Founders at Work.pdf

32 Founders at Work
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.