{"id":10249,"date":"2014-12-06T14:54:34","date_gmt":"2014-12-06T19:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=10249"},"modified":"2014-12-06T14:54:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-06T19:54:34","slug":"apples-first-employee-bill-fernandez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/06\/apples-first-employee-bill-fernandez\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple&rsquo;s First Employee: Bill Fernandez"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/article\/apples-first-employee-the-remarkable-odyssey-of-bill-fernandez\/\">Jason Hiner<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/article\/apples-first-employee-the-remarkable-odyssey-of-bill-fernandez\/\"><p>Daniel Kottke, one of Apple&rsquo;s first dozen employees, said, &ldquo;[In 1976] the Apple II did not even work. Woz&rsquo;s prototype worked. But when they laid it out as a circuit board, it did not work reliably&#8230; It was unacceptable. And Woz did not have the skills to fix that&#8230; But, it was even worse than that. They did not even have a schematic.&rdquo;<\/p><p>Newly funded by investors, Apple had just hired Rod Holt as the company&rsquo;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&rsquo;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.<\/p><p>So Holt handed the first task to Apple technician Bill Fernandez.<\/p><p>When it came to computers and electronics, few people knew the workings of Wozniak&rsquo;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&rsquo;s garage, where the pair worked on assembling the stuff into their own working computer that was years ahead of its time.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jason Hiner: Daniel Kottke, one of Apple&rsquo;s first dozen employees, said, &ldquo;[In 1976] the Apple II did not even work. Woz&rsquo;s prototype worked. But when they laid it out as a circuit board, it did not work reliably&#8230; It was unacceptable. And Woz did not have the skills to fix that&#8230; But, it was even [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[38,406,295,30,173,779],"class_list":["post-10249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-appleii","tag-history","tag-mac","tag-stevejobs","tag-steve-wozniak"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10249"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10250,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10249\/revisions\/10250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}