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Burrell Smith

Burrell Carver Smith (born December 16, 1955) is a retired American computer engineer who created the first wire wrap prototype of the motherboard for the original Macintosh at Apple Computer. He became Apple employee #282 in February 1979 as an Apple II service technician. He designed the motherboard for Apple's LaserWriter. Smith was working in Apple's service department when he helped Bill Atkinson add more memory to an Apple II computer in an innovative fashion. Atkinson recommended him to Jef Raskin, who, along with Steve Wozniak, was looking for a hardware engineer for their newly formed Macintosh project. As a member of the design team, Smith prototyped five different motherboards using techniques based on Programmable Array Logic (PAL) chips to achieve maximum functionality with a minimal chip count and cost. His signature is molded into the original Macintosh case, along with the signatures of the rest of the Macintosh team. Smith left the company before the release of Apple's Turbo Mac design platform, with an internal hard drive and a further simplified chipset. He co-founded Radius Inc.

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Article summary

Burrell Carver Smith (born December 16, 1955) is a retired American computer engineer who created the first wire wrap prototype of the motherboard for the original Macintosh at Apple Computer. He became Apple employee #282 in February 1979 as an Apple II service technician. He designed the motherboard for Apple's LaserWriter. Smith was working in Apple's service department when he helped Bill Atkinson add more memory to an Apple II computer in an innovative fashion. Atkinson recommended him to Jef Raskin, who, along with Steve Wozniak, was looking for a hardware engineer for their newly formed Macintosh project. As a member of the design team, Smith prototyped five different motherboards using techniques based on Programmable Array Logic (PAL) chips to achieve maximum functionality with a minimal chip count and cost. His signature is molded into the original Macintosh case, along with the signatures of the rest of the Macintosh team. Smith left the company before the release of Apple's Turbo Mac design platform, with an internal hard drive and a further simplified chipset. He co-founded Radius Inc.

Key claims

  1. date of birth: 1955-12-16 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the date of birth is "1955-12-16". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.