Founders at Work.pdf

40 Founders at Work
known by doing good stuff.” And I’m telling other people, “You can build your
own. This is how easy it is.” And I was really trying to say, “You can have a complete
computer at a very low price. And not the Altair way.” Trying to say that
there was a whole different way of computers. Some people got it and some
didn’t.
Livingston: Did the people who got it try to build their own?
Wozniak: It was still too much of a job. A lot of them were software people, not
hardware solderers. I went over to one young kid’s—he was in high school—I
went over to his house and helped him wire his own up. I started doing the
soldering. A lot of people in the club didn’t even know how to solder. It really
was more a software group. So not many built it, and that’s really where Steve
Jobs came in saying, “Let’s start a company.” He said, “Look, there are a lot of
people that want to build it and they can get the chips, but they don’t want to
solder it all together. So why don’t we make a PC board and they can plop their
chips in the PC board”—soldering a printed circuit board is easy, there are no
wires—“and then they’ve got it done.”
So the idea was that we’d start this company and build PC boards for $20
and sell them for $40. Well, I only knew the club as a place to sell it and I
thought, “Are there 50 people at the club”—I had a group gathering around
me—“who are going to buy this computer instead of the Intel?” I didn’t think
so, but Steve said, “Even if we don’t get our money back, at least we’ll have a
company.” So it was like two good friends having a company.
Livingston: Do you remember where you were when you guys talked about
making a company out of this?
Wozniak: I don’t. I don’t remember if he phoned me at work, if I was at his
house, if he was visiting me—I can’t remember.
Livingston: How did you know Steve?
Wozniak: That computer that was like the Altair that I’d built 5 years before—
Cream Soda Computer—I’d told a friend down the block, Bill Fernandez,
about it, and we agreed to solder it up in his garage. We spent about 2 weeks
soldering my design together. We’d ride our bikes down to buy cream soda and
come back and drink it, so we called it the Cream Soda Computer. Bill went to
our high school, and he said, “There’s another guy at Homestead High School,
younger than you, and he’s interested in electronics and pranks and things too
and you really should meet him.” So he thought we were alike.
The way I remember it is that Steve came right out there in front of his
house. We’re out there on the cul-de-sac on the sidewalk and we’re just talking.
We started out by comparing pranks we’d done and talking about different
types of electronics and chips. We both had a lot of similar experiences so we
had a lot to talk about. Then we became best friends for so long. There weren’t
that many people that young that knew technology. Steve and I weren’t similar
personalities, which was strange, but I’m the sort of person that goes along with
anyone that wants to talk technology. And then we both agreed on music too.
We had very strong music influences in those days, and it was more songs about