that had returned from the plastics molding company. The name for this new computer was also finalized as "Apple II", following the example of Digital Equipment Company, who had given each newer version of its PDP series a higher number (PDP-1, PDP-6, etc.). They stylized the "II" in the product name by using right and left brackets, and displaying it on the case as "][". The final product bore the mark of each person at Apple:

The computer that appeared at the West Coast Computer Faire was not one person's machine. It was the product of collaboration and blended contributions in digital logic design, analog engineering, and aesthetic appeal. The color, the slots, the way in which the memory could be expanded from 4K to 48K bytes, the control of the keyboard and hookup to the cassette recorder, and the BASIC that was stored in the ROM chip--in effect the motherboard--was Wozniak's contribution. Holt had contributed the extremely significant power supply, and Jerry Mannock the case. The engineering advances were officially recognized when, some months later, Wozniak was awarded U.S. Patent #4,136,359 for a microcomputer for use with video display, and Holt was given Patent #4,130,862 for direct current power supply. But behind them all Jobs was poking, prodding, and pushing and it was he, with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy, who became the chief arbiter and rejector... [Finally,] the combination of [Mike] Markkula [Apple's first president], Jobs, and the McKenna Agency turned Apple's public bow [at the West Coast Computer Faire] into a coup.[4]