Apple’s First Employee: Bill Fernandez
Daniel Kottke, one of Apple’s first dozen employees, said, “[In 1976] the Apple II did not even work. Woz’s prototype worked. But when they laid it out as a circuit board, it did not work reliably… It was unacceptable. And Woz did not have the skills to fix that… But, it was even worse than that. They did not even have a schematic.”
Newly funded by investors, Apple had just hired Rod Holt as the company’s first engineering chief, and this was one of the big problems that Holt walked into when he took the job. At the time Woz’s Apple II prototype was a bunch of wires and chips in a cardboard shoebox. The tiny Apple team had to take this amazing concept machine and turn it into a product that could be manufactured and sold in stores.
So Holt handed the first task to Apple technician Bill Fernandez.
When it came to computers and electronics, few people knew the workings of Wozniak’s mind better than Fernandez. The two had grown up as neighbors and had known each other since the fourth grade. In high school, Fernandez told Wozniak that there was a kid he needed to meet because he was into electronics and practical jokes just like Woz. It was a kid named Steve Jobs. Later, Wozniak acquired a bunch of different electronics parts and took them to Fernandez’s garage, where the pair worked on assembling the stuff into their own working computer that was years ahead of its time.
