gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10 percent of
Apple to us for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300—
but a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed
and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something
was going to catch him.
Livingston: Way back then, how did you guys divide the work between you?
Wozniak: We actually never talked about it even once. If there was any engineering
to do, hardware or software, I did it, because Steve could do stuff, but
he couldn’t do it as well as I. So never once did he even try. Never did he look
at a circuit and suggest anything. I don’t want to mess around running a
Steve Wozniak 47
company—my whole life’s engineering—so he’s on the phone talking to
reporters, talking to stores, “Do you want us to ship you some computers, do
you want to start buying them?” Talking to the dealers on the parts, ordering
the parts, negotiating process, getting brochures made up or ads for magazines.
Livingston: So you two fit together nicely in terms of your skills.
Wozniak: Well, we added up to the total everything that was needed. If there
was anything that neither one of us knew how to do, Steve would do it. He’d
just find a way to do it. He was just gung ho and pressing for this company to be
successful. And me, I was pretty much only in my technical head with the
circuits.
Livingston: Do you remember any disagreements you had in the early days?
Wozniak: Extremely minor. There were a couple, maybe. One was that we’re
getting close to shipping it and we wanted things to be low-cost. Steve says,
“Can we save any chips?” He’s pressing me and pressing me. I am down to like
what is just amazing in the world. People to this day that understand circuitry
tell me how they looked at my design and it was the most beautiful thing they
ever saw. So I said, “I could cut out two chips if I skipped high-res. I don’t know
if anybody’s really going to use high-res.” (It became very important actually.)
And Steve said, “Oh no, if it’s only two chips, leave it in.” But it wasn’t like we
were really arguing. I was just telling him that that’s the only place I could save
any chips.
We had a real argument over slots. Mike Markkula’s coming on and we were
going to build the Apple II, and I had designed a clever system on the suggestion
of a friend—Allen Baum again—that decoded eight slots you could plug
little computer boards into. Each board had the ability to have its own programs