OnInnovation: Visionaries thinking out loud. A video oral history project advancing a culture of innovation powered by The Henry Ford.

Thinking combined with computers that were affordable.  I went to it and I was very disturbed the first time.  I was embarrassed.  Everybody knew about a microprocessor from Intel.

They knew the part numbers, that it was being sold in a thing that called itself a computer with switches and lights for ones and zeros and buttons to push the ones and zeros into memory.  And it was really the equivalent of that little computer that I built when I met Steve Jobs, five years earlier.  Just about the exact same specs, you know, the number-- 256 bytes of memory and eight switches for data and buttons to push.

And-- I had all the same stuff done before.  And what I realized was, these microprocessor chips are out now.  A microprocessor is, like, the whole computer I used to design.  Oh my gosh, I buy a microprocessor chip, I have a keyboard at home and I have a TV that displays words.  I've got my own computer.  It's all done.

And then, I knew, right then, that the computer that I told my dad I'd have some day in my life, I would have it.  So I had to learn what a microprocessor was, by the way.  I was scared.  That's why I was scared.  Everybody knew microprocessors and I took the data sheet home and studied it.

And I said, "My God, this microprocessor is like those computers I used to design."  So it was just a pure accident.  One accident after another was so lucky for me and I couldn't afford the Intel microprocessor, $400.  And they had a program at Hewlett Packard, you could buy a Motorola one for $40.  So I went in at night and used my drawing table at Hewlett Packard.

And I drafted out the design for a computer based on the Motorola microprocessor.  Then another company came up with their own microprocessor for $20.  So I used theirs instead, cheaper, I mean, the cheaper you can go and you look at it as an engineer.  This processor will do as much as-- $20 one will do as much as the $400 Intel one, or the $40 Motorola, I mean, it'll do just as much calculating.

So then I finally got the tools one night.  I got the time, I'd draft-- I designed everything, thought it out, went in and started plugging chips in a board, soldering every wire on, testing and looking on oscilloscopes, debugging.  "Oh, oh my gosh, I'd made a mistake in the design," fix it over here and move a couple wires, put a new chip in.

Or, "Oh my gosh, there's a problem here.  Oh, two wires must be touching each other."  And I'd fix it.  And I'd get the thing working and, all of a sudden, finally, I was running.

And I said, "I don't want this big, ugly front panel."  I like things small, you know-- consumer electronics if it's a hi-fi you like things smaller and smaller.

You know, when we got the CD players, we wanted them smaller and smaller, Sony was good at that.  Well, transistor radio, you can get them big or you can get them smaller.  I like something small.  I don't like huge monstrosities that are mechanical.  I've got to get out drills and I'm not mechanically oriented very well, drill holes for all these switches, plug in the switches and do them.

I did that back in elementary school for science fair projects but I didn't want to do it.  And I said, "Hewlett Packard makes this calculator.  I helped design it."  And what we have inside is a little computer.  When you turn it on, the computer runs a program saying, "Are any buttons being pressed?"

If you press the five button, the program says, "Ah ha, the user pressed the five button, I'll put a five in the display and go back and see, is any key being pressed."  So I said, "Why don't I write a little program that's always built into my computer."  When you turn the switch on, the program says, "Is anything being typed on this human keyboard?"

And then, it reads in what you type and when you hit return, it tries to figure out what to do. And it stores data in memory, it looks at what data's in memory or it runs a program, the same things this big, huge, ugly front panel did in the past.  So every computer before the Apple I had a front panel, front panel full and every computer since the Apple I.

These are all since the Apple I.  They all have a keyboard and a display, a video display.  And that's-- that's how the world went so that day the thing's changed.

I, also, worked briefly, in between college years for a computer company.  And while there I mentioned to one of the engineers, "Oh yeah, I used to design all these computers back in high school and I could never get the parts to build them.  And he said, "I'll get you the parts.  I know-- I have connections with chip companies."

So he got me the parts and I, actually, built a computer of my own and built-- down the street with a friend and the friend said, "You've got to meet this guy, Steve Jobs, because he knows digital electronics like you do and he plays pranks like you do."  So he was, like, the brilliant, technical geek of his high school but-- the school I went to but in later years.

So I met Steve and we sized each other up and became such good friends.  So after I saw Pong and I had driven Steve up to his college in Oregon, when we finally came back from that, I'd tell them all about Atari.  This company's making video games out of televisions.  It's the newest thing.  He went down to Atari, he's the brave guy.

He went down and just got a job, like that.  So he was inside of Atari fixing up their games, adding features to them, that sort of thing.  And I'd go down and visit and do the games and he came up with a deal where the head guy from Atari, Nolan Bushnell, wanted a game design.  And he didn't want his engineers to do it because his engineers were using 50 chips, 80 chips, 100 chips, 120 chips, 150.

They were using 200 chips to make a game.  And he knew that I used very few chips for anything.  So I got the job to design Breakout, did it in 45 chips.  And Steve Jobs and I went in every night, four nights in a row.  It had to be done in four nights.  And that was impossible.  A game took six months back then.

It was hardware, it was not a program you can write.  It was chips with wires that have voltages on them.  And I didn't think I could do it.  I was, like, the best designer in the world, in my mind, but to do that, in four days and nights, I didn't think I could do it.  We didn't sleep, we both got the sleeping sickness, mononucleosis, Steve Jobs and I did, turned over a working Breakout.

So I was goin' back to high school to point out that what happened was I discovered this teacher arranged for me to go out once a week and program a computer at a company in Sunnyvale.  And I came to love programming.  I wanted to do that for the rest of my life, and I set a goal.  I am gonna have a computer that I can type in a program and run it someday in my house.  I don't care-- sure, they're millions of dollars and that it's the impossible dream.

But I told my dad that dream.  And he said, "Well, these little mini computers would cost as much as a house," that's what he said.  And I said, "Well, I'll live in an apartment."  And-- while I was there, I discovered manuals to computers.  A manual to a computer describes, like, the shape of a computer.  The architecture is the holding areas, like the rooms of a house.

But I knew design from my elementary school and middle school science fair projects.  And I sat down with chip books, looking at these little logic gates, they're called, and I would draw them on paper in a way that eventually I taught myself to design a computer.  And then I taught myself how to design the computer, instead of on ten pieces of paper, on three pieces of paper.  I made 'em smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and I got in a little game, and I got manuals for all the mini computers of the late '60s.

These were mini computers from Hewlett Packard, and like the 21-14 and Varian 620-i and Digital Equipment had theirs, the PDP8 and [so] on.  And Data General came out with the Nova.  I would order manuals to all these computers, close my door at home.  Didn't include my father in this, didn't include teachers, didn't include friends, and I just sat down for no reason I could explain to ya, and I'd just start tryin' to put together little logic gates that you could buy on chips.  Although chips cost, you know, way too much for a person to buy back then.

But I would design 'em on paper, and here the end, I finished designing this computer.  I got (CLAP) so good at it.  I did it over and over and over and over, and I would redesign the same computer with a goal of, "Can I do it with fewer parts?"  And it made my mind think, "Is there a way I can get an inverter?  I just need one more chip.

"Here's a weird-- here's a part of a little register, it doesn't invert, it's not an inverter, but it'll actually do the inversion and it doesn't matter that it's a cycle--" I would do these weird things in my head that you'd never find in a book to make every little part used 100 percent.  And I became very good at designing computers, extremely good.  I mean, my designs were half the chips of what they were shipping.

So, while I'm working at Hewlett Packard, I still loved electronics at night.

And I was still shy and awkward and not socially-- I'd never have a girlfriend or a wife, probably.  So, when I came home, I did electronics projects at home.  And one early one, wasn't even electronics but it was jokes.  And I started the first Dial-A-Joke for the San Francisco Bay area.

And I'm so proud of that 'cause that was back in the day when you could not, in the United States, legally own, use or purchase your own telephone.  In the United States, you could not legally own, use or purchase your own answering machine that people could call for a joke.  The one I had to lease cost as much as my apartment rental.

Can you imagine a young engineer pay an apartment rental twice just to run Dial-A-Joke?  That's why nobody ever did it.  And, eventually, I did have to stop it for lack of money.  But-- I ran it for a couple of years, told jokes, told Polish jokes.  Then when the Polish organization said they were going to sue me, I said, "What if I switch it to Italian jokes?" and they said, "Okay."

This was back before political correctness, so, you know, go along with the times.  Anyway, after that I saw a Pong at a bowling alley and I said, "I have to have one."  And I said to my fiancé, I'd met her on Dial-A-Joke, and now, I said, "Oh my gosh, I can build one of these.  I know television signals from high school and I know digital electronics and I designed my own Pong."

Did you take any inspiration from some of the great inventors?  Did you ever pay any attention to, like-- an Edison or a Da Vinci or somebody like that?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I have some friends who are bright, and they went and they studied all the history of these inventors and step by step the processes they did, and can talk about it.  And I wasn't that sort of person.  Or, I don't remember doing it.  I read books, you know, at a very young age that were, like, TV shows, like movies, or books.  Stories.  And I read a series of books called Tom Swift, Jr. about a young, you know-- almost a teenager who had teenage friends, but he owned a company with his dad.

And he was an engineer, and he'd go into the laboratory and hook up wires and oscilloscopes and measure things.  And two weeks later, he'd come out with a device he'd built.  It might even be a submarine or a spaceship or a plasma field to hold an alien presence.  And all these books were just thrilling books to me.  They were the thrilling books, you know, of my life.

INTERVIEWER:
So it was sort of the books, those stories, compelled you to keep moving forward and--

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah, they made me feel that, wow, engineering's where it's at.  And I really respected my dad.  I had a really good father.  Spent a lot of time talking about, you know, everything in the world, ethics and how you live as well as, you know, values in life, as well as when I had a question about electronics, how does a transistor work?  He'd pull out a blackboard and demonstrate how the electrons went through crystals and how they'd make more electrons go another path, and it turned things on and off.  And here's how you make an amplifier.  He would teach me that stuff.

So I really respected him.  And I decided-- in sixth grade, I told him, "I'm gonna be an engineer like you.  And second, I'm gonna be a fifth grade teacher," 'cause he had talked to me about how important my teacher was, you know, to where I was gonna go in life.  And I just really respected teachers.

INTERVIEWER:
So when you were young, you sort of had a feeling that this is what you were cut out for.  I mean, did you ever kind of

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah, it's so strange.  I look back to-- you know, memories can change over time.  But I remember in sixth grade tellin' my dad, "I'm gonna be an engineer.  I'm gonna be a fifth grade teacher," which I did for eight years with no press around.  And always had a sense of humor, and sense of humor's come out great.  And just pretty much exactly where I would have said, "Here's where I'd like to go in life," I've just really done really well at those areas.

INTERVIEWER:
When you did all this, were you carrying on, like, an internal monologue with yourself, talking to yours-- I mean, what was that process where you knew?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah.  No, there was all accidents at a very young age.  But by the time I was around 20-- you know, when you start to form, you're gettin' outta high school and you're gonna be independent at college for a while, you start to form, "These are my ideas of who I am, what's right, and what's wrong.  And how we should do things."  And I started havin' a lot of internal discussions.  Walkin' home from school, I'd run a lot of concepts through my head and evaluate them and come out with, "Here's who I wanna be."

The music that usually gets to my heart is something a little bit country-ish in its flavor, a little bit folk-ish, and good, strong words that you feel a person is really talking to you about a real life experience, some real life advice, and not just made up a song to sound pretty.  So it's not the major, well-known groups that get to me usually.  It's somebody-- an expressive guitar too.

