Excerpt from The First Apple book, an interview with Joey Copson’s brother Bill.
Bill Copson - Why was Joey so intelligent? Who knows? I’ll tell you, it’s funny. Nobody ever even questioned that. Even when he was a kid, it used to blow my mind because adults would listen to him. Even though I was five years younger, I’d notice all these adults listening to him, to essentially a kid. It was unbelievable. Did I tell you the story about the first satellite going over? Joey was nine or ten. I think it was 1957, and I’m pretty sure it was a Russian satellite.
My brother knew about it when this stuff was happening, and it just happened that the satellite was passing over the part of Oregon where we lived. And so he spread the word around the neighborhood. “At such and such time, you’ve got to be outside to see it.”
The kids spread the word, and friends of mine told their parents. And they said, “Well, how do you know this?” “Well, Joey told me. Joey Copson.” “Oh, we’d better be out there.” And I remember standing—I was four, five years old—I remember standing there and thinking, ‘How does he do this?’ Here’s a group of thirty people that are out here just because of something he said. And right to the minute, he goes, “There it is.” I remember looking up and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, it’s true,’ and this bright object with no blinking lights goes shooting over, you know? I’m standing there thinking ‘This is unbelievable.’ I didn’t disbelieve my brother, never. After the satellite goes over, they’re all asking him questions and he’s answering them as best as he can. And then everybody goes inside, and that’s a moment in time.
Joey was interested in any kind of esoteric subject. His interest in astronomy lasted pretty much his whole life, but he also got into chemistry and electronics. He would get into something and learn it, and then move on. It was phenomenal. When I was a kid, I remember my mom would take him to the library. He’d drop off three to five big books, pick up three to five more, and that week at home he’d read all of them, and mom would take them all back the next Saturday. He did that for like a decade. His brain could absorb so much stuff, it was just spooky. That started when I was a little kid in Portland, before I was even five, and it continued when we moved to Palo Alto. He might get an off-the-wall book sometimes, and say, “I just want to read this.” Like when he was studying about electronics, they were electronics books. And he always would pick up something on astronomy. It was a huge hobby for him. He was interested in astronomy all the way ‘til the end. I mean, my dad took us bowling, but as for Joey’s hobbies, he was into astronomy and chemistry. Well, to other people, that would be learning about something, but that was Joey’s hobby for years. He didn’t like going off and throwing darts. He didn’t play Ping Pong. The bowling we did was because we were little kids and our dad took us. All his hobbies had to do with learning more about stuff he just dug. When he first got into chemistry, he learned so much about it, it was unbelievable. Do you know what he did? He wanted to make little things go boom! And not just with the regular old fashioned ways of gun powder and stuff. Now, was he a terrorist? No. Did he like to blow some little shit up? Oh, yeah. But that’s what got him into it, and he was into it for years and years. He went far past the spectrum of learning how to blow things up.
Moving to Palo Alto was a huge blessing, because the schools up in Portland weren’t anything like the schools in Palo Alto. In Palo Alto they were teaching kindergarteners how to read. My dad was in sales his whole life. He generally had two jobs, just to be able to afford to live where we lived. We weren’t rich or anything, but he wanted us in a good neighborhood. Not that Portland wasn’t, but Palo Alto is Palo Alto, you know? We didn’t live in one of the big houses. I was in second grade when we moved to California. Joey was in seventh. For high school, we went to Palo Alto High. ‘Paly.’ He graduated the class of ’69, and I graduated the class of ’74. Around seventh or eighth grade, they took Joey and the other ‘brainiacs’ in his class to a company in Mountain View called Spectro Physics. They got to build a laser with parts the company couldn’t sell, but that could still function. So, Joey built a functioning laser, which was a big deal back then. I remember there were gas vacuum tubes, and there were these little tiny reflective mirrors on a round glass about a quarter inch thick. The surface had to be perfect. Their quality control department looked at it with a micrometer. If there was one piece that wasn’t perfect, then the company couldn’t sell it. So, they used it with these kids, who had an instructor. I used to go over there. I went inside twice, and there was one room where they tested the lasers. They’d screwed up once and the laser ray had made actual holes in the wall. It was neat.
