History of Famous Startups. Apple Computer

Apple engineers and

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Apple engineers and marketing people got to benefit from going public.
Otherwise, they’d have no stock at all. Mike Markkula kind of felt that some of
these people didn’t deserve it; some people shouldn’t get stock. But I disagreed
with him on that. Nobody stopped me, so I did it.
Livingston: But you still kept enough stock for yourself to buy a house, right?
Wozniak: The money I got from Apple employees, I used to buy a house. It
was kind of an early state to be selling out 15 percent of your stock, but hey, that
was a great…

The hardest thing

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The hardest thing was, though, after having a big success . . . see, I didn’t
seek the success—I wasn’t like the entrepreneur who wants it. So the money to
me didn’t really mean much. Pretty much I gave it all away to charities, to
museums, to children’s groups, to everything I could. It almost was like an evil
to me. That was because it wasn’t the motivation that I was after, and I wanted
to remain the person that I would have been without Apple. So that’s why I
went back and did the teaching. I would have done…

Livingston: On the

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Livingston: On the East Coast?
Wozniak: I believe that’s where we arranged it. Mike Markkula had worked
with this guy Hank Smith at Intel, so that’s how they knew each other. And I
think Don Valentine actually put some money in, but then it came to a point
where he wanted to make some good money and buy some stock off Steve Jobs
for like $5.50 before we went public. $5.50 a share, and Steve thought it was too
low. Oh, those two. Don Valentine doesn’t like it when people don’t agree
with him.
Livingston: Is there anything that people…

Livingston: Did you

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Livingston: Did you ever get any investment from Mike Markkula?
Wozniak: $250,000. What he did was $80,000 of it was investment for an equal
share to Steve and I, and the rest was a loan, paid back to him.
Livingston: And that’s all Apple ever took?
Wozniak: Yeah. But we did right away meet with some people he’d met
through Intel that were investment people. Hank Smith of . . . I can’t remember
the name of the company out of the East, but a venture group. They came
in and met us all early on, and they did put…

your head, and

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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:...

data and I

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data and I said “read track 0;” stuck in the other floppy and said “write track 0,
read track 1, write track 1.” There were 36 tracks—I had to switch floppies back
and forth.
When I got done, I’m looking at these two floppies that look just the same.
And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I
did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got
up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my…

place. By the

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place. By the time it got to the data, it read it correctly. So that was a lucky find.
I was afraid, partway through my floppy disk design, that I would never be able
to solve that problem. But I did. I lucked out.
Early on in the design, we were going to the very first CES (Consumer
Electronics Show) show that was going to allow personal computers—which
meant RadioShack, Commodore, and Apple. I had never been to Las Vegas and
I wanted to see this beautiful city, but only marketing was going. There was no
need for me to…

life, by the

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life, by the way. I’d never used or seen one. So I didn’t know the first thing
about them. I’d never taken a course in floppy controllers, I’d never seen a
floppy controller, I didn’t know what they did. But I knew on a cassette tape, I
generated signals of certain timing patterns and, when they came back from the
cassette tape, I analyzed them to figure out what were the ones and what were
the zeros. The microprocessor did the timing, because the timing was loose; it
wasn’t in fractions of a microsecond. I just wrote programs that waited…

thought, “That chip

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thought, “That chip would be beautiful for getting 8 bits of data off of a computer
and shift it out to a cassette tape recorder, or whatever, to a floppy disk.
I’d thought about using that chip for a floppy disk, because Steve Jobs had
talked about floppies back before I left Hewlett-Packard.
So I said, “I’ll look into this floppy disk.” And I started pulling up the
datasheet on that chip, and I started coming up with my first ideas of “How do
I have that chip get the data to a floppy disk?” And then I came up…

home? And that

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home? And that had to do with different types of photography, pictures, settings,
words to the press. He also wanted us to start getting to work on software
that would apply.
He basically wanted us to write a flash card program. So Randy Wigginton
and I did a flash card program called Color Math and it shipped with every
Apple. We also did one called Checkbook, which would let you reconcile your
checks on the computer. But here’s the problem: you had to first read the
Checkbook program in off of a tape, then twiddle your thumbs for a minute…