Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Wozniak 33
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.
I had wanted a computer my whole life. Back in high school I told my dad,
“I’m going to have a computer someday.” And he said that it cost as much as a
house—the down payment on a house. And I said, “Well, I’ll live in an apartment.”
But I was going to have a computer someday. So it starts with a huge
dedication. You start with a lot of motives and values and who you are going to
be in life. You start with those very early—some of mine even go back to elementary
school. I decided there that I was going to be a fifth grade teacher, and
I stuck to it and was. But some of these things you want so badly in life that,
when the door opens, you are going to get there.
Now, I still was in this mode where I had to build everything for free. Then
I discovered that microprocessors had come out. I had sort of slipped out of the
electronics world, out of the computer world, due to working in calculators at
Hewlett-Packard. All of a sudden I discovered these microprocessors. What are
they? I didn’t quite understand it fully, so I took a datasheet home.
There was a club that got started up. It was a club of young people—every
one of them could have been an entrepreneur—the sort of people that liked to
put together gadgets at home and make them work. But it turned out that not
very many of them were real engineering designers that actually sat down and
designed new things. Maybe they had jobs as technicians at work wiring stuff
up, analyzing it, spotting inputs that were the wrong voltage. They were that
kind of electronics person, but most of them weren’t designers.
Livingston: This is Homebrew right?
Wozniak: This is the Homebrew Computer Club. There were a lot of software
people that had no hardware background, and it took hardware to build these
first machines. I was embarrassed because the world had somehow jumped
ahead of me—they had come out with little cheap microcomputers based
around microprocessors and I hadn’t heard of it and I hadn’t been a part of it. I
felt very weird—that was the direction in life that I was going to be a part of