payment on a good house. So, because I could never build one, all I could do
was design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was
competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s
because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up
with ideas that nobody else would come up with.
I knew that I had a lot of approaches in computers that basically no human
really would use. They couldn’t even be taught in a school program. I did a lot
of it in my head. Taught myself everything. We didn’t have computers in our
high school even. And I was designing them. So, I just came across some lucky
journals and then I discovered a way to get computer manuals. The computer
manuals described the computers and my dad got me chip manuals. So I just
figured out, “How do you take the chips and build a computer?”
My skill was that, if I know what I want for the end result—in those days it
was a computer, in later days it might be a certain floppy disk that had to read
and write some data—but if I knew what my end goal was, I know how to combine
chips together very efficiently to get that goal done. Even if I’ve never
designed anything before. My skills weren’t that I knew how to design a floppy
disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem
interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would
design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it. That was
another thing that made me very good. All the best things that I did at Apple
came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every
single thing that we came out with that was really great, I’d never once done
that thing in my life.
Livingston: Do you think that that’s a recipe for being good at something:
you’ve never done it before and you are trying to do it on the cheap?
Wozniak: Yup. But you have to have skills. We had a guy that designed the
Macintosh and he was the same way. He’d never gone to college, but, boy, he
just studied circuits that had been done by others and just became that good on
his own.
Livingston: You went to college and then dropped out, right?
Wozniak: Not exactly. But I didn’t learn anything about designing computers
in college. I never had a class, for example, in writing a computer language,
and, when I got my computer done, I had to write a Basic. It needed a Basic,
there was no other choice. I also knew how to combine low-level software to

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