Certain people, like the Nashville guitarists that can strike, you know, chords deep inside of ya, right with a guitar.  I love that.  And so it's hard to pinpoint the type of music, but usually singer/songwriter because that's the person that writes the music, plays it, and sings it.  They do the whole thing.  They can do it singly with nobody else around them, or make it a little pretty with some other instruments.

And I respect them, because they've got the most talent in my mind.  Somebody can come up to a microphone, have a beautiful voice, and sing and hit the notes and carry it just right.  And that's great too.  But it's just they didn't do the job of creating the music.

INTERVIEWER:
So it's that creative feeling you sense that--

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah.  And the words re often very important to me.  If the words really kinda strike home and have a meaning to you that's significant, yeah.  You know, that really gets me.

INTERVIEWER:
Sounds like-- why you probably like Dylan.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah, well, that's where I started.  I don't like Dylan that much anymore, but-- there's so many groups that-- and I try to listen to the esoteric channels.  You listen to the mainstream FM channels and you'll never hear the stuff I like that really gets me the most.  I like to hear somethin' new.  "Who the heck is that?  That's a great song!"  And maybe they only have a couple-a songs that can affect ya that much, but I go online and I purchase 'em and go to their-- I have a list of 200 lesser known artists and I try to go to their-- for the last couple years, I've been tryin' to go to their shows in the small places in San Francisco, in Hollywood.  Around Felton, there's a place I go to a lot.

Goin' to one up at Freight & Salvage in Berkley-- on the 22nd, even though I have tickets to see Credence Clearwater Revisited at Mountain Winery, which is great, but Steve Forburton (PH).  I wanna, you know, check off my list, you know, one at a time the-- the ones that I like.  Just get a chance to see them as real people.

INTERVIEWER:
Do you buy your songs from iTunes?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah, but that's the biggest waste of money in the world.  Because I buy the song from iTunes; I instantly go to Amazon and I buy the CD.  So I'll get a clearer, unprotected version of it, but I'll get the whole CD; actually, I'll buy the artist, all of their CDs usually, and then listen to all the songs and rate 'em.  So now the iTunes one is wasted money because you know, I got the same song off my CD unprotected.

And yeah, to this day, the Apple II was just an incredible design.  The color idea, it was really an accident.  I was down at Atari for those four days and nights, working on Breakout when I had gotten no sleep and I got mononucleosis and my head is, sort of, in and out of consciousness.  And I went up to the factory floor.

Back in those days, Atari could only use black and white TVs.  That's all they could afford for their games.  They didn't have color TVs.  But this one dot moving across the screen was changing colors, red, purple, blue, yellow, red, purple, blue, yellow.  And it turns out they had put Mylar overlays on a TV screen.

The Mylar overlays made it seem to change color.  And I just was dazzled.  And I said, "This is kind of psychedelic."  You know, and I wasn't a drug user, but I thought, "This is just so unbelievable to watch."  And, you know, and I'm kind of almost asleep but it's mesmerizing.

And that's when I thought, "I wonder if I have this chip with four little bits, ones and zeros, and I spun it around, what would come out one end would be 1100, 1100, 1100 and it goes up and down, just like color TV signals on American TVs do.  If I spun it at the right rate, it would be interpreted as color."

Even though it didn't-- hadn't followed all of these incredible mathematics and differential equations and calculus that define how American TV did color, this one-- the signal would look pretty much like the ones that represent blue and light blue and dark blue and green and orange de--  depending on what codes you put in. And I didn't know if it would work, but the day that-- when I was building the Apple II and tested it and it worked.  I called Steve over.  I mean, we were shaking.  We knew, at this point, we had something that was not gonna be given away.  It's gonna be secret and it's gonna be worth a lot of money.

And I was still being turned down by Hewlett Packard, by the way.

It was, you know, the first one to say that a computer can also be a game machine and it can be fun and it can be in the home.  And we were just so lucky.  None of the big companies thought that a little computer based on this little chip would be doing the useful tasks, ever, so they passed it by.  And they didn't see that there were a lot of people that wanted something less than a useful computer.

A lot of doctors and lawyers and school teachers and plumbers and everybody in life, they didn't talk to those people that just wanted a thing called a computer and learn how to use it and write programs that dazzled things on the screen and play games.  So games was a big part of that kick-off for the Apple II and it became, yeah, and eventually we had competition.  At first, we had competition from Radio Shack and Commodore.

INTERVIEWER:
The things that got you started-- some inspirations maybe, or the things that motivated you.  Was it people, or other technology, or?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Well, oddly enough-- and, I mean, I had a father who was an engineer, and that was a key part of it.  But he didn't push any of us to be an engineer.  I mean, my brother and sister didn't wind up going that direction.  I think I lucked out in school at first and I was acknowledged as good in math.  So I started thinking of myself as good in math.

And then my father-- we had science fairs.  My father just suggested a couple electronics projects.  We went down and got a book, and he explained a little bit how electrons go through a wire and made a project for a science fair.  And then I discovered by accident a journal in the hallway, and it was a journal only for high-level engineers 'cause computers weren't known to any normal people (there weren't even undergraduate courses in colleges) and it described ones and zeros and how they were added.  And it described formulas of logic to make things work, make decisions, and logic gates, and had a type of algebra.

And I learned it all and I said, "This is weird.  These computer things that are way beyond rocket science"-- back then, they were way beyond rocket science.  I was like ten years old.  I said, "This stuff is easy for a fifth grader.  You don't need high level math.  You don't need multiplication.  You don't need algebra, you don't need geometry and trigonometry and whatever comes beyond that, calculus and things.  All you need is the same sort of math you have in fifth grade."

So I decided computers were gonna be my favorite little inside personal-- intrinsically rewarded, my head feels good doin' it, my whole life.  I would never have it as a job, I loved writin' those ones and zeros and figurin' out how they worked.  And that was a big start.

And then my dad got a bunch of parts and I built science fair projects that were big computers way back in early, early days.  I mean, I had no idea that-- how far advanced I was, buildin' stuff that was, you know, (LAUGH) so good.  And my eventual career.  I just thought-- did it for fun.

INTERVIEWER:
Did you have a philosophy like that when you were developing your computers?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I didn't.  I did not have that sort of philosophy.  I tried to make them simple in terms of the fewest parts, and I got very good at that.  And I always tried-- and I believed in-- and as part of that process, I learned that if you're-- say you're writing a program, leave out a whole bunch of things that almost don't matter, but do the core of it very well.  And sometimes you could think of ways to have fewer elements but do as much as the more elements would have done.

And sure, a lot of people would look at it and say, "You don't have 500 things."  No, I've only got 20 things, but they do all the job.  And I got good at that, and so indirectly, I was ready for it.

INTERVIEWER:
So even later on in life, most of your inspiration, motivations came from this internal strength that you had as opposed to looking externally?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
That strength let me-- well, I did a lot of work in high school.  I had a teacher that saw that my electronics education would be beyond the school.  And that's great.  Whenever teachers do that, it's like interns in companies is a great thing.  Kids that are in college as students get to be in the real world.

Some companies have total co-op programs.  Some colleges like Kettering University, it's an engineering college in Flint, Michigan.  The students go to school for six months, they work for six months.  They go to school for six months, they work for six months.  So they're already gettin' both sides of the real world considerations of a business with bosses, with projects, and they're getting the education in school.

[We all had Segways and we] just went on and said, "Well, what could we try doin' with paddles and goals?"

INTERVIEWER:

Interesting.

STEVE WOZNIAK:

And balls. And we figured out what kind of ball size works, how to make a paddle, then how to buy a paddle.

INTERVIEWER:

So this is, like, your latest invention, a new [game]

STEVE WOZNIAK:

Oh, we've been doing it for years, about four years or so.

INTERVIEWER:

Is it catchin' on?

STEVE WOZNIAK:

Yes, it is, actually. We used to have one team for quite a few years, and then there was a team in New Zealand that we'd play. And now there's teams all over Europe, a bunch of places. And there's three teams in the Bay Area.

INTERVIEWER:

Is this like--

STEVE WOZNIAK:

But we don't really play team versus team. Usually just whoever shows up today, we'll break everybody into a bunch of teams that are about equal and we'll play for fun.

INTERVIEWER:

Now, what would a score be? What kind of scores you guys rackin' up?

STEVE WOZNIAK:

It could go up to as high as ten to ten, it could be as low as two to one. I don't know--

INTERVIEWER:

Okay, so it's pretty--

STEVE WOZNIAK:

--if I've ever seen it that low, but it's like [soccer]

INTERVIEWER:

So it's pretty competitive

STEVE WOZNIAK:

Oh, yeah. It's very much like soccer, and you're tryin' to be in the right place to block the shots and tangle for the ball, and who gets the best control. And hit a fast one right by the goalie, all that sort of stuff.

I tried to make them simple in terms of the fewest parts, and I got very good at that.  And I always tried-- and I believed in-- and as part of that process, I learned that if you're-- say you're writing a program, leave out a whole bunch of things that almost don't matter, but do the core of it very well.  And sometimes you could think of ways to have fewer elements but do as much as the more elements would have done.

And sure, a lot of people would look at it and say, "You don't have 500 things."  No, I've only got 20 things, but they do all the job.

But I was in a computer club, and the club was full of academics, professors from Stanford, Berkley.  And a lot of people that had been involved in social movements, and even anti-war movements and the like.

And they wanted this new technology to free the people, to get to, like, a better, further state.  And they spoke about how we were gonna change as people.  How we were gonna be better educated with a machine that can answer us back, instead of just a book that can only present data one way.  And how we were going to be able to communicate and leave messages that hundreds of people could read and all know that a meeting place got changed.

And, you know, these great social goals really-- even though I was too shy to ever talk at the Homebrew Computer Club, I sat in the back row and I just was so inspired thinking, "This is the good that we're doin'.  And I'm good at designing computers.  I wanna put my talents in that direction.  I want [to help] all these people that are listening to these stories--" I didn't realize it was really only a few scattering ones that were super bright.  Super bright, futurist, social evangelism thinkers.

And I figured that everybody here must be so affected like I am.  And I wanna help them build their own computers.  So I took it as my goal to design a very simple, affordable computer which I knew how to do, and give it to the others.  

And I did, I passed it out for free.  No copyright notices, no nuthin'.

I got into videogames, seein' them early, and admiring the fact that a game could be made on a TV, Pong.  And then I designed my own.  Because the only way I could ever have a videogame was to build my own, and a long time before I had thought that everybody has a television.  And you could theoretically make television, or oscilloscopes, make the patterns stream out and draw in a certain way to draw letters.

And then I thought, wow, I knew how television signals worked.  I knew how to-- I was such a good designer.  Built this little thing with just 28 cheap little $1 chips, and put Pong on my TV set.  Then I met the guys at Atari and they wanted to hire me, and I said, "No, I work for Hewlett Packard."  And they had me design a game-- commissioned me, and I designed Break Out for Atari.  That's where you hit the ball against bricks and they disappear.  It's a very popular, successful game.

We went to Commodore and tried to sell them what we had, the Apple II.  And, "Give us a bunch of money, give us some good jobs and give us some good positions and to run the project."  And they said, "No.  People don't want color, they don't want all these fancy things.  They just want the cheapest machine there is."

And they built their own machine.  And I still say that their machine cost more than ours, anyway.  So it was a mistake and Radio Shack.  But their machines were not color.  They had lousy keyboards.  They weren't expandable in any way.  We had huge expansion.

And, you know, whenever you write-- you have computers, you have a certain level of programs and amount of memory you use.  But next year, you're gonna use more memory.  You're gonna find ways to use more and more and more.  And we had the ability to plug in extra memory and we had a huge amount of memory and those machines didn't.

