Wozniak: Yes. Once...
Wozniak: Yes. Once I got that much of the Basic done, we had to store a big
program efficiently somehow on mass media. I used a tape recorder so I
wouldn’t have to type it in for 40 minutes. But that came pretty late in the
game. I had developed the whole Basic without it really.
Livingston: And you showed it off at the Homebrew Computer Club?
Wozniak: Every 2 weeks I brought my computer, which became the Apple I,
down. We hadn’t decided to start a company. Because companies weren’t my
thing, technology was. I’d bring it down and show it to people, and I brought
schematics. I’d make Xeroxes at work of all my schematics and pass them out,
because—I made sure my name was on it—I was so shy and I thought, “I’ll get
Steve Wozniak 39
known by doing good stuff.” And I’m telling other people, “You can build your
own. This is how easy it is.” And I was really trying to say, “You can have a complete
computer at a very low price. And not the Altair way.” Trying to say that
there was a whole different way of computers. Some people got it and some
didn’t.
Livingston: Did the people who got it try to build their own?
Wozniak: It was still too much of a job. A lot of them were software people, not
hardware solderers. I went over to one young kid’s—he was in high school—I
went over to his house and helped him wire his own up. I started doing the
soldering. A lot of people in the club didn’t even know how to solder. It really
was more a software group. So not many built it, and that’s really where Steve
Jobs came in saying, “Let’s start a company.” He said, “Look, there are a lot of
people that want to build it and they can get the chips, but they don’t want to
solder it all together. So why don’t we make a PC board and they can plop their
chips in the PC board”—soldering a printed circuit board is easy, there are no
wires—“and then they’ve got it done.”
So the idea was that we’d start this company and build PC boards for $20
and sell them for $40. Well, I only knew the club as a place to sell it and I
thought, “Are there 50 people at the club”—I had a group gathering around
me—“who are going to buy this computer instead of the Intel?” I didn’t think
so, but Steve said, “Even if we don’t get our money back, at least we’ll have a
company.” So it was like two good friends having a company.
Livingston: Do you remember where you were when you guys talked about
making a company out of this?
Wozniak: I don’t. I don’t remember if he phoned me at work, if I was at his
house, if he was visiting me—I can’t remember.
| ← Wozniak: I got | Livingston: How did → |