Power Source
Wozniak, whose passion was the circuitry, didn't concern himself with the issue of heat. But the power source necessary to keep all those circuits functioning can make a lot of heat, and that can require a fan, a low-tech contraption in itself, to disperse said heat. Steve Jobs thought fans an inelegant solution, and looked for someone who could come up with a better one.
Rod Holt is credited (for example in the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs) with the solution. Holt employed a Switched-mode power supply design. This generated far less unwanted heat than a linear power supply, which most other home computers of the time used.
Isaacson quotes Wozniak saying that this was not something he could have done. "I only knew vaguely what a switching power supply was."
Read more about this topic: Apple II
Famous quotes containing the words power and/or source:
“The reduction of nuclear arsenals and the removal of the threat of worldwide nuclear destruction is a measure, in my judgment, of the power and strength of a great nation.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)