And we had the ability, you know, you're gonna want something new.  We started out the early, low cost computers had to store all the data, including programs, on cassette tapes, very unreliable method, very slow.  Well, we moved up to a floppy disc.  We had plug-in cards in our Apple II.

The Radio Shack and the Commodore had no way to plug things in and they were stuck.  They had to go back to the drawing boards and we gained, like, a year, year and a half on them and that was really big.  So that's when we became the number one selling computer in the world.

Eventually, machines like the Commodore 64 came along.  They were cheap, they were colored, they were games, they had more graphics, more speed, more ability and they even sold more than the Apple II in quantity.

INTERVIEWER:
Let me ask you a little bit about when Apple went from-- it was your design and then you guys started small, you got bigger and bigger and bigger.  You had to hire people.  You're a very innovative company, in the early years, at least and now, again, I suppose.  Tell me about that process of how you took this design and brought other engineers and the kind you hired, what you looked for.  You still wanted that innovation, tell me about that.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
It really started with seeking money.  And Steve and I having no experience, we'd had no business experience, no business classes in college.  But we started going around, talking to companies, talking to venture capitalists.  And we ran into an angel that looked at the technology, he knew it.

It was an area he wanted to go in his life and he had made his money marketing for Intel.  And he wanted to, basically, come out and start this company and put the money in.  And it would cost $250,000 to kick off a run of 1,000 computers.  So Mike Markkula joined us.  And he said, "Well, you need to fill out the other key departments of a company."

And I'm sure we could still stay small, like ten people for awhile but we had to hire a president.  And Mark made a recommendation, we interviewed Mike Scott.  Steve and I interviewed him, and liked him as a person.  And we liked the way he talked.  He was forceful, he could take direction, he was a good president and thankful we had him.

He took us-- Apple, from when it started to when it went public with one of the biggest, most successful public offerings ever.

I always thought of myself as an engineer.  In later life, after we started Apple, I'd looked at it and saw that I did the same things that an artist trying to make a piece of music so perfect, correcting it, having all this talent and getting-- knowing when something is so perfect that almost no other human could do it.  And so then I realized I took engineering as an art.  I was an artist at engineering.

And I ran into a few others of those.  In the early days of Apple, about one out of ten engineers, one out of 20 would be this artist type that everything they could show you was so perfect, they would just show it off.  And it's rare.

And usually, they were classical musicians.  I don't know how I was the one who wasn't.  I played guitar but I was not a musician.  But for some reason, the artistic-- engineering and musical-[went together], real good music talents. I mean, some of them were professors of classical music.  So they were that brilliant.

INTERVIEWER:
Think it's 'cause the math and music's a mathematical language?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I think it probably is.  Probably somethin' in the mind of all these little pieces that add up to something larger, like a bunch of notes might add up to a chord, and they might have little timing differences between them.  And they add up to a stanza and they add up to a longer piece of music and they add up to a whole song.

I think that sort of-- that's how you build computer programs.  You start with computers themselves with hardware.  You start with very small elements, build a little bigger structure out of that, combine it with another bigger structure; eventually you can build it up to a full computer, or a full program.

And also, the people that were that type of people, that had these incredible techno-- they could apply their -- I don't know what you call that, intricate, artistic thinking, to designs and computer programs, they also were the ones that were the most humanist.  That spoke the greatest words about how society should be affected by computers, how computers should treat a person.  How you can make the human being more important than the technology.

Yeah.  I never really had to think about a path career, what I would do, because I was so smart in electronics, I always had an easy job that was satisfactory to me.  I was always real happy.  I had a lot of jokes in my life and humor.  And I wound up getting a job at Hewlett Packard designing hand-held calculators, the first scientific calculators that all engineers and scientists had to start using instead of slide rules.  And I didn't have a college degree but they interviewed me.

I just knew all the design electronics and all that and that was good enough.  And I feel so grateful that I didn't have to have some certificate proof that I knew it, that I just had to, you know, I didn't have to have my fourth year of college.

That strength let me-- well, I did a lot of work in high school.  I had a teacher that saw that my electronics education would be beyond the school.  And that's great.  Whenever teachers do that, it's like interns in companies is a great thing.  Kids that are in college as students get to be in the real world.

Some companies have total co-op programs.  Some colleges like Kettering University, it's an engineering college in Flint, Michigan.  The students go to school for six months, they work for six months.  They go to school for six months, they work for six months.  So they're already gettin' both sides of the real world considerations of a business with bosses, with projects, and they're getting the education in school.  And I believe in that strongly, and I forgot what I started out to say.

Well, oddly enough-- and, I mean, I had a father who was an engineer, and that was a key part of it. But he didn't push any of us to be an engineer. I mean, my brother and sister didn't wind up going that direction. I think I lucked out in school at first and I was acknowledged as good in math. So I started thinking of myself as good in math.

And then my father-- we had science fairs. My father just suggested a couple electronics projects. We went down and got a book, and he explained a little bit how electrons go through a wire and made a project for a science fair. And then I discovered by accident a journal in the hallway, and it was a journal only for high-level engineers 'cause computers weren't known to any normal people (there weren't even undergraduate courses in colleges) and it described ones and zeros and how they were added. And it described formulas of logic to make things work, make decisions, and logic gates, and had a type of algebra.

And I learned it all and I said, "This is weird. These computer things that are way beyond rocket science"-- back then, they were way beyond rocket science. I was like ten years old. I said, "This stuff is easy for a fifth grader. You don't need high level math. You don't need multiplication. You don't need algebra, you don't need geometry and trigonometry and whatever comes beyond that, calculus and things. All you need is the same sort of math you have in fifth grade."

So I decided computers were gonna be my favorite little inside personal-- intrinsically rewarded, my head feels good doin' it, my whole life. I would never have it as a job, I loved writin' those ones and zeros and figurin' out how they worked. And that was a big start.

And then my dad got a bunch of parts and I built science fair projects that were big computers way back in early, early days. I mean, I had no idea that-- how far advanced I was, buildin' stuff that was, you know, (LAUGH) so good. And my eventual career. I just thought-- did it for fun.

First of all, I had been a little bit-- through most of school, I had been an outsider.  You might call it a nerd.  You know, I was a techie, so you might call it a geek.  But-- people kinda didn't talk to me the same way.  And they had their small, little discussions, and somehow I didn't learn how to socialize.  I was shy.

So I had my group.  My group of people would be just weird guys that were interested in building an electronics project.  And as a result, that made me-- I think that made me-- very independent.  And I read books like Walden Pond in ninth grade and started thinkin' about being very self-sufficient and on your own.  And lots of, you know, the philosophies are still with me today.  You know, you can do somethin' on your own and you don't have to listen to everybody else.  They can be wrong and you can still go your own way.  That came to me very strongly in high school.

We had a lot of philosophies.  I was very tuned into the counterculture philosophies that were in all the papers.  The "summer of love" things and the music of the times.  And to me, it was like people are thinking of a whole different way that life could be organized, and yet a lot of what they say makes a lot of sense.

But we had this thing, one of the big principles was don't be a follower, don't conform.  Okay, don't conform to the values of the parents, really.  You know, don't conform to what you're supposed to do.  Well, really, to me, I looked around and I saw all these kids in school goin' to parties, drinking, using drugs, and they were conforming to each other.  They were doin' it because the others were doing it, not because they felt it was intellectually right, like they had read some great theories about why it's a good thing to take these drugs or whatever.

So I decided I would not do anything.  I would not drink, I would not go to parties, I would not have sex, would not do these things, if other people were around because I might be doin' it because of them and then I'm a follower.  And I decided, no, I was going to think for myself and be a good person.  And if I decided it was right to drink, I should drink totally alone and not with others.

So I was really kind of a pure type person.  I mean, I even got to where I'd cross streets only at the corner.  But, you know, you're proud of the things you do that are good.  But everybody does some really good things, just, "See how good a person I was?"  Well, we also do some bad things, and sometimes I might jaywalk and-- nobody's perfect.  You just wanna look at the good things and so everybody says they're a good person.  But I was extremely clean.  Yeah.

Steve Jobs and I, we were first told by Jeff Raskin that when you build a computer, it has a certain amount of electronics in it.  And that electronics can do a certain amount of calculations for other people.

And yet, you can take extra time, put some work into programming harder and harder, to making a program so beautiful that a person who knows nothing can walk up and use it successfully without having to be trained, "This is here, that's there, this key does that."  We're-- you know, like, the geek world was full of switches you'd never understand on the old big computer front panels.  And this museum's full of a lot of those.

But-- it's like how do you get away from that?  How do you make somethin' so obvious a person walks up and it's intuitive?  I want to do a certain thing, I want to add some numbers.  Maybe if I just type in a formula like I do in math, five plus six equals, it'll give me an answer.  You put in enough software, you can make it work better for the person, and yet it's still just as good a computer.

And that was one of the big influential days of my life, when he was telling that simple-- story.  Because I said, "Yes, all computers should be made that way.  We are the computer experts.  We're tryin' to make life easy for people."  Electronics, it should make our lives better.  And we don't get happier than the caveman, okay?  We don't get happier than people were a couple hundred years ago, but we're driven to try to find these ways to make life easier and happier.

And, boy, the computer should do the thinking, not the person.  If the person has to think to-- "I remember how to do this and this and this step, and those 20 steps on this computer," then the person has had to conform to the technology, and the technology's been made the master.

We went over to a friend's house.  And this friend had to do with some things we'd been involved with in my year at Berkeley in college, making tones into a telephone so you could dial free calls anywhere in the world, weird, little device called the Blue Box.  And this guy was called Captain Crunch and we went down to a basement and he's typing on a big, huge, metal teletype machine, the machine you see in military stations in movies, usually, you know, big, clunky machines, typing away, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk.

They have that hackerish sound to them.  And he said, "I'm playing a game with a computer in Boston across the country."  And, oh my God, he printed out a list of colleges, about 12 colleges, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, Chicago might have been in there, Boston had a couple schools, New York.

I'm saying, "Oh my God, you can reach out like a Superman."  I love it when electronics makes you a Superman.  "You can reach out to all these-- " and I said I had to have it, just like the Pong game.  My formula was, use my home TV, which was free, a free device for output, wired a little wire inside and put pulses on the wire to cause balls and paddles appear on the screen.  Now, I designed a circuit that would put letters of the alphabet on the screen so you could have a certain number of letters across each line on the screen.

And I could, actually, type on the keyboard in the end, went through a little modem I built into my telephone, dialed the number over in Palo Alto at Stanford.  It got me on this thing called the ARPANET, with 12 colleges.  And the ARPANET was gonna grow into today's internet but these were much earlier years.

And I had my own device now and I could, actually, type-- talk to computers and program them.  And they could run programs.  And the output would appear on my TV.  So this was an exciting, exciting time.  I'd worked at Hewlett Packard the whole time.  But at night I was doing these incredible, interesting things, just for my own fun and interest.

Now, I didn't-- we didn't call it an Apple I.  Steve Jobs wasn't going to the Homebrew Computer Club at first, and I started telling him about this interest, this computer I had built.  "Look, I can type stuff into it."

He started coming to the club and he saw there was interest in it.  And I was passing out my schematics for free.  I was passing out my code listings for the little program I had written for free saying, "Build your own.  You can build your own."  And I thought that 50 people would build their own.  And almost nobody did.

One high school kid, Randy Wigginton, I went over to his house and I soldered it together for hours and hours and built it for him.  But Steve Jobs came and he said, "You know what?  These people don't want to spend the time building it.  They want to buy it already built.  So here's what we do.  We make a PC board, this blank PC board is a green board with little metallic silver traces on it, wires that are connecting things.

