Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Wozniak 49
We got the computer finished up enough. We don’t have much to add on
besides a printer and a telecommunications of some sort. So Steve was arguing
for two slots. And the trouble is, two slots wouldn’t save me a single chip. And I
wanted to show off that I had eight slots and so few chips. If I only had two
slots, I would have had parts of chips unused. I was really dead set to hold my
chip count, so I said, “If you want two slots, get another computer.” That was
the only time we had a real argument.
Livingston: Did he keep pushing?
Wozniak: No, he had no choice. I gave him no choice. We had to have eight
slots. And it turns out that it was very important; it was very beneficial. Because
we came out with a floppy disk. Not only that, other people came out with cards
that put 80 columns of text on the screen so you could see more. People came
out with extra memory cards, people came out with other languages in cards,
people came out with cards that had CPM. People came out with cards to connect
all kinds of equipment in the world, to operate your house over your power
lines. It was just a world of cards. Many people had their Apple IIs filled up
with cards—every single slot.
Livingston: When you showed people the Apple computer, were they amazed?
Wozniak: Every single time I showed the Apple II, before we started the company
and even slightly after we started the company—before there was much
word around about it, every single person who ever saw it . . . The engineers at
Hewlett-Packard came to me and said, “That’s the best product I’ve ever seen.”
And they’re around one of the greatest products of all time—the Hewlett-
Packard calculator—and one of the greatest companies, and they’re saying
things like that. The Apple II had so much intrigue to me, but I knew it
intrigued all technical people. And the Apple I just worked. I actually wound up
doing some great work at Hewlett-Packard using that as my computer.
Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?
Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail.
You have to be so careful that you haven’t left something out. You have to think
harder and deeper than you normally would. It’s hard with today’s large, huge
programs.
I was partly hardware and partly software, but, I’ll tell you, I wrote an awful
lot of software by hand (I still have the copies that are handwritten), and all of
that went into the Apple II. Every byte that went into the Apple II, it had so
many different mathematical routines, graphics routines, computer languages,
emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in and out of an emulation
mode. It had all these kinds of things and not one bug ever found. Not one bug
in the hardware, not one bug in the software. And you just can’t find a product
like that nowadays. But, you see, I had it so intense in my head, and the reason
for that was largely because it was part of me. Everything in there had to be so
important to me. This computer was me. And everything had to be as perfect as
could be made. And I had a lot going against me because I didn’t have a computer
to compile my code, my software.