your head, and once in a while you’ll wake up and say, “Oh my god, I just realized
a bug that’s in there, something I hadn’t thought of.”
Or, if you have to modify something, or add something new, you can do it
very quickly when it’s all in your head. You don’t have to pull out the listing and
find out where and maybe make a mistake. You don’t make as many mistakes.
Just believe that what you have is better than whatever has existed before. We
should only move forward in technology and not backwards.
Lack of tools: find a way to do it. If you say, “I have to have a tool,” and
you are a prima donna—”I have to have a certain development system”—if you
Steve Wozniak 55
can’t figure out a way to test something and get it working, I don’t think you’re
the right type of person to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to keep
adjusting to . . . everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this
idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace
it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat
you to the punch.
It’s better to be young because you can spend a lot more nights, very, very
late. Because you have to get things done, and there’s almost no other way to
get around that. When the times come, they are critical.
Livingston: You got mono once because of this?
Wozniak: That was the Atari Breakout, because I didn’t sleep for 4 days and
nights. How could you design a game—this would be months of design—build
it, breadboard it, get it working, debug it in 4 days? Steve needed the money
quick. He didn’t tell me. He also didn’t tell me the full amount of the money.
He got paid a lot more than he told me, and he only gave me half of a smaller
amount. Which he didn’t have to; I would have done it for 25 cents. So that
wasn’t the point. I was glad to just be in there doing it. To get to design a game
for Atari, who was bringing arcade games to the world—what a thing to remember
for the rest of my life. So I would have done it for 25 cents.
But we both got mononucleosis. There was one Coke can I think we’d
shared.
Livingston: So he took more money than you did, but you both worked on the
project?
Wozniak: Yeah, I found out 12 years later.
Livingston: That’s awful.
Wozniak: I know, but he didn’t have to. He probably needed the money. And I
didn’t; I had an engineering job at Hewlett-Packard. It was very little to me. It
would have been better if he’d been open about it and honest. And what if I
remembered something wrong, too? It’s so long ago.