You plug the chips in.  Maybe it takes you five minutes.  All the chips are in the right place.  We assumed that the people could get chips from their companies or whatever.  Plug the chips in, solder the bottom where the chips plug in and you're done.  You don't have to add one wire."  So that was his idea that we build this PC board for $20, sell it for $40 and call ourselves Apple Computer.

And I said, "Well-- I'm too scared to sell anything because I have a company, Hewlett Packard and they own what I design.  And I implored Hewlett Packard, I said, "You can build a little machine, that looks like a typewriter and you can write basic programs on it.  And you could sell it for $800 and it works with the person's home TV."

And they turned me down.  They thought about it, they thought about it, they knew it was an intriguing idea.  They knew it was gonna be one to change the world but it didn't fit the Hewlett Packard culture, the corporate culture.  And they didn't see the way, a formula to make it outside of the culture.  You know, Hewlett Packard products, back then, were only sold to engineers.

They had to be completely finished, very rugged, have a certain very official look.  Engineers don't have a fanciful, this is fun, look to it.  It would have to be, kind of, almost boring and say, "I am a work machine," instead of, "I am a fun machine."  And what I was designing was fun machines.

So Hewlett Packard turned me down for the first of five times and Steve and I were in business.  And we put together quite an operation around that Apple I.  Right away-- well, we were gonna sell just PC boards at first.  So we didn't start as a computer company.

Right away, the guy who owned the local computer store, Paul Terrell, had seen me at the club, with all these people interested and seen that I had one little board with only about 30 chips on it and I'm typing in programs and running them.  How could a computer be so small?  Nobody'd ever imagined it, a full computer that could run programs could be that small.

There were a bunch of hobby kits, like the Altair 8800 being sold.  They were monstrosities and they were so expensive and they still wouldn't compute.  You had to add a whole bunch of memory cards that went off to these big, huge, clunky teletype machines that cost as much as a car.  So you were really far from a computer that could really be used by any other approach.  And I'd hit on the lucky good formula and Paul Terrell said, "I'll buy 100 of these for $500 each," worked out a deal with Steve Jobs.  So Steve Jobs called me at work and said, "I've got a $50,000 order," and I fell down.  I collapsed.  No, just kidding.

But that was the biggest financial shock.  That scared me, 'cause my salary was only $24,000.  And we've got a $50,000 order?  This is the bigger thing ever in my life. I was scared.  I was just gonna be an engineer, my whole life.  And so, we were doing this on the outside.

And the way we did it, we had no money.  Steve and I were in our young 20's.  We had no bank accounts, no savings accounts, no cash.  We didn't own any cars.  We had no way to get any money.  So what we did was, we got the chips on 30 days credit, for these computers, built them up in about 10 days and drove them to the store and got paid cash.

We had arranged a C.O.D. with the store owner.  So he was really taking the credit.  That's how we got the credit.  The parts companies knew that he'd pay.  And that put us in business.  We built about maybe 150-- probably sold about 150 Apple I's.  But you have to understand, the Apple I wasn't really a Wozniak computer design.

I already had a machine designed to talk to a computer in Boston, over a low speed modem, that could only pass, maybe 30 characters a second.  So across the line you'd see the words forming on the TV screen.  That's slow; it is the fastest it could go.  And I designed things to save parts, taking advantage of knowing how slow it was.  That was for a terminal.

Now, all of a sudden, I decided, "I'll put my little microprocessor, some memory and a little program on the board."  So now, I'm typing to my own computer and it's typing to my TV.  But it was still at that same slow rate.  See, I just, sort of, quickly adapted a microprocessor to make my terminal into a computer.

With the Apple II, I designed the thing from the ground up.  And that was the great machine and, I don't know, I hit on so many unbelievable things.  I just cut the chips in half.  I kept thinking of ideas to save parts and do the best design of my life and, still, nobody had ever imagined color would ever come to a low cost computer.

And here it was, I had a weird idea with a one dollar chip, making color for American TVs.  And in the past, color would be a couple of big, huge boards full of hundreds and hundreds of parts and doing weird, little mixtures and you need specialized engineers and I had this clever, little idea for it.  And we had graphics.  If you've changed numbers in memory, like, you went into every computer has memory, that's one section of the memory was just presented on the screen.

And if you change the number to a five, a grey square would pop up.  If you change the number to an eight, a purple square would pop up.  And, all of a sudden, you realize that if you write a program to move the numbers around, you can make animated cartoons, animated games, like the ones I'd done for Atari, right on your screen.

And then I even had a mode in there that had pixels, real pixels.  We called it high resolution.  I mean, almost, you know, not quite photographic standards of today, 2008, but pretty unbelievable what you could do with pixels, make tiny, little shapes that look better.

And we didn't even know if the world would use this, what they'd use it for.  But if it only cost two chips, put it in.  And this Apple II, we knew, was gonna change the world.  First of all, the Apple I was the first machine that came out with a keyboard and a video display.  After we did that, another group at the club, who was always looking over my shoulder, processed our technology, came out with the S0l computer, keyboard and a video screen.

That Sol used the Intel chip and it had taken over the computer stores in the country.  They were selling a thousand a month.  A thousand a month of this little microprocessor computer?  And Steve and I had the Apple II and we're looking at ourselves, "We didn't give this one away without copyrights."

We didn't pass it around, showed it off very seldom.  And we said, "You know, this Apple II is ten times the computer.  We're gonna sell a thousand a month."  A thousand computers, maybe, a $1,000 each.  That's $1,000,000 a month.  And  when you're young and have no money, that's very, very big time.  But we had to explore getting money to do it.

Steve likes high technology, you know, the state-of-the-art stuff?  And, of course, I did all the hardware and software for the computer, but Steve wanted to make a plastic case.

And he saw his role in the company being in design more than anything else.  And he worked with it, he found the guy that could make a very cheap plastic case.  It almost sunk Apple because we had to, eventually, go and make real molds and get a real case, but this guy could do it like they make motorcycle seats.  He could do a few a day at his place over at Menlo Park. And Steve worked with him to design pictures of the shape.  What should it look like?  And the Apple II, actually, came out very attractive even to this day.  I just think it's an attractive case.  It was a really big step.  But Steve likes-- there's a plastic case and there'd be so much heat inside, it might overheat.

And we'd need a fan to cool it.  You put in a fan, that cools it.  Steve wanted to skip the fan and he knew this bright engineer at Atari that could design what's called a switching power supply.  Today, all power supplies are switching supplies, they're all tiny because they have chips that do it.  But Ron Holt joined us and he designed a little circuit that took power out of the wall and let little bits of it at a time charge up circuits to get their voltage up to 12 volts, up to five volts.

It's all inside going on.  And when it's at 12 volts, it stops charging it and when it drops a little charge it'll give it another pulse to keep it charged.  And it's so efficient that you'll lose very little of your energy to heat.  You have very little waste and we don't need a fan.

So it became a really good example of-- use the brain and you save the fan and you, basically, wound up with, you know, in the end, the way things are made in electronics are basically the same price.  So we had a state-of-the-art power supply.  And Rod Holt, the engineer who designed it, joined us as a member of our executive staff.

So we had five people that ran the company for the first couple years.  I did the engineering.  Steve did whatever the company needed, every role of the company, having oversight and because he understood the digital stuff even if he didn't design or he didn't write programs, he understood when somebody was on to something good or when somebody was slacking off, just doing a lousy job.  Mike Scott was our president.

Mike Markkula joined us with his money and he ran marketing.  And well, I mentioned-- I think I mentioned all five of them.  I can't remember.  Yeah, it was Mike Markkula in marketing, Mike Scott was president, Steve, myself and Rod Holt, the analog engineer came in.

And one thing I liked about Rod, although he wasn't a digital engineer of computer programming, he hadn't really written programs.

He started playing around with the basic programming line on my Apple II.  And he, being an engineer, he learned it very quickly and easily.  And that's what I liked about the whole Apple II design, was I intended it to be a learning machine.  Anyone could sit down and, right away, be learning how to make programs that they could think of.

You know, I had learned all my stuff in computers by reading other people's journals.  I never took a course, never read a book on computer design.  I would look at their design and see what they had done and I got it from others.  So I wanted to pass that on.

And in our manuals we put in all my schematics, all my code listings, everything in the world that I had time to write, just instructions because I wanted it to be a learning machine.  This is what computers are.  This is the parts they're made out of, here's how you write a program.  Here's how you write a program in another language, go do it, it's ready to use.

BARRY HURD:
Do you think in those early days being small like that made you guys more innovative?  I mean, did the size of the company have something to do with that, sort of, direct design it as opposed to marketing a product, you're actually engineering something?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I would say yes.  When you're small, just everything you're doing-- but remember, everything we were doing had never been done before.  So we didn't have roadblocks.  We didn't have obstacles saying you have to design a certain way.  Stores were opening up.  We didn't have to go in and say, "Oh, we'll buy the shelf space so we will have it instead of Radio Shack."

They didn't have any agreements like that.  We have a good product.  You want to sell it?  Here it is.  We were very lucky time-wise that we were ahead of the rest of the world so it was easy to sell.  Any device we decide to make, let's make a printer interface.  Let's make something that will talk to modems.

Let's make something that will print out on serial buses.  Let's make a floppy disk.  Everything we ever designed instantly would have a lot of sales.  It was gonna be profitable.  You couldn't go wrong.  So you couldn't make wrong choices so we didn't have a lot of structure saying, "Don't do this and we'll get a spec and we'll approve every bit of the specs."

"And then you go build what's on the spec and don't try to change it if you get another idea."

No.  We just went in with, " I'm gonna work on a floppy disk for the next two weeks and go in and work hard on it and do a good job and get something to work and to show off and we're done."

Yeah, Apple had gotten to a point with maybe a hundred engineers or so.  We had different buildings and labs.  And I was in one lab and-- and, boy, I saw all of-- we had a lot of structured type thinkers, and I'm more of the artistic, almost the right brain approach to engineering.

But a lot of these left brainers, every little thing was documented on paper in advance, like, "How can you know what you're gonna do in advance?"  When I was creating things, it was like, "I'm gonna try this chip and see if it works roughly, and get an idea of what it can do.  And then I'm gonna try to do the max and put another idea that comes into my head."

And I don't flow like I'm gonna follow a script.  And, of course, I could do anything I wanted.  So I could sit around and, "Hm, I think I'll try to come up with a program to make the disk more effective or faster today."  And I could just go to work on anything I wanted.

I didn't really have equivalent of a boss.  So I was outside of that structure but it just wasn't something that I would fit into.  I like little start ups when people are talking, "Rough ideas," and, "You don't even know if it's possible or not.  Let's go try it."

INTERVIEWER:
So the lack of structure is a better way to create innovations is what you're telling me.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Well, yes.  I would say you're more-- there's a lot more innovation and it goes in a lot more directions.  And it's a lot more fun and interesting for the people doing it.  They're motivated differently.  They're motivated because they want to do something to show it off or because it's gonna be good.

And they're not doing it because they're being paid a salary and, you know, and able to do it.  But, not everybody can be that innovative either.  So a large corporation doesn't really have a choice.  A large corporation turns out they're protecting their market, making sure you don't lose your market and your sales.  It's a money machine.  Keeping the money machine going is much more important than trying to innovate and come up with something new.  What if something new-- all your effort on something new and you've got known for it and you lost some of your real income, your money.

INTERVIEWER:
Okay, Steve, I handed you a sheet of supposed quotes of what was said to you when you guys went around to sell the Apple II was it?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Well, different times.