Joseph Charles Copson’s “Job History” from his resume:
U.S. Army, USAR Control Group, Field Radio Mechanic, Technician Jan 1970 to October1974, Vietnam tour of duty
Commodore Computer, Technician Calculators, November 1974 to December 1975
Programmed Power, Technician, January 1976 to February1979
Vindicator Corp, Programmer, March 1979 to March 1981
Atari Corp, Programmer, March 1981 to March 1984
Macromind, June 1990 to September 1990
Apple Computer, October 1990 to December 1991
Bill Copson - When Joey was eighteen, everybody was getting drafted right out of high school. So he got his numbers. I’ll never forget that day. Oh, God, did that suck. He was 1-A, you know? And if you don’t know what that means, that means you’re going in. You’re going in unless you only have one leg. The Armed Forces got all these results from high school. Remember when we were in high school, and they would do tests in gym class? How many pull-ups and how quick? Everybody’s results were recorded, but they didn’t seem to go anywhere. That’s what went to the military. It would let them know what these boys and girls—well, boys back then—what they could do. You know, that’s how they knew all that stuff. My brother told me, if they ever do that test at your high school, do really shitty. They came up in my junior year or sophomore year, and my coach just goes, “What the hell, three pull-ups? What’s wrong?” And I said, “Ahh, I just don’t…” “Four sit-ups?” Like, I ran the mile in twenty-one minutes.
When he got the draft notice, he just went in the bedroom and sat down. I looked at his face, and I was like, “Oh, shit. What’s wrong?” And he just handed it to me. You know, he knew it was coming. All the guys were just scared as hell in those days. I mean, I just missed it by a little ways, thank God.
He went and talked to my dad. My dad and he weren’t always really close, but when he needed my dad, he wasn’t scared to go talk to him. And my dad’s best buddy was retired military; he was an attorney for the Army. So my dad calls him up, and says, “Hey we need to ask your advice, my son just got his notice and he’s 1-A.” So, his friend said, “Does he want to go, or does he want to leave the country?” I remember my dad saying, “No, he’s not going to Canada.” A third of the people were. “He wants to go,” and my dad’s friend knew how smart my brother was. He said “He needs to go in and enlist.” Because if you enlist, you’d get all kinds of advantages.
So, he went and enlisted. In boot camp, he was in charge of ten guys. Just because he enlisted. He had a great time in boot camp. He had a blast. I mean, he got tired, but he’d send me letters and call, and Oh, my God, they were having fun. But they busted their butts. And then, when he got out of boot camp, he stayed stateside for twelve more months, going to specialized schools for the military. And when he got to Viet Nam, as soon as he put his foot on soil, he was E-5 with combat pay, even though he wasn’t a fighter. He was in an air-conditioned office. He worked something called Tailboard Controls; the helicopters would take off… (makes whirling sound effect) then they’d radio to him and give a password. He’d open up the safe and give them their orders. You know, exactly what they were supposed to do.
But he never could tell me more than that. And, he told me everything, so it was weird. The military got to him. It was on a ‘need to know’ basis with him.
I know he was exposed to Agent Orange and it later contributed to his death. Everybody in that whole region was exposed. My God, I mean the helicopters flew out of there to disperse it, you know? It was everywhere, even though he wasn’t crawling on the jungle floor. Now, they might have been out in the jungle getting drunk and having fun, you know? And believe me, they got to have a lot of fun when they were out there.
