working on and...
working on and then Apple. So I never really had a chance to get back. But I
was close, and I wanted to get back. And in 1981, I had a plane crash. As soon
as I came out of amnesia from the plane crash—within 5 minutes I knew that
this was the time I was going back to college. I’d never get another chance. So I
went back and got my degree. I always liked school and was a good student, a
top student. And my parents had college degrees and I thought something of
that. My kids should see their dad with a college degree.
Steve Wozniak 51
Livingston: Any other eureka moments in the early days?
Wozniak: I’ve told you two major eureka moments. One was getting color to
work, with this weird scheme that I had no idea if it’s going to work or not. The
other was that I didn’t know if I was going to get Basic to program an arcade
game, and it worked. In both those cases, I didn’t even know if it was possible
and lucked out. The floppy disk was probably the third real major eureka story.
We had the computer out, and I got to work designing parallel cards to talk
to early cheap printers. Then serial cards to talk to better letter-quality printers
that are more like the quality work that a business could put out. Then cards
that would talk to modems, other serial cards. I actually did a phone card that
could control your phone line and control cassette tape recorders and make an
answering machine for you and do all this stuff, but it didn’t do a modem, just
controlled your phone line. Apple never put it out, because they didn’t like the
guy that I had brought in to do it, which was Captain Crunch. He designed it. It
was a great card.
Then came a point where we only had a cassette tape interface at first. To
read a program in, you’d stick a cassette tape in a tape recorder and type something
on the keyboard and then press a button on the tape recorder. I think on
the keyboard you would just type something like “100R” and it means the program
goes into address 100. You press the button on the tape recorder and
there’s a long lead-in period and then data (there’s a twiddling sound if you’re
listening), and you have to wait for a minute and it goes “beep,” and now your
program is in memory. It worked surprisingly well, but it took a long time.
Mike Markkula wanted to get going right away on the marketing. He ran
the marketing for the company. Marketing largely meant, how are you going to
present the computer to be acceptable in the home? How do you move “computer”
from a word that’s yucky and airplane cockpittish to acceptable in my
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