INTERVIEWER:
Okay, read one of those quotes and give me your reaction.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
The first quote I glanced at, "We don't need you, you haven't got through college yet."  That has, actually, been taken a little bit out of proportion.  It was said by Hewlett Packard to me.  Francis Rohde, one of the original developers of the HP 35 handheld calculator, wanted me.  He saw what I had done with the Apple projects and all that.  And he wanted me to be the designer [of a device] that you could hold in your hand with a little display on it and doctors [could] take it around to patients to type in questions that patients could type things back, answers back, just a simple communication tool.

And he wanted me to design it.  Now, it had to be designed in Hewlett Packard labs.  And they had five labs of mostly, you know, PhD research top guys.  And I went over there and interviewed for the job.  And I could do whatever was needed for this thing.

I wrote a computer language without ever having a course in it.  I figured everything out.  And they knew I could.  But they had turned me down because I didn't have a degree.  I'd be really low on that scale over at Hewlett Packard labs.  So I didn't get that job.

But it wasn't like they didn't turn me down for the Apple II because of that, no.

INTERVIEWER:
So that context is a little bit off the mark.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
As a matter of fact, the engineers in my lab, the calculator lab, would come to me and say, "That Apple II is the finest product I've ever seen in my life."  And they knew that their company, Hewlett Packard, couldn't sell it and had turned it down repeatedly.

INTERVIEWER:
What about the next quote?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Next quote, "Get your feet off my desk, get out of here.  You stink and we're not gonna buy your product."  I wasn't around any kind sort of horrible thing [like that].  And that's supposedly by Joe Keenan, president of Atari, responding to Steve Jobs' offer to sell him the rights to the new personal computer.  Oh, that's totally wrong, totally wrong.  I know the real story.

INTERVIEWER:
Correct the record.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
The real story is we have the Apple II.  We didn't have money to build 1,000.  We're looking for how to make some big money off of it.  And Steve and I went and visited Al Alcorn, not Joe Keenan, in his home.  And Alcorn had a projection TV, one of the earliest ones ever.  You know, techie guys like to be state-of-the-art.  We hooked it up and it played in his house.  And we showed him how you could write little programs on it. And Al was intrigued.  But they were about to come out with the first home Pong game in the United States, big money.  Atari was finally gonna be making big money.  And they didn't have time to diversify and do another thing at the same time.  And that's the truthful reason.  So that one is very wrong.  That one's just wrong.

INTERVIEWER:
Well, now, we know.

Quote, "There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home," Ken Olsen, Digital Equipment Corporation.  That is probably true.  It was a quote going around.  And it made sense from some points of view.  In other words, if Digital Equipment Corporation whom he was-- he was president of that company, what did they sell computers for?

They sold computers that cost as much as a house to factory floors, to people doing scientific research evaluations.  And these little tiny machines wouldn't do the job.  That's right.  And by the time they did the job, you'd have to put all the money in again to buy printers.  He didn't, you know, have the [vision] he didn't see that, "Wow, for $1,000, a price humans could afford, a lot of people would want something that was close to a computer, a starting point.  A lot of people would love that starting point."  And he didn't see that it would eventually be a good platform to innovate on because of the low price.  So he was right and wrong.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
It's an interesting quote.

INTERVIEWER:
Let me ask you about your Hewlett Packard experience.  We're not in any chronological order.  But tell me, that was supposedly the company at the time, was it not?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
All my life from when I was in elementary school doing science fair projects, my dad might bring home an oscilloscope to use.  And it was a Hewlett Packard.  He explained that they made the most precision equipment.  And they were very bright engineers out of Stanford.  Everything about their company spoke engineering calculation, the perfect parts, make machines that worked so well.

They're better than just the junk you buy normally.  And when I went to Hewlett Packard, they had many divisions across the country.  And all of the divisions built the equipment and the tools that engineers used.  So it was an engineer's company building the stuff for engineers.

I mean, we were the market.  We understood what they would be using our stuff for.  Even scientific calculators was almost the first break towards a consumer appliance.  They built power supplies.  They built tone generators that would put a tone on a wire to feed into equipment to test it.  They built the oscilloscopes that had displays of signals that you could get things-- your circuit working perfectly.  I mean, they were really an engineer's company.

INTERVIEWER:
How was their management there?  They had all these innovative engineers.  How did they support you and keep you guys cranking out the good stuff?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I never wanted to move up in management.  So I never got a real good insight as to how the management worked.  At the bottom, it was excellent.  We engineers were respected.  They-management--would come up to us and say, "Can you come up with some new ideas for the next calculator?"  And we'd sit down and toss out our ideas and come up with the new ideas.  It would be the new product that would drive the division of a company.  It didn't get forced down on us.  Sometimes above one on certain things, but generally, yeah, the flow of new products came from both directions.

And I liked that.  I felt very respected there.  The engineer's company, started by engineers, infiltrated with engineers in every level of management.  And they respected good engineering abilities and thinking.  Every single division of Hewlett Packard had its own IC manufacturing plant built in so they could get little advantages, you know, built the absolute finest products possible, not just buy stuff off the shelf.  We'll package it up and we'll sell it.

INTERVIEWER:
And are they still like that today?  Are they changed? What's your opinion about it?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
That's a very different company.  They sold off that part of Hewlett Packard.  And it's called Agilent today.  It still makes test equipment, it's still well respected.  But Hewlett Packard followed more where the money flow went once they got into printers.  They had a new printing technology, the inkjet printers.

And, boy, have they done just-- you know, taken the world to different places with that.  They kept some of their older businesses of larger computers, the sort that businesses buy.  And they have the personal computer line.  Personal computers, though, get to a point that you're competing against a lot of other companies that have almost the same product.

So it becomes a big marketing game.  And instead of being an engineering driven company, we have these extra engineering features, now, we have these extra marketing points.  You know, we're blissful.  We're a new day in the sunshine.  We're the path to outer space.  And the words don't necessarily mean anything to an engineer.

Try to hire the bright engineers.  Try to hire the ones that have, in themselves, the ability to invent the engineering technology, not ones that just already know how to do it, that have already-- you know, right now, companies go out and they [say]-- "I want an engineer who's done this and that and the other thing and that'll have all three of those disciplines in the right place."

Find the engineer that's young, that whatever new discipline he doesn't know already, he'll learn it or invent it on his own and make the most out of it.  Try to find those real bright ones, hard to find them.  You know, it's kinda like trying to find the ones I was when I was an engineer.  It'd be hard to find them.

But you know what?  I can tell when I go around colleges and talk to young people, there's a few that just strike me.  They've got something-- it's an extra drive in them that's gonna take them to, you know, more than just the standard place that is expected of an engineer who gets a degree in engineering.

They are solidly inside, they wanna be an inventor and a designer and they're often very independent.  They're harder to manage.  Give them a lot of freedom.  Let them build devices for their home and their own.  Give them some of the parts.

You know what?  You can pay for them to take courses at Stanford or you can give them a few parts which is another form of payment and let them build what they think.  And they're gonna-- their mind is gonna develop techniques of designing things and building things that is gonna show up in your own company's products.

Now, when somebody comes up with something like the Apple II, recognize it for how great it is.  And even if it can't be done within your company, it doesn't fit your whole product road map and everything, marketing, selling, find ways to be a big sponsor to start them up as a small start up on their own and recognize the good ones.

In other words, a little bit of venture capital, a little bit of entrepreneurship within the big corporation and those sort of elements will lead to a lot.  Of course, number one, still has to come your profits.  So, you know, your basic market-- you've still gotta have maybe some standard-- enough standard engineers that can do that.  But Google gives the engineers, what is it, one day a week, 20 percent of their time just to work on things of their own idea, you know, let them, you know, dream and-- and I think that's really a good road to innovation.

And, of course, and sometimes I would work so hard and, oh, my gosh, I'd say, "I'll get it done tomorrow."  And I couldn't do it that night.  I'd stay up till 2:00 or 3:00 and the next night and the next night and the next night.  And once that happened and I finally-- I almost-- every night, I did the same things I had done the night before trying to build this one complicated, complicated solution.  Finally, one night, I stayed up till 6:00 and got it working.  Everybody was coming in the doors.  And I was going out.  And I said, "I got it done."

INTERVIEWER:
You know, you have this quote.  I think it's [in] your autobiography, it says, "Technology always moves us forward."  Can you tell us a little bit about the real meaning of that to you?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Well, technology-- one of the things is when it comes to computer type technology, I mean, some technology, it's just a better tool that saves us labor.  And that helps us.  Computer technology saves working of the mind.  You don't have to think to add two numbers.

You can just push the buttons or to calculate the [tip] at a restaurant.  You can multiply it out.  And it, basically, did the job for you.  Technology shouldn't force you to remember a whole bunch of things either, save it for you.  Today's personal computer is the best example.  I think my computer means the most to me of any technology in the world.

It is storing all this data that's important to me, that I know where it is so I know I can find it.  And even if I forget where it is, I know that I have methods that will get me to find it.  Plus it makes my life fun, more entertaining.

And when I'm doing work, I always believed in my life and the Apple II is a big part of this philosophy that what you do for work should be fun.  So I made the Apple II a very fun machine, a machine you could program in jokes right along with work.  You could enjoy it.  It was in color.  And you could play a game and then go back to work on the same machine.  I believed very strongly in that and, you know, the personal computer is certainly an-- an outtake of entertainment.

So that's why you liked the pranks.  I mean, is there some correlation of the pranks and the engineering, the artistic design?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I don't necessarily think so.  I think the person could do an artistic design and not have to be a professional prankster like I am.  But in my own case, it might've been just a psychological release.  You know, you're an engineering technologist.  You kind of speak geeky talk.

You don't relate to normal people.  You've got your little engineering friends.  You develop inside words.  You develop your own little inside jokes.  And very often with engineering, it's a building science.  It's like auto mechanics.  And you actually are making little devices other people don't understand.  Very often, you can design a device that will make a radio knob go backwards instead of forwards.

And it's, like, a joke.  And it sounds funny.  And you laugh at it at lunch.  So once in awhile an engineer goes back and does one of those little projects that sounded like a joke and has fun.  And it's a prank.  You've fooled somebody with your electronics.

And I just grew up liking humor, pranks my whole life.  I learned in middle school that if you pull pranks or jokes at school, you get in trouble and you get caught even if you didn't do anything bad, you did something unusual, you get, you know, you made a face at somebody.  You get sent home.  You get punished by your parents.  And I learned don't tell anybody what you did by the time I got to high school.  So I did lots of pranks.  And it was great.  You can do a prank, have a little chuckle and there's no penalty.

INTERVIEWER:
Are there any pranks that are ongoing you, now, wanna admit that are yours that we can reveal?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
No, I do pranks every day, every day, to this day, I try to make up a little joke.  So just the other morning I kinda got up and I had an empty plastic bottle of water.  I stuck it under my armpit, went back to my bed.  And I got my wife and I said, "Oh, my neck hurts."

And she looks up.  And I squeezed the bottle and big crack.  And she jumped.  And I laughed.  And we both laugh.  You know, you gotta be with somebody that enjoys your humor.  Some people do not like humor.  And they should be around people that don't do humor.

INTERVIEWER:
What was your Apple II of pranks?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Apple II-- I don't have one.  I get asked a lot, "Well, name one prank."  And there's so many hundreds of pranks I've done. What means the most in my heart are two pranks Steve Jobs and I tried to do before Apple that didn't come off, either one of them.  But they were just such great ideas.  And one was Steve had learned how the sprinklers system at our high school worked.  And he learned that if you throw one switch it turns on the water supply.