And so Viet Nam gets over. And he left two days before they took over the Embassy, so everything over there was crazy. And his CO says, “Okay, you’ve got to go over to this base to get your records.” Joey goes, “Well, why can’t they just send them over?” Everybody’s excited, “This is it! We’re leaving!” My brother had to hitchhike over to this base and they gave him all his papers, everything, not just what they would’ve forwarded. He had twenty pounds of papers, you know? They just said, “Here, take it.” Everybody was packing up and getting out of there. So my brother comes home. He’s got a month off. Well, a month goes by. My dad says to him, “Hey, wait a second. You’re supposed to go back.” Joey goes, “Ah, I don’t think so.” My dad’s like, “Whoa, you can’t do that.” He collected pay for three months, going over to the base in Oakland. Then, finally, one of the guys at Oakland, a real cool dude, says, “Don’t come back in here.” So my brother said, “Okay.” My brother was home for, I think it was nine or ten months, and his hair’s getting longer. He’s starting to get ready to look for a job. And I remember, we were eating potato chips and watching stupid afternoon TV. Then, there’s a knock on the door, and I went towards the door. I look outside, and there’s an MP Jeep. Then I head over to the front window and on the porch there was an MP with a rifle over his shoulder. I’m like, “Oh, Joey…” And he goes, “Well, open the door. Open the door.” So they come in. And they’re real nice, and they go, “Are you Joseph Copson, blah, blah, blah..?” And he goes, “Yes, I am.” And they say, “You‘ve got to come with us.” And he goes, “Yeah, no problem. Can I get my shaving kit?” Because if you’re in the military, that’s your one sole possession you keep around. And they go, “Yeah.” And he gets his Army coat and he walks out the door. They don’t handcuff him or anything. And he says, “You tell mom and dad that when I can, I’ll give them a call.” And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my God, here he’s gonna be gone for twenty years, who knows?’ I mean, like right now. I’m like freaking out. And mom and dad get home—of course, this is before cell phones—and I tell them, and I’m like, ‘Oh, gosh!’ It was three weeks later when we got a call from him.
And Joey says, “Well, it’s not too bad.” And we’re all like, “What do you mean? Where are you?” Well, all they did to him was put him at Fort Ord in Monterey Bay, for one month. And in the military if you’re bad, they take money out of your paycheck, they scold you financially. And he did shit work, I mean absolute grunt work for a month, and he got a forty dollar paycheck for the month. He went to some base in Texas for the rest of the months he had to serve, and he got out with an honorable discharge. He had full benefits. So why would they allow somebody–a ‘brainiac,’ and also a big pot smoker and stuff–why would they treat him like that? I just wonder, what did he know?
Bob - I know Joey was self-taught. Did he use his military benefits to go to school and study computers?
Bill - Not one bit. No, he hated school. Let me explain it to you this way, one time he said… He kind of worded it like this, this was long time ago. I asked him, “Why didn’t you go to more college?” And he said, “For me going to school, it’s like, okay, this whole class teaches you how to swim, and after a half a day I’m doing laps. And now I’ve got to sit here for the rest of the year just to take these stupid tests to show that I know it.” So, school was too slow for him. It was like reading the same comic book that you never even liked, and it’s the fiftieth time you’ve read it. You know, it was something that if you had a choice, you wouldn’t do it. That’s where he was at. He didn’t really even get fantastic grades because he never did his homework. And he’d take these tests and get perfect scores. The teachers hated him. They’re like, ‘You put no effort out.’ So, he passed everything, but he wasn’t a straight A student. Now, some teachers would realize that he was real smart, and liked him, and he liked them. But the other teachers, they just couldn’t handle that crap. You know, ‘You’re not doing it the way that you’re supposed to.’ Well, screw that.
Bob - Do you know where he bought the Apple-1?
Bill - Yeah! He got it brand new from a shop down in San Jose called the Byte Shop. That’s who he bought it through, but I’m almost sure it came to him via the mail, through a package. I was there the day he opened it, and he was all excited about this green board with black chips. He’s opening it up and I’m going, “Wow, this has got to be something really bitchin’.” And he opens it up, oh, wow! But to him, he’s almost bowing down to it, and I’m like, “What are you so excited for?”
It was something else! He was like a kid opening up the best present he ever got at Christmas. It was as if you got the BB gun you always wanted. I tell you, it was unbelievable. I remember when the Apple ][ (“Apple two”) came out, and he was sitting there saying—and we were partying or something—and he said, “They’ll give me a big discount if I trade in the Apple-1,” and he goes, “No, I’m not going to. I don’t care, I’m keeping the Apple-1.”
That’s how come there’s not as many Apple-1’s. Apple did the typical thing they would do to this day. Bring in your Apple-1, we’ll give you this much off your Apple ][. I don’t remember what the dollars were, but my brother said, “Well, that’s not worth it. Hell, I’ll just go and buy an Apple ][.”
Bob - What do you think his motivation was to keep it?
Bill - Because he knew how unique it was. It’s such a cornerstone of technology, you know?
