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Dr. Wendell Beck Sander is an American engineer and one of the first employees of Apple Inc.

Early life and education
Wendell Sander was born in in 1935. He received a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from in 1956, 1962, and 1963, respectively.

Career
Sander joined in 1956 to work on missile telemetry systems. In 1958, he began work on hybrid computer and display system design at in. In 1964, Sander joined, where he spent 13 years. He became the head of the Complex Array Engineering section of the Digital Integrated Electronics Deptartment developing early Gate Arrays and Semiconductor Memory leading to the Illiac IV Semiconductor Memory system. He then became head of the Memory Research Department designing a Bipolar DRAM.

Apple Computer
He was hired in August 1977 as the newly-incorporated Apple Computer's 16th employee and first staff scientist. Later Steve Wozniak signed the Apple-1 and added the most unique dedication of all known Apple-1: 'To Wendell, a most incredible engineer! Woz. Apple would not have happened without you!'.

Sander also recommended fellow Iowa State graduate Thomas Whitney for the engineering department. The two worked on the Apple II series. Whitney became Executive Vice President of Engineering and focused on recruiting while Sander began designing the Apple III. Sander collaborated with Bob Bailey of to consolidate Steve Wozniak's Disk II floppy disk controller into a single chip, commonly called the "Integrated Woz Machine", but also known as the "Integrated Wendell Machine". Macintosh team member Andy Hertzfeld considered Sander one of Apple's best engineers.

The Apple III project was code-named "Sara" after Sander's daughter. The specifications were defined by a committee and Sanders was given 10 months to implement the project. Jobs oversaw details of the design, such as the omission of a cooling fan because it would have been "too noisy and inelegant". Many Apple III units began malfunctioning after its initial release in 1980. The early units had unreliable RAM board connectors that caused intermittent failures. Sander stated that the Apple III had been rushed to market 6 to 9 months too early. Whitney was fired from Apple in 1980 and Sander also left the company in August 1982.

Wendell Sander's Apple-1
Dr. Wendell Sander purchased an Apple-1 (listed as Apple-1 #9 in the Apple-1 Registry) and Apple Cassette Interface from a Byte Shop at Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose along with the needed transformers and a Decwriter Keyboard in July or early August 1976. He modified the Apple I computer, with which he wrote a game that impressed Apple Computer Company co-founder Steve Jobs.

Wendell Sander's Apple Floppy Disk Drive S/N 2
In early 1978 Sander was doing a lot of the engineering on the early Apple II boards so he was looking at how to test the Disk card and since the state machine PROM was not readable by the processor he became very familiar with the state machine operation to come up with a test sequence. In doing that he found that Steve Wozniak aka 'Woz' was 1 count off on measuring one of the paths. Sander reviewed it with Woz and he agreed so he made up some corrected PROMs. At the same time Apple was starting Disk II production and had a lot of Drives ready to go but they had a problem that the drives did not meet the 1 in 109 error rate the industry expected at the time and production was held up. When they tried my corrected PROMs the drives passed and they could start shipping. For that Apple presented him the Drive II S/N 2 with Shugart floppy drive 390 S/N 2 inside. Cliff Huston got Drive II S/N 1 and Woz got Shugart 390 S/N 1. In December 2021 Achim Baqué acquired this disk drive from Wendell Sander.

1985-2005
In 1985, Sander and other former Apple engineers then formed a technical design firm called The Engineering Department in. In 1990, Sander joined General Magic as a fellow providing technology guidance in the development of PDAs.

Apple Inc
In July 2005, Sander returned to Apple to work for his son Brian Sander, also a graduate of Iowa State and a young executive at Apple Inc.; the two collaborated in engineering the circuitry of iPods and iPhones. The elder Sander was responsible for developing the volume controls on Apple's EarPods and was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer, Scientist or Technologist (DEST). He received 115 patents.

After 2010
After retiring from Apple in August 2010, Sander assisted the History San José organization in restoring an Apple I computer in their Perham Collection to working order.

Professional Activities
Senior Life Member of IEEE Past Chairman of the Computer Chapter of the SF Section of the IEEE Reviewer for IEEE Publications Program Chairman (Hardware) for 1975 COMPCON San Francisco Participant on numerous Panels at Conferences and Workshops

Publications
"A Transistorized Voltage Controllable Frequency Source" with W. Wilke, WESCON 1958. "Bootstrap Generates Logarighmic Sweeps" with J. Curry, Electronics, December 23, 1960. "Electronic Techniques for Long Term Analog Storage" Masters Thesis 1963. “Applications of Real Polynomials of Binary Variables" Ph D Dissertation 1964. "Ratchet Circuits for Electronic Analog Storage" IEEE Computer Transactions, August 1964. "Systematic Engineering Approach to Complex Arrays" with L. Vadasz, R. Nevela, and R. Seeds ISSCC, 1966. "Design Considerations for a MOS Complex Array" with L. Vadasz Microelectronics Conference, Munich, Germany, 1966 "The System/Semiconductor Interface with Complex Integrated Circuits" FJCC, 1966, AFIPS Vol. 29. "Semiconductor Memory Circuits and Technology" FJCC, 1968, AFIPS Vol 33 Part 2. Guest Editor of IEEE Computer Transactions "Special Issue on the 1968 Computer Conference" August 1969. "Interconnection/Economic Tradeoffs with LSI" Symposium on Parallel Processor Systems, Technologies, and Applications, Monterey, California 1969, Spartan Press, 1970. "Address Selection by Combinatorial Decoding of Semiconductor Memory Arrays" with F. S. Greene, ISSCC 1969 and IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, October 1969. "Design Considerations Leading to the Illiac IV Process Element Memories" with R. Rice and F. Greene, IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, October 1970. Semiconductor Memory Technology" 1970 Air Force Materials Symposium. "Yield Enhancement Techniques in Semiconductor Memory" IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, August 1972. "A 4096 x 1 Bipolar Dynamic RAM" with J. Early and T. A. Longo, ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers, February 1976. "Dynamic Random-Access Memory Competes with MOS Designs" with W. H. Shepard and R. D. Schinella, Electronics, August 19, 1976. "Applications-Oriented Fast Low-Cost Dynamic RAM's" with J. M. Early and T. A. Longo, Proceedings ELECTRO 77, April 19-21, 1977. Keynote Speaker at “LCD International ‘94” Conference in Japan September 28, 1994 "Visions for Handheld Computing", ALCEM, May 16-17 1996. "Precision Direct Polar Modulation", Wireless Portable Symposium,  February 12-16, 2001. “Polar Modulator for Multi-mode Cell Phones, (invited paper)”, with Stephan V. Schell and Brian L. Sander, Proceedings of the 2003 Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, pp439-445, September 2003.