If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it
might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a
desktop computer was: the Apple II.
Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between
Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful
team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon
Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with
the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple
was launched on a rapid ascent.
Woz soon followed with the machine that made the company: the Apple II.
He single-handedly designed all its hardware and software—an extraordinary
feat even for the time. And what’s more, he did it all while working at his day
job at Hewlett-Packard. The Apple II was presented to the public at the first
West Coast Computer Faire in 1977.
Apple Computer went public in 1980 in the largest IPO since Ford in 1956,
creating more instant millionaires than any other company up to that point.
The Apple II was the machine that brought computers onto the desks of
ordinary people. The reason it did was that it was so miraculously well designed.
But when you meet Woz in person, you realize another equally miraculous
aspect of his character. A programmer might describe it by saying he’s good in
hardware.
Livingston: Take me back to before you started Apple.
Wozniak: Even back in high school I knew I could design computers with half
as many chips as the companies were selling them with. I taught myself, but I
had taught myself in a way that forced me to learn all sorts of trickiness.
Because you try to make valuable what you’re good at. I was good at making
things with very few parts by using all sorts of tricks—almost the equivalent of
mathematics—so I valued products that were made with very few parts.
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That helped in two ways. When you are a startup or an individual on your
own, you don’t have very much money, so the fewer parts you have to buy, the
better. When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly
you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have
fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product.
In the few years before Apple, I was working at Hewlett-Packard designing
scientific calculators. That was a real great opportunity to be working with the
hot product of the day. But what I did that led to starting a company was on