Inside the Mind of Steve Wozniak: Innovation, Apple’s Legacy, and the Future of Engineering

I had a lot of time because I never had parties or socializing or any of that sort of stuff. And Steve, he understood my brilliance. That was important to me. Oh, somebody else that appreciated my abilities. And so we became very best friends in a lot of ways.

The crucial decision was putting money to my computer.

Number one, be honest. Say things that are true. Don't say them just because they sound good. I'm not teaching technology. You want everything to be fast and fast and fast. Those who read the most wound up being the smartest in school. Maybe there are shortcuts around reading and still come to understanding.

Yes.

Fun and what? And patience.

Well, I was already a skilled engineer way above others in a category that no one else did and I didn't realize it was going to be important to the world at the time, but I just, what you're good at is what you value. So I just valued my engineering skills and even without a college degree, I was hired by Hewlett Packard to design the very hottest products in the world, the most important products in the world. And because I could answer any question you asked about computers, I trained myself by doing it on my own when there were no classes, no books, no nothing. I just figured out how it should be done and became good at it. And so I was already there. I was in that position. I was going to actually build the computers that became Apple at that point in my life for other reasons. It wasn't because there was a company or an industry to start or anything like that, but I wanted to always show off my brilliance. And so I don't know, the computer that was all of Apple's revenues for the first 10 years as we rose up and up and up in money in the world, that one computer I designed it all on myself. Nobody around me, no Steve Jobs or anything. True. But he had met, we'd met five years before when I was actually building a computer of my own. Built it and showed it off to the newspaper, but it was like what everyone else was trying to build 5 years later. I was 5 years ahead of that. Wanted to make things normal and simple for the human. The human's most important. And my computer had to look like a typewriter. Everyone in those days knew how to type. And today to some extent we do too. Although more it's touchscreen. And I just, I don't know, I built that computer for myself and it turned out very lucky. Now, Steve, it was nice to know him because I was very shy. I was a geek. I had a lot of time because I never had parties or socializing or any of that sort of stuff. And Steve was, when I met him, he understood my brilliance. And that was important to me. Oh, somebody else that appreciated my abilities. And so we became very best friends in a lot of ways. And he was young and we both were young and we were thinking of, you know, we were in the counterculture realm of the San Francisco Bay area, very big at the time, different types of thinking and summers of love and that sort of stuff. And it was a different way of thinking about life. And he was more lived the life of a hippie. And I just admired it, but I didn't live it as fully as he did. And the day I met him, I took him to my house. He was 16 years old. Steve had no record albums. He couldn't afford them. So I took him to my house and I showed him all the Bob Dylan albums and the liner notes and the strange interviews and the lyrics to the songs and they were so different than anyone normal person would come up with and we both admired that. So that became a big part of our life. Tracking down Dylan, Bob Dylan memorabilia, going to concerts and that sort of stuff. So back then it was not talking about a company or anything. Steve did want to be important to the world because he admired people that were known for being important. He just didn't have the academic background. But he had me. Great.

Okay, first it wasn't exactly my idea. There were a group of people that thought, wow, bring computing to everyone, it's going to change society, and that inspired me. I never raised my hand to speak at these meetings, but I listened to Stanford professors, Berkeley professors talking about how it was going to change the world if we could own our own computers. I just had all the abilities and the techniques and the knowledge and I was right there to build a good useful computer that was affordable. Everyone else was trying to build useless computables that might be affordable for a useless nothing, but I'd been there 5 years before. So, what was the question?