Everything about Randy Wigginton totally explained
Randy Wigginton was one of
Apple Computer's first employees (#6), creator of
MacWrite,
Full Impact and numerous other Mac applications. He used to work in development at
eBay,
Quigo, Inc, and now works for
Move.com(External Link
). He has a daughter named: Andrea. He has a son named: Ken.
Wigginton was a student at
Homestead High School in
Cupertino,
California, interested in computers just as the earliest
microprocessor-based computers were being assembled by hobbyists. He had heard about the
Homebrew Computer Club but had no way to get there until he started getting rides with another club member,
Steve Wozniak. The two hit it off, and Wigginton became one of Apple's earliest employees in 1976, and was present with Woz when the
Apple I was first presented to the world at a Club meeting.
Wigginton collaborated with Wozniak on the circuit design and
ROM software for the
Apple II in
1977. As Woz wired up color graphics circuitry, Wigginton wrote
machine language graphics subroutines, and
Chris Espinosa, another high school student, wrote demo programs in
BASIC. Wigginton wrote several early programs for the Apple II, including a checkbook-balancing program co-authored with Apple's vice-president of Marketing
Mike Markkula. Wigginton wrote a new
BASIC, called
Applesoft BASIC, as an answer to
Microsoft BASIC, which had
floating-point arithmetic. Wigginton wasn't trained in
numerical analysis, but he managed to write a set of floating-point routines, which worked fairly well. However, there were a few anomalies: In the
Applesoft BASIC Reference Manual, writer Brian Howard included a section entitled "Rounding can be Curious", in which he demonstrated that the ROUND function, which rounds a number to a prescribed accuracy, isn't
monotonic: in other words, for some
x and
y, such that
x<
y, ROUND(
x)> ROUND(
y).
Perhaps his most critical early contribution was the RWTS (read/write track-sector) routines for the Disk II, the 5 1/4" floppy disk controller introduced at the
Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show in early
1978. Wigginton and Wozniak wrote the final version of the software in Wozniak's hotel room on the eve of the show.
In
1979 Apple's President
Mike Scott enlisted Wigginton to write a secret competitor to
VisiCalc, to use as leverage against
VisiCorp (then
Software Arts). To keep the project under wraps, it was given the code name
Mystery House.
Wigginton left Apple in September 1981 and formed
Encore to work on his own. However he was quickly contracted by Apple to help work on MacWrite on a semi-formal basis. When the
Apple Macintosh shipped in 1984 he again turned to his own projects, starting a new spreadsheet that would eventually be released after four tortuous years as Full Impact.
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