Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Wozniak 41
living and life and where we’re going and where we’re from and what’s it all
about and what works and what doesn’t. It was a lot more Bob Dylan stuff than
normal popular music that intrigued us. So we’d go to concerts. I was going off
to Berkeley, but I’d be down on weekends. Every time I was down, we’d link up,
have a pizza, whatever.
Livingston: What were the first things you did after Steve suggested starting a
company? You were still working at HP, right?
Wozniak: The very first thought in my mind was, “I think I signed a document
that everything I design belongs to Hewlett-Packard.” Even just on my own
time, I thought that they deserved it first. And I wanted Hewlett-Packard to
build this. I loved my division. I was going to work there for life. It was the calculator
division; it was the right division to move into this kind of a computer.
I went to management, and I had three levels of bosses above me in a room
and a couple of other engineers, and I presented the ideas and told them what
we could do at what price and how it would work. They were intrigued by it,
but they couldn’t justify it as a Hewlett-Packard product for some good reasons.
Hewlett-Packard couldn’t do a simple project, which was really what was interesting.
They had to do a real finished-for-scientists type of computer that would
be too expensive and really wouldn’t start the mass movement. They were a
little concerned about using a TV set that didn’t come from Hewlett-Packard.
When there’s a problem, how do you decide where the solution is? But I know
they were intrigued by it quite a bit. That was when we were going to sell PC
boards for $40 each.
When Steve called me one day at work and he said he got an order for
$50,000—100 built computer boards for $500 each—that was high money.
That was twice my annual salary at Hewlett-Packard. So then I got Hewlett-
Packard’s legal department to search every division—I wrote down what we
were doing and had them search every division—but the thing is that the calculator
division was the lowest one in Hewlett-Packard. The others wouldn’t want
to touch anything cheap. It was too cheap for our division, and the other ones
wouldn’t touch it even more. So I got a written response back from them that
no divisions were interested.
Now it was almost like we were big-time. We were going to sell some computers.
Sure, we only sold 150 (maybe less) of the Apple Is, but it was a real
computer and we had our name in all the magazines with charts and comparisons.
This whole industry’s springing up and there are articles about it. And no
article could skip a company with a name like Apple.
Livingston: How’d you come up with “Apple”?
Wozniak: Steve came up with it. I do remember that one. I picked him up at
the San Francisco airport and I was driving down the Bay on 101 and then on
85, and it was on 85 that he said, “Oh, I’ve got a name for the company. Apple
Computer.” Both of us were sitting there trying to come up with techie names
that were clever, but nothing was going to be better than Apple. And I said,
“But what about Apple Records?” (Which is funny because we’re still having
problems with them.) And he said, “They’re a different company.”