Joey gets credit for being the Atari programmer who did the games Star Raiders (Silver 1, 5200 System, 1982) and Spitfire (1983). In 2007, Star Raiders was named one of the ten most important video games of all time.
Bob - Do you remember when he first went to work for Atari?
Bill - Oh, I remember. I had my own pass! I went there all the time! I met all those guys. See, how it would work is the building he worked in— at that time I think Atari had like eighteen big buildings right in Silicon Valley—and to this day, some of them are still vacant, because of the economy, I guess. And, I would go into the building, and the girl would say, “Hey, Billy,” and I go, “Hi,” and she would give me my badge. And I had a badge with my name on it, Visitor Billy.
You’d walk in the very front, and it was all three-piece suits. You get fifty feet further and all the ties are off. You get back another fifty feet, and now you see some guys with cut-offs. You go back another hundred feet, and you could even smell marijuana. I’m telling you. And all of the suits told everyone, “You don’t bug the programmers. They can do whatever they want.” And, no kidding. I remember one time going to my brother’s office and there were six of the designers sitting in a circle and passing a joint, talking about the problems they’re having with their particular situation. They were trying to make the arcade game fit into the Atari home version. Well, the arcade game had a mile of memory, and the home version had one foot of memory, and they have to make that game interesting, and they did it. Son of a bitch if they didn’t do it. They’d all brainstorm to help each other out. And they’d go, “Shut up, sit down Billy,” and I might have to sit there for a half an hour.
They had a big room in the very back with all the arcade games, you didn’t have to put quarters in them. It was for the guys to go play, like, ‘Okay, I’m running into a problem here.’ They had the games there so they could play as much as they wanted, to kind of refresh their memory. So I could go back in there, and I’d go in for hours at a time, and just play these friggin’ games. It was fun, man. And nobody else’s kid brother went in. I was the only one. It was weird.
Bob - Why?
Bill - Because I dug my brother, and all of the guys liked me. See, I was like six feet tall at a very young age, and everybody caught up to me. When I was in fourth grade, I was the tallest kid in the school. I was taller than most of the teachers. And then, later on in life, I looked older than I was. I could hang around with my brother’s friends because they were all five years older; I wasn’t a stupid little giggly kid. That’s how come. I used to say to some of the other guys, “Don’t your brothers want to come in and do this?” “No, they’re not really interested,” and I said, “Wow.” I saw the value in it, of going and having fun over there. And plus hanging with these guys was exhilarating to me, anyway.
Bob - You told me you’d sold some collectibles that were owned by Joey. Did any of that have to do with Joey’s career?
Bill - Well, we put up four Atari games on eBay, four games that are signed by the writers.
Bob - And those were guys that he worked with?
Bill - Yeah. Those were all his buddies. What’s a bitch is I have one of his games, but he never signed it. He didn’t think he was gonna die, you know?
Bob - You said Atari staffers could get a bonus if they’d done something that was a big success?
Bill - Oh, yeah. I remember years ago, what happened was Atari and these big companies were paying these guys pretty much shit pay, and then they were making millions and millions off these completed programs. And so these writers started saying, “Well, screw you, I quit.” And that’s how all these other places (start-ups) came to be. Hell, that’s how Apple came to be, because designers got tired of being ripped-off. And finally Atari says, “Wait a second, we’ve got to start giving them a percentage.” I think it was in the area of one percent. Well, his good buddy did Centipede, and he got a million dollar bonus. This was back in the ‘70s, dude. We didn’t see him for a week, but he didn’t quit the company either. He was very happy. That was when a million dollars meant something, not like today, you know?
Yeah, here you give a twenty-three year-old kid a million dollars—that’s a brainiac like Joey was—and you know, and so that goes around, and that pumps all the other guys up. But then Atari went bellyup. Joey was supposed to get a pretty substantial bonus, but he got screwed. Yeah, so be it.
I think he even did some work at home. He wasn’t even on the clock, it was just a challenge to him. My brother invented a really great astronomy program that was better than anything else at the time. It took so much memory to use, he’d have to go to NASA, to NASA’s database. Then, his computer could handle the rest of the program. And I always used to bug him and say, “Dude, why don’t you sell it?” And he goes, “No, no. I don’t even want to sell it. I’m just making it for me. It’s an achievement.” Well, one day he finally told me, “Billy, I can’t sell it.” And I said, “Why?” He goes, “Because I got the idea while I was working for Apple. “That’s why I can’t.” Because I knew he signed something. They all signed a proprietary agreement which said that anything they thought of while they were employed by that company, was owned by the company.
