This whole industry’s...
This whole industry’s springing up and there are articles about it. And no
article could skip a company with a name like Apple.
Livingston: How’d you come up with “Apple”?
Wozniak: Steve came up with it. I do remember that one. I picked him up at
the San Francisco airport and I was driving down the Bay on 101 and then on
85, and it was on 85 that he said, “Oh, I’ve got a name for the company. Apple
Computer.” Both of us were sitting there trying to come up with techie names
that were clever, but nothing was going to be better than Apple. And I said,
“But what about Apple Records?” (Which is funny because we’re still having
problems with them.) And he said, “They’re a different company.”
Steve Wozniak 41
So we said, “OK, we’ll do Apple Computer.” In those days there was no
money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and
investors, analysts—those kind of people, that are trained in business and much
smarter than we were—they didn’t think that this was going to be a real big
market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or
ham radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn’t going to
go to the masses.
In the Homebrew Computer Club, we felt it was going to affect every home
in the country. But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was
technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their
problems that way. Even when we started Apple, we had very mistaken ideas
about where the market was going to be that big. We didn’t foresee the VisiCalc
spreadsheet.
Livingston: Had you quit Hewlett-Packard?
Wozniak: That was very tough. We started selling the Apple Is, and I stayed at
Hewlett-Packard. I still intended to be at that company forever. Our calculator
division moved up to Corvallis, Oregon, and my wife didn’t want to move to
Corvallis and I did, so that was lucky because otherwise I would have been up
in Oregon and Apple never would have happened. So I stayed here and I
moved into another division of Hewlett-Packard across the street that made the
Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputers.
I was working there for a while getting educated on the HP 3000 . . . for the
Apple II, we knew it was so good . . . that was a product that broke ground in
every which way. The Apple I, oddly enough, was probably more important,
because it said that a computer of the future is going to have a keyboard and a
video display and it’s going to look like a typewriter. It’s going to be roughly that
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