And you turn on another switch and it turns the sprinklers on the football [field] where the parents sit during graduation.  So a couple days before graduation, we took a lock pick friend to try to pick his way into the building.  I climbed up on top and got in but the wrong part of the building.

So we never pulled it off.  But it was a really funny one.  And we had another graduation prank one year where as the seniors came out of graduation, half of them came around one side by the C building.  And right off the C building was this big sign that got unfurled that said, "Best wishes."  And, you know, some people would look at that and say, "Oh, what sick people to do something like that?"  And I don't understand it.  It's fun.  It makes us laugh.  And to me, all laughter is good.  I've been-- going around with a Hollywood comedian recently, Kathy Griffin, who's known for putting down a lot of celebrities.  And the first-- right from the start, I said, "You can humiliate me and embarrass me all you want.  And if it's for laughter, it's worth it."

If people are laughing, you know, all this, "Oh, my gosh, you hurt somebody with that joke."  Well, I don't know, if they ever tell a joke about your ethnic group or something, you know, that's very evil.  And then you say, "Oh, my God, that joke is evil."

And I told a joke at an engineering graduation that has nothing to do with characteristics of an ethnic group.  What do you call four Mexicans in quicksand?  Quattro cinco, it's a very funny play on words.  And somehow, they said I offended 400 people.

And I'm thinking, you know, this offense is man-made.  It's not God-made, it's not nature-made, it's man-made.  You have to be offended if you hear the word Mexican without thinking it's a joke-- you know, a bad joke or a piece of humor.

Laughter is so good a medicine.  You know, talking to people and laughing is the best psychology there is.  I think that, you know, you use this kind of psychoanalysis, you use this other kind of psychotherapy.  And you use being on the waiting list and talking to friends and talking to friends, you'll recover just as fast.

I think we're the best.  And it's strange.  But sure, we have a lot of problems in our school systems compared to others.  But a lot of these others societies grow up a lot more strict and rigid about your behavior.  You have to do good in life.

They put a strong pressure and you have to good in life.  And we, in America, kind of like, "Well, you know, you'll probably have the life.  Or it's a lot more random."  And we don't grow up with as many parents, you know, directing, "Here's what your values have to be and blah, blah, blah."  And in my travels, I've talked to a lot of young people in elementary school, in middle school, in high school, in college, and young people out of college.  And I just see the sort of mentality that it's trying to think of new ways of doing things that haven't been done before.

And when I go to other countries, I don't encounter that as much.  Or when I do, it's usually young people, it's like 15, 16 years old.  And they might have all these great ideas.  And they're things that, you know, I have real smart adults, too, that are clever and creative ones.

And they say that's a great idea when they hear the same thing.  So around the world, I see it.  But in the United States I see it everywhere I go among engineering type people, interns at Apple, you know, maybe not managers, maybe not ones that are trained in the business world.  But the ones that are trained in electronics, yeah.  I would normally say-- "There's a lot of reasons why we got these big companies.  And we've gotta outsource this on the engineering.  And we're not doing it ourselves."  But, no, I see so many influences for the push to do the new things that haven't been done before.

There's two things, teachers and schools, and they go together.  And a lot of times, a school means the whole system of education.  Sometimes the system, in my day, I could play a bunch of pranks and be a little character in class and be a comedian in class.

And today, you get your hand slapped for the smallest little jokes.  And pranks aren't allowed.  And the schools tighten up.  And it's gotta be almost kind of a religiously run life.  And you can't have that kind of humor with your education that you used to have.

I mean, sure, kids are kids.  You can't take away a lot of that.  It'll come out anyway.  But they're almost considered bad kids that do that sort of thing.  And it bothers me a lot.  But I know that education can be a lot better.  Education's always gonna be imperfect.

Education in the United States largely comes in public education, say.  Where does the money come from? The government. The government has a pie.  And a certain percentage of the pie is gonna go into the military and according to how many people-- if more people want more military, there's gonna be more military, more voters.

And some, it's gonna go into farm subsidies.  And if there's more people that want farm subsidies, the farm subsidies will be bigger.  But kids don't get a vote on education money.  A family of five gets no more votes than a family of two.  So you've got people in a community.

Some have kids and want more money in education.  They want a better educational system.  Some have no kids or they've already had their kids.  And they don't wanna spend any money on education.  But the trouble is, both the family of five and the family of two get the same votes.

So, you know, we don't have the right amount of money that comes from the government to our schools.  One teacher that cares will never fail with one student.  If we can get the class size smaller and smaller, we'll always do better.  But if we have a system where teachers get paid more for teaching 30 kids poorly, than they get paid for teaching 20 kids well then they wanna teach 30 kids poorly and get more money.  That's a problem.

INTERVIEWER:
When you were teaching, you weren't slapping hands were you?  Were you applying your philosophy to these kids?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I was volunteering.  We had a lot of fun allowed-- fun was built in to the class.  And anybody who did anything fun on their own, you know, sort of got applauded, almost.  I told [the kids], "If you can, over the network, get into somebody else's computer and move things around and scare them, that's okay, as long as you can undo it easily."

And in eight years, every time they did something like that, it was easily undoable.  In other words, they wanted the fun of doing something they weren't supposed to be able to do because somebody hadn't protected their computer properly.  They wanted the fun.  But they didn't wanna destroy.  And I was volunteering so I couldn't really lose on that.  My kids-- my classes-- I could even talk philosophies and values of life and why you might discover this later on.  And you know, like a parent, "Boy, you can get in trouble-- as a teacher in a public school giving the kids some ideas of, you know, right and wrong."

INTERVIEWER:
You said that innovation wasn't happening in PCs today.  Where is innovation happening?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
PC, itself, is what you take home-- yeah, it's kind of an incremental, step-by-step process, right now.  And it's not coming out well.  It is so much different than it ever was before.  Now, you know, we have had tablet PCs I would call great innovation.  But we're not having a great innovation every month like at the start of the PC revolution.

Every new program, every new little device that came out, whoa, the world is changed forever.  Nowadays, I think it starts more with market has so much money going in from the big companies.  There isn't that room for the one guy who has all these creative little bright ideas because whatever he does is gonna look small and be judged small proportionately.

Software, look, we just opened up an app store on the iPhone.  And a lot of people jumped out and wrote some of those early programs, simple ones.  Some of them do very useful things.  Some of them do entertaining, fun things.  There's a lot of innovations going on in the areas of display. But big companies kind of control that because the display market is a multi-billion dollar market.  And anything that's big gets the attention from money to make sure that the money wins and if there's an innovator out there, buy him in.

And the innovator disappears.  In other words, it's not so much like the lone inventor that goes into the shop and comes up with something neat on their own.  Look at recent times stuff, we've had small startups.  And they're usually young people like Steve Jobs and I were when we started Apple, starting, you know, working on something that becomes as big as Google or Yahoo or, you know, a few of these other net-based, you know, Facebook and Digg and those kind of websites that-- it's almost always somebody young and finds that there is a place to, also, at the same time, innovate. It first is the drive.  And then after all the discovery, "Wow, we're gonna change the world so big."  And that's always equivalent to a lot of money.

INTERVIEWER:
Is there another big hardware thing, though, for PCs we should be looking for?  I know you said display technology.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
You know what?  There are people that will work on fast-- ways to make chips faster in the future and make a lot more memory available.  And you won't need a hard disk, maybe.  Everything will be on one chip, your entire life and every movie and everything.

But that doesn't really solve a lot of the world's big problems anymore.  A computer can sit down and store your music.  And it'll store your music in the future in about the same way.  Well, there aren't very many steps different.  It can run the finances of a company everything from parts and inventory to employees' salaries and their benefits and HR.  And the computers have been doing that for a long time.  They're doing that same step today.  The computer, itself, can get a little bit less expensive.  We're talking about the move to the cloud.

Right now, you know, it doesn't matter.  You know, when I first typed on my keyboard, I was talking to a computer in Boston.  And it was talking back to my TV.  And we've gotten away from that with PCs.  Starting with the Apple, we said-- we're calling it personal computer because it's personal.

It's you.  You're not connected to a whole world.  Eventually, we had reasons to wire people together so they could share an expensive part like a laser writer printer.  And then we discovered the internet and the whole world so we could share all the ideas of the world are at your disposal.

So already, we're-- a lot of us is out there.  Almost anything I use the computer for is sort of out there.  You know, except for me when I send e-mails, me to you.  It's me to you.  But we're using equipment out there without knowing it.  We're using programs that are out there, sometimes, without knowing it.

And eventually powering it up and I can run a program to play my music.  Well, the program might eventually come from out there.  I don't really think so.  I think a lot of the programs are so cheap and so versatile and so-- you like to have it in your possession, in your little laptop, in your phone, whatever.  You like to have the program there and not have to depend on being hooked up to run it.

INTERVIEWER:
Okay, let me jump in.  The question about--

STEVE WOZNIAK:
A lot of the innovation starts with researchers that are in the chemistry, physics and those type of [fields]-- in university research things discover a new material that has a new property.  And recently Hewlett Packard has announced it has a new memory it's gonna make and patent.  It's called Memristor.

And it was a type of device, they didn't know if it ever existed.  And they finally found a type of atomic material that does that job.  So the people who are working on raw elements and molecules that do new things.  Nano-technology, making little devices that you almost need an electron microscope to see.

They're developing new materials with new properties.  And I think it all starts there.  And then after some long period of years, some of those things, actually, they're gonna make sense, economic sense.  They're gonna make a material that is a better value.

And then more years beyond that, they get implemented.  Like when I started out building computers, I looked at the chips.  And they had designed chips with certain features.  Those features, I was, now, gonna put into a device people could use.  But it was many years from where somebody decided what features people would use some day until they actually got it.

INTERVIEWER:
Right, you knew that 6502 chip...

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Well, no, but-- there were other chips even besides that that had certain capabilities.  I go down to the atomic level.  And I almost developed all my own stuff, my way of creating video signals.  Well, somebody else might develop a video chip or develop a floppy disk chip.  And then a few years later, it'll be in a floppy disk and make it cheaper.

I was in Apple.  And I was thinking, "Wow," all of a sudden, we have this engineering structure with managers that get all this feedback to them.  And really, it was a way of putting the control of the company up high in a few individuals instead of all the engineers.

A manager will ask, you know, I want you to write up what you can do and get this.  And a manager can modify it and approve it and say, "Okay, here's the final one that I'm willing to sign off on.  And my manager above me is willing to sign off on."  And then the engineer has a project to work on.  I don't work that way.  I didn't like it.

So I was thinking, "Gosh, you know, Apple's-- all of a sudden, Apple had about 50 projects going on.  And I could only be working on one at a time, of my own.  Hey, you know, this company is really going to go as well and as far whether I'm here or not.  I'm not the critical one engineer that everybody needs anymore."

And I would've liked to find a way out of it.  But I could never say I'm leaving Apple.  And after I had a plane crash, amnesia for five weeks.  When I came out of amnesia, the first thing I did, I called Steve Jobs and said, "I'm gonna go back to Berkeley and get my degree."

You know, I had enough money by then from Apple that I had the freedom to make that sort of a choice.  And that was me.  I stayed on the Apple's payroll book.  I worked out a light salary because I still go to trade shows.  I speak for Apple on occasion.  I do something Apple would call me and want me to do.

I might even work on a project now and then.  So I stayed on the payroll because I wanted-- and I got it in my head, I always wanted to be on Apple's computer forever that keeps track of how long you've worked for the company.  How long you've been getting some small salary.  And I am to this day.