Bob - Do you know how he first started working with Apple?
Bill - I don’t know exactly. It could have been the headhunter, or word of mouth. Because even though Silicon Valley is rather large, every industry is small in itself, when it comes to people that know people around in that industry.
When he worked for Apple, he worked for them a number of times through a headhunter. My brother’s big thing was they would hire him to de-bug new programs that their in-house people had put together. The programmer did that normally, but that was my brother’s forte. He figured out where the glitches were and then fixed them.
Joey was real funny. All of Joey’s friends know that they couldn’t say, ‘Yeah, I bought a program and made a copy, you want one?’ My brother would kill them. ‘You don’t copy that stuff. You go out and you buy it. And you pay the people the money that invented it.’ My brother would… It was like, my brother didn’t have that kind of attitude with anything except for when it came to programs and stuff. You don’t short the system on this, you buy it like you’re supposed to. If he was around now, he wouldn’t bootleg any music off the Net. He’d pay for it. Because he goes, ‘That’s stealing and that’s just wrong.’ My brother, in his own way, was one of the most honest guys in the world. He wouldn’t do something he could get away with just because nobody was watching. He wouldn’t do it, because he knew it was wrong. That’s how we were raised.
You know, it’s funny. I’m five years younger than he would be if he was still alive. I remember when he came home one day with this big thick manual, because he was all excited because they were going to let him work on the Cray computer that they had, right? He brought home this like four-inch thick book. I’m sitting watching TV, and he drops this book on the table, and it’s like a phone book, right? And I go, “What the hell is that?” And he goes, “This is the condensed version for the operation manual to work on the Cray.” Which he was all excited that he was one of the ones picked to work on it. And I go, “What’s a Cray?” Well, that’s when I learned. He told me, it’s a supercomputer, it does this, that, you know? And I’m looking at this book, I go, “How are you going to read the thing?” “Oh, I’ve already read half of it.” I’m like, oh, Jesus, you know? Whatever he read, he remembered, man. It stuck in his head. It was amazing.
Bob - Where was the Cray?
Bill - At Apple. Yeah, exactly, the Cray was at Apple. As far as I knew, back then, Apple was the only company that even had one of them. I have his Apple insignia with the name Joe Copson. They’d Velcro them on his office door in a plastic sleeve. He ended up keeping that, and when I came across it going through his things when he passed, I kept it. I kept anything. I got business cards from when he worked at Atari saying he was a software engineer, and I got tablets that say Atari in his name, and I think I have some that say Apple, because they always supplied that stuff for him.
When Joey went into the hospital, he didn’t think he was going to die. Dude, when he drove himself to the hospital, it’d be like you going in to have your tires rotated, and then the mechanic tells you that your engine is blown. You’re like, ‘What?’ He never got out again; he was in a coma thirty hours later and never spoke to anybody again. So, he went down feeling bad; he didn’t know any of this stuff was going to happen. The VA (Veteran’s Administration) had diagnosed him a decade before with Crohn’s Disease. But he never had Crohn’s Disease. He had cancer, and they treated him for Crohn’s. That’s why the cancer spread through his entire body.
Even the doctor told us, me and my mom—bawling next to me— “We’re sorry, you know, but we misdiagnosed him.” You can’t sue the VA, otherwise I’d have taken them to the friggin’ cleaners for taking away my brother like that. I wanted it to end, and not prolong the pain my mother was going through. She aged twenty years in one day. It took me three weeks to take care of his stuff. My boss said, “You don’t worry about it, Bill. Your chair’s open here, you just take care, do your stuff.” And when I left, I started calling my mom every day, because her memory, she couldn’t remember shit. And it was about one year to the calendar day of him dying, all the sudden she popped out of it. She was better. It was unbelievable.
