Book Excerpt

Rendezvous with technology legends

If anyone person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II.

Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’ mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent.

Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company: the Apple II. He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software-an extraordinary feat even for the time. And what’s more, he did it all while working at his day job at Hewlett-Packard. The Apple II was presented to the public at the first West Coast Computer Faire in 1977.

Apple Computer went public in 1980 in the largest IPO since Ford in 1956, creating more instant millionaires than any other company up to that point.

The Apple II was the machine that brought computers onto the desks of ordinary people. The reason it did was that it was so miraculously well designed. But when you meet Woz in person, you realize another equally miraculous aspect of his character. A programmer might describe it by saying he’s good in hardware.

Livingston: Take me back to before you started Apple.

Wozniak: Even back in high school I knew I could design computers with half as many chips as the companies were selling them with. I taught myself, but I had taught myself in a way that forced me to learn all sorts of trickiness. Because you try to make valuable what you’re good at. I was good at making things with very few parts by using all sorts of tricks—almost the equivalent of mathematics—so I valued products that were made with very few parts.

That helped in two ways. When you are a startup or an individual on your own, you don’t have very much money, so the fewer parts you have to buy, the better. When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product.

In the few years before Apple, I was working at Hewlett-Packard designing scientific calculators. That was a real great opportunity to be working with the hot product of the day. But what I did that led to starting a company was on the side. When I came home from work, I kept doing electronics anyway. I didn’t do the same calculators we were doing at work, but I got involved through other people with the earliest home pinball games, hotel movies…The first VCRs made for people were actually made by an American company—not Betamax, it was before Betamax even—called Cartravision. It was put in some Sears TVs. I got involved with that. I saw arcade games—the first arcade game, Pong, that really made it big—so I designed one of those on my own. Then Atari wanted to take my design and make it the first home Pong game. They said to do one chip, which was better for the volumes that they would have-to do a custom chip. Steve Mayer came up with that idea. But I was kind of in with Atari and they recognized me for my design talents, so they wanted to hire me.

Livingston: How did they know you?

Wozniak: Steve Jobs worked there part-time. He would finish up games that they designed in Grass Valley. He brought me in and showed me around, and Nolan Bushnell offered me a job on the spot. I said, “No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers-bottom-of-the-org-chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion, and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there.

Then I designed a game for Atari called Breakout, and that was a really incredible product. That was just so neat, to have my name associated with a product that actually came out in the field in video games. Because this was the start of a whole industry and I wasn’t really a part of it. But I wanted to be a designer and just have some little connection to it.

In doing all those projects, I got involved in another one. The ARPANET then had about a dozen computers connected with a network. You could select which computer to visit, and they had certain access that you could get into as a guest; or, if you had passwords, you could get deeper. I just saw somebody typing away on the teletype, just talking about playing chess with a computer in Boston, and I said, “I have to do this. I just have to have this for myself.” For a lot of entrepreneurs, they see something and they say, “I have to have this,” and that will start them building their own.

I couldn’t really afford to buy the pieces I needed. I couldn’t buy a teletype, so I had to design my own terminal. The only thing that was free (because I had no money) was a home TV to see characters on. I got a keyboard for $60, which was amazingly low-priced then. That was the most expensive thing to getting my terminal built. Then it was just a matter of designing logic to put dots on a TV screen that add up to the letters of the alphabet and spell out what’s coming from another computer far away. The keyboard types the data to the computer far away, and I built a modem for that. So now I had a TV terminal. This is while I’m working at Hewlett-Packard. I’m just doing these things on the side for fun in my apartment in Cupertino.

Back in college, I had designed a neat deal called a blue box, for making free phone calls. Steve Jobs came along and said, “Let’s sell it.” So now I had this video terminal, and he said, “There’s a local time-sharing outfit that buys these expensive terminals. Why don’t we sell this to them?” So we actually sold some of the video terminals that I had built. It was to become a portion of the Apple I.

Excerpt from ‘Founders at Work’ by Jessica Livingston. Price: Rs. 499 Publisher: Springer Distributed by Goel’s Computer Hut Contact: Manish Goel Phone: 020-24451959 E-mail: compuhut@pn2.vsnl.net.in