draft it on my drafting board), I would hook up all the parts and figure out
where to plug them into some boards, and I would solder wires between
each one.
In my minimalist approach, I made the wires the shortest, straightest,
thinnest wires possible, instead of having these big old looped-up hairy messes
of wire-wrap type stuff. So I did all that and I was also the technician. I would
test things out and look for the voltages first and apply it carefully and look for
signals and analyze what was wrong...

Wozniak: I got this idea that I was going to have the computer that I had
wanted my whole life at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
That night, I realized it, when I found out what a microprocessor was. I went
home and studied it and said, “Oh my god, I’m here. Because now I can come
up with the money to buy it someday.” At first it was quite a job to come up with
the money because the Intel processor was $400, and I just wasn’t going to
come...

Wozniak: Yes. Once I got that much of the Basic done, we had to store a big
program efficiently somehow on mass media. I used a tape recorder so I
wouldn’t have to type it in for 40 minutes. But that came pretty late in the
game. I had developed the whole Basic without it really.
Livingston: And you showed it off at the Homebrew Computer Club?
Wozniak: Every 2 weeks I brought my computer, which became the Apple I,
down. We hadn’t decided to start a company. Because companies weren’t my
thing,...

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...

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...