When a parent buries a kid, I couldn’t even imagine that. I’ve only got one kid. I can’t even fathom how bad that would be, you know? Joey had one best bud. He had a lot of friends, but he had one best bud, and his name is Mike. Well, what Mike does, he can’t really talk about. He’s a genetic engineer. He used to work in a building that had no windows. But Joey and him, they had a grease pencil board out in the carport of his back yard. And they would do equations like Einstein. Sometimes it would take them a year to get through one. And we’re sitting there one time, getting stoned or something, and all of the sudden, I remember Mike stood up, he goes, “No!” then he erases this…and writes another line and a half of all these equal marks, and parenthesis, and God knows what, 2 with another 2. And my brother goes, “Why didn’t we see that?” And then they stare at that for three more weeks before they can figure out how to go forward. Dude, I don’t get any of that shit. To me, it’s Chinese. Mike loved Joey; they were best buddies. Mike would go eighty miles out of his way to pick up Joey’s mail when Joey was in the hospital. Only true friends do that, you know?
Joey lived in a tiny cabin shack in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It wasn’t like a shantytown shack. It had a bathroom and a living room, the kitchen was part of it. You’d walk down a short hallway, and that was his bedroom. And that was it. I mean it was maybe five hundred, six hundred square feet. It was heated only by a potbelly stove. It’s up on Scotts Valley. You get to it by the way of Highway 17, and he lived on Summit Road. As long as you went off-hours, it wasn’t that bad of a drive to commute to Silicon Valley. If it was during traffic time, it could take an hour. That was exactly how he did it. And he’d come down and visit my mom three or four times a week, you know, in Palo Alto, which is just another hop, skip, and a jump going north.
Bob - Did he ever marry?
Bill - No. No, it would have been a special woman to fall in love with my brother. You know, he was, I don’t know how to say it. I mean, he wasn’t extremely handsome, he just grew long-ass hair and he had a big bushy beard. He wasn’t real clean and neat as far as his house went. Now I know he had some girls that he knew that were friends, but…
No, it would have been a special kind of woman to have fallen in love with my brother and he never came across her. Which is too bad. He wasn’t afraid of women. He just was a geek.
Bob - When he passed away, was he still living in the shack?
Bill - Oh, yeah. It took me three weeks to clean it out, empty it out, get it right.
Bob - And the Apple-1 was in the shack?
Bill - No. He’d lived there for over twenty years. He got out of the military, and then he lived with my mom for a while, because my dad was dead, and, you know, he helped her out. Then he found this place, and I remember the day he found it. He says, “It’s way up the Santa Cruz Mountains,” and I just knew he was going to move there. His eyes were glazed over. And, he was like, “This is too bitchin’. As long as the clouds don’t come in, I can see the stars like you wouldn’t believe.” That was big deal. That was because astronomy was always one of his hobbies.
Bob - I don’t mean to focus too much on the difficult time when he’d just passed away—but when you cleaned out his shack, did you have his most important assets in mind? Were you thinking about the Apple-1?
Bill - Well, no. When he died, I hadn’t thought about the Apple-1 for years. It was already down at mom’s house, stuffed in a closet. In the shack, he had a Dobsonian telescope with a twenty inch mirror, and a Celestron A. Then he had his big binoculars that he’d search for comets with. I ended up with those.
Bob - So he’d stuffed the Apple-1 into a closet at your mom’s house?
Bill - Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. He brought it down. He was thinking of selling it, and he didn’t get any real bites on it. This was decades ago. And then my mom said, “Leave it here.” When my mom died four years ago, I cleaned up her house and came across it. I thought, “Oh, fuck, the Apple-1!” I’d forgotten about it!”
Bob - So you’re cleaning out a closet and you come across the Apple-1?
Bill - I came across it. You know, if I’d emptied everything out and not found it, at some point later in life I would’ve gone, ‘wait a second.’ It would have popped up in my mind, like, oh, my God! What happened to it?
Bob - And you knew at one time he’d considered selling it anyway.
Bill - Oh, absolutely, yeah. Exactly. I think somebody gave him an offer of seventeen hundred dollars. And he was working, and he said, “No. It’s worth more to me to have it.” If he’d have lived until he was ninety, he probably never would’ve sold it. Unless he really needed to, he would have hung on to it, because that was a prized possession.
Contact Information:
Bob Luther
P.O. Box 830 Alexandria, Virginia 22313
Phone: (703) 966-0122
Email: BobLuther@TheFirstApple.com
