A Tale of Two Steves - Designing for Manufacturability before Apple Inc.

Welcome to our DFM Legends series where we share renowned DFM nerds and their stories as they engineer their way through ambitious DFM challenges. 🤓
This article centers on two of my favorite Steves: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As with any DFM folklore, some details may be fictionalized but still based on a true account of DFM culture at its finest.

Enlisting and rallying the DFM nerds
Before this duo of Steves' founded Apple they were 2 awkward kids roaming Silicone Valley with a passion for tech. Legend has it, one day a young teenaged Steve Jobs wandered into the Atari building and refused to leave until they gave him a job. Intrigued by this, CEO Nolan Bushnell hired Steve as a technician.
Shortly after, Jobs was banished to working the night shift because he smelled really bad and refused to take showers. Â Evidently, he so smelled so bad that nobody at Atari could work near him. Woz worked as an engineer across town at Hewlett-Packard. After work, he would often come to hang out with Jobs at Atari.

One day, Bushnell went searching for anyone to design his new game idea - Breakout. Most of the staff seemed disinterested, seeing this as a sort of pong reboot, so Bushnell turned to Jobs. Â Bushnell knew that Jobs didn't have the technical chops to complete the game, but also knew that Jobs' best friend Steve Wozniak would come and hang out with Jobs at night. Bushnell was hoping Jobs would bait Woz into helping. Â
The DFM challenge - design for minimal chip count
Bushnell tasked Jobs with a timeless DFM Challenge: Do this with the least amount of chips. Woz had become a Silicone Valley legend in designing with minimal chip usage and was officially hooked.
Bushnell offered $700 to complete the game and apparently also offered a bonus for each chip saved. The 2 agreed to split the $700 50%/50%, but it remains a mystery if Jobs hid the chip reduction bonus from Woz or if the bonus ever even existed.
Iterating and executing to the extreme
The 2 Steves worked day and night on a critical 4 day timeline. Why such a short timeline? Not because Atari required it, but instead because Jobs wanted to go to an apple orchard commune over the weekend and needed some fast cash! Â The 2 stayed up for 4 days straight and apparently worked so hard they caught mononucleosis.
By day 4, Woz had created a successful game with a legendary 44 chips! Â Typical Atari games benchmarked at 150-170 chips. Â Legend has it, the game was so intricately designed to utilize these chips, that no other engineer could fully figure out how it worked and they needed to add back a few chips for mass production.


Strange fact, to this day it was never known exactly how much Jobs was paid. Some say he received a cash bonus for chips not used and never told Woz. Jobs denied this claim throughout his life, but Woz forever remains suspicious. 🤨
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