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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.
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