Randy Wigginton

Randy Wigginton was an early employee at Apple Computer who worked on the development of the Apple II and Macintosh.

Career
Wigginton lived down the street from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and rode with him to the Homebrew Computer Club at the age of 14. He joined the Apple Computer Company in 1976 and was present with Wozniak when the Apple I computer was first presented at the club.



After Apple was incorporated in January 1977, Wigginton officially become employee #6. He collaborated with Wozniak on the circuit design and ROM software for the Apple II. As Wozniak 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 VP of Marketing Mike Markkula. Wigginton was one of the Apple employees who adapted Microsoft's 6502 BASIC for the Apple II; it was dubbed Applesoft BASIC.



Wigginton became a member of the original Macintosh design team, but 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 for the Macintosh 128K. When the Mac shipped in January 1984 he returned to his own projects, starting a new spreadsheet program that would eventually be released by Ashton-Tate as Full Impact.