Well, we had already sold the Apple Is in 1976.  But it was kind of build your own wooden case.  And we had little wooden cases for it.  First time we-- you know, you need a large volume to justify making a plastic case.  So the Apple II, we decided we wanted a plastic case and came up with this great design.  I mean, it looks kinda like a typewriter.  It fits in all the innards of an Apple II including the extra parts you could plug in over time.  We didn't know what people would design, what they would wanna use the Apple II for.

Would they go to have a board for a floppy disk?  Would they have hard disk boards?  Would they have boards for modems and this and that and scientific instruments?  So we didn't know.  But there's room in there for it.  There's a very simple case removal.

You have to imagine, this is the Apple II computer that I'm known for.  And it really did bring computers to the home.  It was the first one that had the features people wanted at a price they wanted.  And you have to imagine you had a television set with it.  And it could be your big home TV.  And you type in here and see words on the screen.  And you could run programs and have fun.

INTERVIEWER:
Now, tell me a little bit how you came up with that disk drive.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Yeah, when we first came out with the Apple II, like the Apple I, it stored programs through a little wire, there's a hole in the back and an earphone jack right into your cassette tape recorder.  You'd press play, record on the tape recorder and record some data.  Or you'd press play on the tape recorder and play a game off of cassette tape into your machine and run it.  And that's how the first software was sold for the Apple II.  Well, one of the programs-- as we worked on certain programs like a checkbook program for the home user-- a flash card program to demonstrate its abilities in schools.

We had these programs and we thought, "It takes too long to read them.  How do you speed it up?"  And Steve Jobs had, actually, been a honcho for the floppy disk before we even started the-- the company for real.  He'd be in with Shugart.  They had these things called floppy disks.

I had never worked with any kind of disk drive in my life.  And I had never worked with anything.  But I knew that was one of our high priorities to do some day.  And I had a few little weird ideas.  When I see a chip that has a certain feature, I think right away, how could that feature be used in the real world?

And one of the ideas I'd come up with before leaving Hewlett Packard even was to put data onto a floppy disk and out using this one new chip.

After I went to Berkeley and earned my college degree and I, also, ran some big rock concerts, I walked right back into Apple.  "Hey, you know, I'd like to work here again." I walked into the division where I thought I had the most to contribute, the Apple II 3 division.

When I had my plane crash, I had been working on the Macintosh.  But it was, now, in a separate division of its own.  And I hadn't designed it.  So I wouldn't be able to help it as much as the Apple II 3 which was still the bread winner of the company.

And after a certain point in time, I was talking to some friends and a really cool idea popped into our heads.  Why don't we make a remote control?  See, I was at home.  And I had a lot of remote controls.  Almost nobody had a hi-fi with a remote control.

But I did.  And almost nobody had a satellite receiver.  They weren't sold yet.  You almost had to build your own.  And I had one with a remote.  And I had a remote for my TV and a remote for my VCR.  And it's enough remotes.  And I had laserdisc players.

So I have like five remotes.  How can I make one remote do it all?  The universal remote idea hit me.  I got another engineer that came out with a bunch of weird ideas.  He was kind of a-- one of those crazy types, Joe Ennis.  And that inspired me to think even more about the idea.  "Man, I've got the sort of guy that thinks and isn't afraid to challenge-- do new things a new way."  And I said, "I love these little startups when you have just a few engineers and a few other people that are talking wild new ideas for the world."  That's where I like to live.  I don't like to live in the world that's well-known because everybody in the world who knows how to put money in and build factories cheaper and this and that.

They're all winning that war.  I don't like to, you know, get into competition either.  I like to be out doing something different because, then, you're not challenged.  I don't like to be confrontational.  You're not in a confrontation having to prove your better than someone else is not my thing.  I don't like to do it.

INTERVIEWER:
You like to work alone, you're saying?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
I like to work alone and you're just-- yeah, whatever you do is better because nobody else is doing it.

So one day, we had a meeting.  And turns out that the very first time ever the big consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, the one that all young technical kids wanna go to see the newest hi-fis and speakers and amplifiers and car systems, the first time ever they were gonna allow personal computers in, Apple, Radio Shack and Commodore.  And three of our marketing people who were going, Mike-- Mark Lewis, Steve Jobs and a sales guy-- I think it was Gene-- forget his name and they were all gonna go to Las Vegas.

And I thought, "Wow, I wish I could be in on that group.  But they're taking marketing people."  And so I said right there-- I said, "What if we have a floppy disk, could we show it?"  You know, and the show was two weeks away.  You don't design a floppy disk and controller and all that in two weeks.

But I do the unusual things.  And they said, "Yeah, if we had a floppy disk, we'd show it."  This was my in, my way to get to Las Vegas, to see the lights of the city that I had never imagined actually seeing in person.  And I got to work.  I worked every day, Christmas Day, New Years Day, this young employee, Randy Wigginton, came in and worked on some of the software with me.  And I got my little tiny design without knowing how disk drives were made or what they did, I got a design done that could, at least, write a program onto a disk and read the program off of the disk.

And then I said, "Well, I wonder what I'm missing?  All the other designs have a lot more chips."  So I opened up a competitor's design.  I reverse engineered it.  And I figured out mine did more in the end.  So I knew I had another big winner just like the Apple II, a little board, floppy disk drive.

You type "run checkbook."  And it would run the checkbook program.  And that was a big step upwards for computers.  We showed off the floppy disk.  It got a lot of attention, immediate hit.  We figured out ways to get the prices so much lower than everyone else.  And part of it was few parts in the design.  And that was a big step for computers.

I love technology and I love following gadgets.  I had 20 hours a day to work every detail in my head of an engineering design and just do engineering constantly back then.  Today, I can't be that way.  I have obligations you get as you get older.  And I have families and homes and you know, and I could be more of an idea person and try to find engineers to do the final design.

And in that area, though, I get intrigued by the new little things down at the lower levels, at the atomic levels, the new ingredients and applying them in a new way to make some new device that doesn't exist.  And I've had some failures.  I've started out trying to build devices that turned out to be-- that what was an excellent device was impossible to build today.

And I had to give it up because I don't wanna build just little junky, crappy device.  I don't wanna put out another one of these, you know.  I like to think about things that other people aren't doing.

One of the things that's intrigued me for about 20 years is, is it ever possible to have light signals switch each other around the way electrons get switched by electronic circuits?  Could you build a chip that has a fiber optic cable in and fiber optic cable out and no battery, no voltage, you know, almost no electronics at all?  And there's been some research breakthroughs.  But most of those were a few years back.  And they sort of dried up in print.  They're hasn't been that much printed about them.

The other day I was reading that Intel is, actually, pursuing this kind of a chip.  Could you make a new microprocessor that really works on light and is much faster?  Today, there's a chip being called photonics for switching all the optical cables and the fiber cables of the world and switching computers around.

There are a lot of uses for it.  But I'm thinking of where the photonics is the computer running on light.

I have some other intriguing ideas that I'm working on.  There's new architectures to computers; we're used to flash RAMs in our iPods and we're used to flash RAMs in our iPhones, devices like that.  They're becoming big in the world.  And they've finally come down to very low cost.  And you can build a lot more memory even on one of those type of-- it's called flash memory.  You can build these flash memories.

We used to call them double E-PROMs. E-E-P-R-O-M, "electrically energized programmable read only memory."  But it's not really read only.  It's regret-- there's uses of those outside the computer as disks.  But it turns out, there are, actually, some companies, Fusion-io, is one that I'm close to.  And I don't have an official role there.

But I'm on the advisory board.  And they make a board that plugs into the servers, today's modern high speed servers that serve all the Internet data and, you know, run the information of the world.  And they do everything from e-mail to Microsoft Express servers for all your Outlook data.  And when you put this board in and run it as not quite a real disk drive using the operating system as a disk drive would, but as a new type of memory substitute, disk substitute something that doesn't-- has a vague name right now-- write a little driver program for it, you can speed all those tasks up, all those computers up like two times, two X.  You can speed them up faster than big multi-thousand dollar disk arrays.  And it takes no power.  This flash RAM takes no power.

So that's another good application.  It's a computer architecture discussion, really.  And it's one of the things that, you know, I've loved my whole life.

Oddly enough, there's a lot of little surprises that you're never looking for that people who start trying to create something that they really wanna make that other people don't believe is gonna be of much value.  Well, after you're done, you know, making it, you sometimes come up with there is a value for this thing that we didn't see before.

And it's always a big surprise.  The things that you can predict, all the big corporations of the world are already going into that are gonna be worth money.  But-- yeah, just young kids, you've gotta believe in yourself, believe in your own ideas, believe it's right.  Keep working on it.  Whatever resources you have, I know that all the best things I ever did for Apple was because I didn't have any money and had to think of inexpensive ways to get the job done.

I, also, know that by being smart but not having done things before, if it was the first time ever I tried doing something, I figured out better ways using today's parts to get it done than people had done that knew how to do it right out of their head.  They would do it the old ways.  They build a computer the old way.

They'd start with big mainframes and the switches and the lights and a bus.  And we know that we can turn that into a computer.  But it's not a computer in the form it's in.  And so you know, believe in yourself and just work on it and use as few resources as you can for awhile.

You always need a few bucks to buy something.  But try to figure out the ways to do it cheaply at first even if you can't do the complete job.  You can do a part of it.  And that part of it you might-- you should be able to sell, earn the money to make it bigger and finally get the real full thing done.

Boy, I really look forward to kids of the future, especially, trying to build robots.  The Apple II of robots doesn't exist.  And I go and I judge the first robotics competitions in the high schools where kids, you know, have teams and they try to build human-sized robots to play a game.

But you control it with a little joystick.  But those are the kids that are gonna figure out how to build a robot kit that could be applied to useful jobs in the home.  We've already got Roomba to clean our rooms.  But that's one that a kid might build, also, or to build their own Segways or build their own dishwashing machines or car washing machines.

Sleep all night long and the thing goes outside and just sort of goes around, little motors and washes every square inch of your car and is done by morning.  I sort of see that coming from young kids or a machine that, you know, just makes a cup of coffee and serves it and sets the cups aside in the morning.  You know, little robots-- the mechanical motor plus electronics plus computer combination is always intriguing.  Also, another bit of advice I would have is being multi-disciplinary, learn to do all the jobs yourself.

You know, look at the build-it-yourselfers who go out there and they melt some steel and then they design a plastic part and go to a place that manufacturers this little plastic round about and drill some screw holes.  And they just do the entire jobs themselves and wind up with something built, put in a microprocessor, connect the wires, have a little, tiny voltage power supply.  But they did every bit of it, hardware, software, everything themselves.  You gotta be that kind of make it yourselfer if you really wanna come up with the unexpected device that's gonna be new and startling, no one ever expected.

Work by yourself up to a point. When one person can do a lot of the different tasks instead of five different people working like a committee, that's when you get the greatness and the excellence.  The product has one uniform point of view, one thing it's supposed to do.

I'm thinking a hardware product right now.  But it applies to software.  And it does it, you know, that's so right for one person, yourself, the main developer, that it will be good.  And it will be what's considered excellent and not just-- it does it.  And it's good.  It satisfies this guy.  And it satisfies that guy.  And it satisfies everybody that worked on the team.  And, now, it's just a big conglomeration of two messy things.  You need one mind, at least, that condenses it back down to what it should be, one strong mind.  I mean, at Apple we had Steve Jobs.

This is the Apple I that we sold minus a few parts that were taken off so that it could be bolted on to this wooden case.  That's not really how it would've been implemented and the wooden case would've been a little larger than the board.  And the board would've been inside.  This was rev two of the Apple I.  Rev one is the one that I sat down and hand soldered the wires and got working the prototype and ran cables into my TV.  You didn't have video in back then.  When Steve Jobs came along, it was his idea, "Let's build a PC board and sell it for $40."  That's the green board we're looking at.  And I sold my most valuable possession, my HP 65 calculator.

