From Creating the PC
When Steve Wozniak was in high school in the mid-1960s, he dreamed of owning a computer. His father told him that computers cost as much as the down payment on a house. "Then I'll live in an apartment," Wozniak said.Today, Wozniak is widely acknowledged as the engineering genius who made computers affordable and user-friendly. "The other Steve," as Wozniak is known, is the reclusive cofounder -- along with the more flamboyant Steve Jobs -- of Apple Inc.
Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, the heart of what would become Silicon Valley, Wozniak started tinkering in fourth grade, encouraged by his father, an aerospace engineer. It was a time when NASA and the race to the moon regularly made front-page news, glamorizing the slide-rule set.
By the mid-1970s, the shy young man in his mid-20s and a crowd of like-minded nerds founded the Homebrew Computer Club, an association that nurtured some of Silicon Valley's smartest brains. "People were talking about how we were going to revolutionize the world," Wozniak recalls. "We used the word revolution at every meeting. We knew it was going to happen."
Until that point, electronic parts had been too expensive for Wozniak's budget, so he'd been designing his computers mainly on paper. But then the prices came down enough so that Wozniak could move his designs from the drawing board to reality. "I built a very tiny computer. I couldn't afford a device for display, but I had a TV at home and purchased a keyboard. I could type to my computer, and it would type back to my TV set."
Members were fascinated by the idea of a device small enough to fit on a desk. Wozniak happily shared his design and encouraged them to build their own, but few had the skill or time to solder together all the wires to connect the parts.
One of the members was Steve Jobs, a close friend of Wozniak's, who said, "Let's build a PC board that makes the assembly easy. We'll build it for $20 and sell it for $40." (This solution enabled members to save time by soldering the electronic parts directly onto the PC board, a kind of motherboard, and avoid handling the wires.)
It was the start of an extraordinarily productive partnership. At the time, Wozniak was working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. "I wanted HP to build the computer, so I went to my boss and my boss's boss and his boss and said, 'Here is a machine you could build for $800. It works with your home TV.' "
When Hewlett-Packard rejected the device, Jobs and Wozniak decided to sell it on their own. Jobs sold his van, and Wozniak sold his prized HP calculator. Together, they managed to scrounge up a few hundred dollars. They named the company Apple Computer and called Wozniak's creation the Apple I.
Staying the Same Person
Jobs went out looking for customers and located a computer store in the area that wanted 100 completely built computers. It offered to pay $500 each. "We had a $50,000 order," Wozniak marvels. "That was twice my annual salary."With their bank account scraping bottom, Jobs and Wozniak negotiated 30 days' credit on the parts and went into warp speed. They subcontracted the basic manufacturing, but did all the quality testing themselves in Jobs's parents' garage, then boxed up the goods and delivered them to the store. The owner paid cash in ten days.
Meanwhile, Wozniak was working on a $1 part that would add color to the Apple I. "I decided instead to design a completely different computer (software, hardware, color, graphics, everything) from the ground up. That was the Apple II, the computer that really did start the personal computer revolution."
Knowing Apple II's winning potential, he and Jobs decided to look for an investor with business experience to guide their young company. When Mike Markkula came on board, he told Wozniak he could work at HP or Apple, but he had to choose. "I went deep inside myself and decided, No, I am not starting Apple," Wozniak recalls. "I had designed a bunch of great computers and written more software than anyone could believe in one year while moonlighting. But I wanted to work for HP for life. I loved how HP supported their engineers."
Luckily, a high school friend (and fellow computer aficionado) convinced him that he could start a company and still remain an engineer, but at Apple. The rest, of course, is history. The large computer companies that were manufacturing mainframes scoffed at the idea of personal computers for ordinary people. But Wozniak and Jobs made it happen. And by then a young fellow named Bill Gates was designing software for small computers.
Wozniak was just 26 years old when he cofounded Apple. The company went public in 1980, and he had the opportunity to attain wealth to a degree few 30-year-olds could even imagine. But money had never been a motivating force for Wozniak.
He began sharing his wealth from the start. When Apple was on the verge of going public, he found out key employees in engineering and marketing had not been given the chance to buy stock at the insider price. "I felt it was wrong, so I allowed them to buy my stock at a price that would make them very wealthy. It put the lawyers in a tizzy, but eventually they let me do it. I had far more than I needed."
Now 56, Wozniak looks back on his life and says, "The themes that drove me were the love of engineering, enabling me to design things that other people could not design. Also the social ramifications of doing good. We were talking about taking the little guy to a new place where the individual would be as important as the big company. I got to be a creator."
What's more, he says, "I would have done the things I did without Apple's success. I went back to college and got my degree. I always wanted to be a teacher, so I taught elementary school for eight years. I pretty much stayed the same person."