Founders at Work.pdf

42 Founders at Work
So we said, “OK, we’ll do Apple Computer.” In those days there was no
money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and
investors, analysts—those kind of people, that are trained in business and much
smarter than we were—they didn’t think that this was going to be a real big
market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or
ham radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn’t going to
go to the masses.
In the Homebrew Computer Club, we felt it was going to affect every home
in the country. But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was
technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their
problems that way. Even when we started Apple, we had very mistaken ideas
about where the market was going to be that big. We didn’t foresee the VisiCalc
spreadsheet.
Livingston: Had you quit Hewlett-Packard?
Wozniak: That was very tough. We started selling the Apple Is, and I stayed at
Hewlett-Packard. I still intended to be at that company forever. Our calculator
division moved up to Corvallis, Oregon, and my wife didn’t want to move to
Corvallis and I did, so that was lucky because otherwise I would have been up
in Oregon and Apple never would have happened. So I stayed here and I
moved into another division of Hewlett-Packard across the street that made the
Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputers.
I was working there for a while getting educated on the HP 3000 . . . for the
Apple II, we knew it was so good . . . that was a product that broke ground in
every which way. The Apple I, oddly enough, was probably more important,
because it said that a computer of the future is going to have a keyboard and a
video display and it’s going to look like a typewriter. It’s going to be roughly that
size. And it’s funny, but every computer since the Apple I, including the
Polymorphics technology Sol computer that came next (it was out of our club),
had a keyboard and a video display. No computer had done this before that. No
small computer was coming with a keyboard yet. The Apple I was the first and
the Apple II was the third. Basically every computer since then had a keyboard
and a video display. The world has never gone back from that day. Now the
Apple II was the great design. I designed it very efficiently with very few
parts—amazing design. We added color. How could you ever have color and
still cut the chips in half? It was half the chips of an Apple I. It had color, and it
was just a clever idea that popped in my head one late night at Atari.
When you get very, very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long;
Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it
thinks of ideas that you’d normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of
taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at
the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I
could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of.
Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the
way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was
established in the television world? Would it work?