Steve sold the van.  We got a few hundred bucks each.  And we paid a friend of his who worked at Atari to lay out a PC board to draw.  He had a little tape that he would draw around where all those little curvy lines.  Those are little wires on the board.  He laid them out on mylar.

And, then, that got manufactured into the PC board itself.  On the PC board, we have all these components here.  The microprocessor is the white chip.  That's the heart of it all.  And we chose the 6502 because at the date it came out, it was the most advanced, the best of all the little microprocessors even though it was the cheapest.  And, you know, my whole thing in life was evaluating computer architectures and it was just better than the Intel chips.  Right next to it is a very large chip which was, I believe, the one that connected to a keyboard.

That was the one that let the keyboard get into the microprocessor.  And it wasn't too expensive.  But it was a big chip.  Most of the chips in here are just running circuitry that tells American color TVs when to start it's vertical lines, when to start it's horizontal lines, when to turn on and off the guns.

This was black and white only, so when to turn it on for a dot of white and then off for a dot of black.  That's what those chips were doing there.  And they store the data that was on the TV screen.  Down here in the lower right corner, there's 16 chips.  And I designed it so you could plug in what was called the 4K dynamic RAMs.  This is the RAM of the machine.  One row of RAM would be at least 4K bytes.  As the chips got better and bigger, you could, actually, plug in two rows of up to 16 chips for a total of 32K, that's one millionth of 32 megabytes.  That's one-millionth of 32 gigabytes, which is a small number today for even an iPod.

So it was a very small amount of RAM.  But it was enough to run a computer programming language.  You have to have, at least, 4K bytes of RAM to run any computer programming language that's ever been made.  We've got some big blue parts up here which are capacitors that smooth out the voltages for the other chips.

And they started out at the wall.  You plugged in some transformers in the wall and ran in some up down signals here.  And that was the circuitry that created the voltages for the part.  There's a little crystal, a silver crystal, next to the blue chip.  And the silver crystal generates the clock.  I chose a crystal that was deliberately a multiple of the United States color television standards because I had this idea that some day I could come in and add an idea I had back in here.

And you had to have everything working at a rate of color television signals to wind up getting color on your set by the simple method I'd come up with.  I did apply that method.  I never did it to the Apple I.  But applied that method when I went to the Apple II.  And it's all there.  It's actually very, very simple, especially if you take out the free memory, there's very, very few chips.  And they're very inexpensive chips.

Now, remember the Apple I-- and the amazing thing is, the Apple I was a big turning point for computers.  We went from the big front panels with geeky words on switches and lights that only had one in zero meaning to something that was human with a real typing keyboard and a real television display with words.

That was a big step.  But really this was kind of a little hack job.  I took a product I already had that could type data to a computer far away.  I added my own microprocessor and my own memory, a couple little ROM chips that had the program that says, "What's he typing on the keyboard?"  And I put together a computer quickly.

But this was a very slow computer intended to go at very slow speeds according to United States telephone lines.  So it was the Apple II was really a computer line from the start up.  But this computer was so useful.  I could take it into Hewlett Packard, run programs and get calculations on circuits and design circuits better than the other engineers right at my desk with my own little computer.  This is the computer I really-- wanted Apple-- Hewlett Packard to start selling, too, a lot of turn downs.

I don't wanna be remembered as much for the-- I'm glad that I got to share the start of the personal computer revolution.  It was such an exciting time.  And we cared so much about it.  I wanna be known for-- more than anything else, is that people that opened this up and look at a schematic and you'd never be able to-- nobody uses these kind of chips anymore to this day and says, "Wow, how did he hook those chips up so clever?"

And so, you know, it was my type of engineering.  It was the thing that I was very good at my whole life was figuring out how to make circuits that did a lot with very few parts.  Nowadays, you can make everything on one chip and it's got a million times this much complexity.

So you never get to see how well was it done.  It's the excellence of the engineering.  Yeah, I'd want to be known as a good engineer my software had the same characteristics.  I've wrote an entire computer language and having no training in it.

But I did it in a very structured manner.  And it came out very small fast, good characteristics.  I want them to respect the engineering more than anything else.  My own children, that's what I would want them to see.  "My dad did an excellent job and not just a slop job."

INTERVIEWER:
Is there something you can say that it might be relevant to the people down the road and stuff maybe you've never revealed before, something about yourself, something you've worked on that you'd like to sort of put out there for posterity?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
It's hard to say.  People are people.  You know what's in your heart.  And if you're being pushed in a direction that's not where you wanna go, if you have some idea in your head of something that you'd like to create someday that may come out of you.  You know, trust yourself.  Don't-- and other people have-- you should be doing this and that in life.  But if you really wanna be doing what's in your heart, follow it.  More than anything else, you know, I just sat there.

And I said, "I knew what I wanted."  There were people that saw this design that I showed it to and they said, "Oh, no, no, no, we wanna build it the old, big clunky way.  That's how it's done."  And I couldn't get them to even come over to my way when they saw it, you know, a year before this was sold.

You know, come on, look how simple it is.  Look how few parts it is.  I couldn't get that many people interested.  But at least you get the buyers interested.  You do have to, in the end, you know, think about, you know, you're not gonna get known for something very creative unless you really have big sales and influence a lot of the people and sell it to them.  And the money that you make off of one product like this lets you build the Apple II.  And the money from the Apple II let's you build an Apple III and go and on and on and on and really get the world to move to its advanced state.

So you know, you need a start and don't worry if your start is very few bucks.  We sold very few Apple I's.  In about a year, we might have sold 150 of them.  We had a bank account that might be $10,000.  You know, it doesn't sound like much.  And we didn't pay ourselves.  So you know, we just did all this moonlighting.  So we saved a little bit of money.  But it's the start that propels you to do more in the direction you're going.  I'm not good at advice.  But that's my experience.

INTERVIEWER:
What does feel like to be you, you know what I'm saying?  I mean, you're sort of a celebrity.  But, also, in your heart you're this engineer.

STEVE WOZNIAK:
Never understood it for a long, long time in my life because everybody wanted to come up and get autographs and things.  Come on, I was a good engineer.  Engineers don't give autographs.  You know, those are celebrities and, you know, I just did a good engineering job.

Why would anybody respect that the same way?  And then one day I was at a little night club.  And I was looking down at the people dancing.  And it just hit.  And this group Berlin was playing.  It hit me, it was just a few years-- a couple years ago that of all those people down there, they had been the inventors of this technology and the inventors of this science and the inventors of this astronomical thing or the runners of NASA.

And one guy down there had just been, however significant he was known or not, he had invented the personal computer.  That person would mean the most to me.  The personal computer is just the most useful tool and toy of our life.

And for me it is, you know, even as a user.  So I finally understood why people think that way of me that I'm so important in life.  And I never wanted to be.  I was very shocked.  And I still don't like the publicity.  But I have to do good things for other people, too.

I really hope that I'm a good example more than anything else in life, you know, what you do, it's even more important to be an example to others especially my philanthropy, my giving, you know, early on.  I didn't really do this for money.  I didn't want money and gave it away.  You try to be a good example of what's important to you and what principles and values you followed to get there and then others will turn out that way.  And one of the things that I like to do especially if I help other people through their life, some of them write back to me.  And they say they remember that I told them, "You don't pay me back with money."

"You pay me back by passing it on, if you could help other people sometimes."  And some of those people get further in their life than they would have.  And they write to me about how they've taken some young kids and helped them learn this and taught them that and given them some, you know, accounts or useful things so they can go somewhere with computers.  And that's what I like, you know, it's really, you know, the next generation of young people.

I will always support young techie types that like to, you know, know the mathematical and the little details of things and never put them down.  That's where I came from.  You know, I don't wanna say, "Oh, those people are unimportant now.  You know, now, I can be a big wig and run things.  And those people are just peanuts and you can find a million of them," no.  Their inspiration is the important thing in life.  It's what you feel.  You know, it's not what you accomplish, necessarily, on paper.  It's what you feel about it.  Of course, I loved it, so.  It's really nice when, you know, the thing you love is your job.

I'm not that directly involved.  It's a lot of longer technologists who come up using Linux where you have to piece together pieces of software and it's very technically challenging and nothing kind of works twice or works the same the next week as it did this week.  But that's where I came from.  And I loved it.  I learned how to build these computers by looking at little diagrams and working things-- little pictures on paper of how to put it together and figured out how to do some things.

And I've learned it from other people, their publications.  When we came out with the computer, I told you, the first one, the Apple I, I gave away every bit and piece of the design and everything so that other people could, not only build their own, but learn from my excellence how you can design a computer, how you can write certain kinds of software.

With the Apple II, we made money.  We kept it copyrighted.  We made money off of it.  We owned it.  But we published the documents so that other people could learn.  And that's part of this open source idea.  If you can see the program that went into something, you can modify it a little, add the differences that would make it exactly perfect for your needs and modify it and, you know, and have rights to that.  And, now, you've created something on top of what somebody else created.

It's, like, one learning can lead to another to things can build on each other, very proprietary type devices I've always been very much against where, you know, it's locked up.  You can't use your own intelligence.  You, the technical genius, the engineering genius, can't use your own intelligence to improve something somebody else did.

And that locks off a lot of innovators.  When I run into young people-- even interns at Apple, they talk about how important it is, you know, some of the hacking that's going on is really developing out minds and trying to think out solutions that are complicated.  And they sort of see this whole open source world as not-- it's not like we're trying to get stuff for free.  We wanna make somebody else's work all of a sudden be free and shared with everyone, no.  It's just being able to see how they did it so we can learn from it and then take our own minds and take it even further than it went.

You know, but when you shut off the learning, only a few people are allowed to know how something works, that's closed source, then how they wrote a program is hidden, you can't learn from it.  And-- I just think that's harmful.  I don't really see any good purpose for it.

It doesn't mean that a company can't be protected to their rightful profits.

INTERVIEWER:
How does that relate, then, there was always this thing I remember 'cause I grew up in this era where they said, "The Apple's like a closed platform.  The PC's an open platform?" I mean, what's that all about?

STEVE WOZNIAK:
It's hard to say 'cause, obviously, we were very open in our early days.  The Apple II had instructions and diagrams, how to plug everything in and design your own stuff and add on-- thousands of companies started up.  Sometimes they were just high school kids that sort of knew how to put a couple of chips on a board.  And we'd shown them the formula and all of a sudden, they had a music keyboard or something.  Or they could write music software or write a game.

So many companies started up from these young people.  And I'm so much for that.  Nowadays, we're a lot closed.  You know, you can't see what we've done.  You can't see how we've done it.  We wanna keep the secrets to ourselves.  And that hurts a lot of the smart people from learning, you know, more-- you know, as much as they would.

And it doesn't really help profits.  I think it helps keep-- big companies can stay in a position of saying, "We are the source of power.  And you are not important.  You don't know how to do what we do."  But-- you know-- it's disrespectful to the people that I respect the most, the creative young engineers that can figure out how to build things, how to make things, how to make them new, how to make them better.

And, you know, a company is not open to other people.  Here's an idea for you.  Well, the problem is, a lot of people have ideas that aren't really worth a lot and then they'll sue you.  So you know, and a lot of it is the whole business system, the laws, the tax laws, the court cases.  And that almost forces companies to be very closed, too.

In some areas, it's harder to be innovative in certain areas.  You're almost not allowed to.  You're not allowed to, for example, buy a computer and then redo the code and the ROMs to make that computer have some neat and new special little fancy features.  Apple wouldn't like it.  We don't like people saying that they can build a computer.  Only we can.