strong participant. I wasn’t going to tell other people how to do things. I wasn’t
going to run things ever in my life. I was a non-political person and I was a very
non-forceful person. It dated back to a lot of things that happened during the
Vietnam War. But I just couldn’t run a company.
But then one person said I could be an engineer. That was all I needed to
know, that “OK, I’ll start this company and I’ll just be an engineer.” To this day,
I’m still on the org chart, on the bottom of the org chart—never once been anything
but an engineer who works.
Steve Wozniak 45
Livingston: So you called Steve?
Wozniak: I made my decision by that evening and I called Steve and told him
I would. Then the next day I came in (to Hewlett-Packard) and I told a couple
of friends, who had come over with me from the calculator division. I told them
that I was going to leave Hewlett-Packard and then I went over to tell my boss,
and he wasn’t there. He was in a meeting or something. All day long people
started coming up to me saying, “I hear you’re leaving.” And my boss hadn’t
heard. Finally he showed up at his desk, and I went over and I told him that I
was going to leave and start Apple. He said, “When do you want to go?” and
I said, “Right now.” So I left that day and the deal with Mike Markkula was that
I’d have the same salary starting Apple. It was like $24,000 a year.
Livingston: Did you go straight over to Apple?
Wozniak: I walked out that day. We didn’t have an office yet so I was still at
home, but I was doing the Apple stuff. I was finishing up things on the Basic,
finishing up some hardware things, writing code for some special graphics, that
sort of stuff. Then Steve and I met a friend of Mike Markkula’s named Mike
Scott, and we liked him very much as a strong, forceful guy (he was a director at
National) who got things done that needed doing. We decided that we wanted
him to be our President. He was our President from the day we started Apple
as a real corporation—until the day we went public, he was still our President.
So he had a rather important role in history, and he’s very much forgotten. I just
think that he was the greatest thing ever.
Livingston: How did you find him?
Wozniak: Mike Markkula knew him as a friend. Their friendship kind of came
to a breaking point where Mike Markkula sort of ousted him as President for
making rash decisions. There was a day that he laid a lot of people off. Apple
kind of grew and grew and grew and had a bunch of engineers assigned to different

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