He's famously shy and quiet. And I asked him if his shyness actually helped him when he was young because he didn't go out and stayed in. Had nothing to do but invent a world-changing computer.
Being shy caused me to do all of my studying, whether it was for school or just figuring out computers, all alone with the door shut in my room, reading whatever manuals I stumbled onto by accident. I think it slowed down my discovery of what computers were, but it let me learn it in the course that I discovered things, which was a nice step-by-step path. Basically, when I sat there, I would start by high school, I was designing computer after computer after computer based on real computers that were made and sold. And in doing them over and over and over, I made a little game up, and the game was how do you design them better? How do you design them with fewer parts? And clever little tricks would come into my head. So absolutely essential in my development of computer skills. Never took a class on it.
And when did it stop being sort of just something you did quietly in your room to actually being, hey, this might be something I could do with my life?
Just about never, because even when I was doing it in high school, designing all these computers and I knew that my designs were good and half as many chips as the manufacturers like Digital Equipment Corporation, I still didn't think I'd ever do it in life. I knew I was going to be an engineer, but I thought engineers make TVs and radios and computers were off in some weird, strange part of the world. They weren't even called engineers or something, because this computer stuff was something I could understand from when I was 10 years old.
So how did it change then from being something you were just doing because you fancied it and didn't do anything else to actually being your mainstay of what you did?
Well, in early school years, it was my main thing that I did over and over and over, not for a job, but for myself. Now, I had a job working at Hewlett-Packard on the first scientific calculators. The first calculators that could calculate sines and tangents and you punch them in and hit a button and you see the tangent. No other calculator in the world could do that. That was the calculator that was going to put slide rules out of business. So it was the hottest product in the world to someone like me who was like the calculating engineer type. And I got to work designing them. I designed video games before they were software. More video games. I designed a little terminal to work with my TV and what was called the ARPANET. That's what became the internet of today. And I could actually type to computers far away over in Boston and computers at Stanford and they would type back and display it on my TV set. I had to build anything I could myself and I had to build it for free. That was the key ingredient. Then all of a sudden I discovered microprocessors and microprocessors were whoa. I looked at the data sheet and said, 'This is a little chip that I can finally afford, and it's just like all those minicomputers I used to design back in high school.' So, I said, 'I'm in business. I'm going to have that computer I always wanted in my life, but I had to design it.'
So, you designed Apples for yourself.
Oh, yeah. I absolutely did all the design, but I had a goal in my head. And my goal wasn't to design the simplest little project that everyone else was calling a computer. Thankfully, I had built that machine 5 years before. What everybody else was coming out with looked like a geeky box with all these complicated switches and lights that would scare you away. Looks like an airplane cockpit. What are these switches for? You know, I didn't want a computer like that. I wanted to take the next step forward like our Hewlett-Packard calculators and really have a typing computer where you just type into your own computer and you never have to see all those little ones and zeros and geeky stuff.
The look of Apple is a big part of the success, modern success.
Well, that was our second step. See, first I designed one computer and it was getting popular at a local club of people that shared the vision that computers were going to change the world and revolutionize things and make the small guy with a computer more powerful than the most powerful companies had been before. And we really are in a sense when every single person who has their own computer has such a powerful tool now.
Do you think there's a case though that Apple is now style over substance?
No, Steve Jobs has had a very tight feeling and control in his life that nothing we make should just be junk. It should absolutely be exceptional, racing into the future, tackling the newer technologies before other people, at least for the masses. Good lord. That's been our whole history from the first Apple I and II computers that I designed to even the Macintosh was bringing this nice GUI formula of mice and windows and menus, bringing it to the masses. You know, it's a lot of focusing on the human element being more important than the technology. The technology should support the human, not vice versa.
I mean, you obviously still get very excited about all of this. Do you ever regret that Apple isn't actually more like Microsoft? I mean, however great you think you are, you're a niche player.
In some ways we regret it because Apple's not as large as Microsoft. We don't have the market share of Microsoft, but when I think if we did, would we be as good as we are? And it scares me that we might have factors like all the viruses would be written for us and we'd have a lot more problems running as a company. So, I fear it. Also, I feel good about having a small market share because every time it got a little bit smaller, I just felt a little more special. You know, a lot of us just want to be more special and have made a more intelligent choice of the computer we use for a strong reason other than everyone does it.
Yeah. But it's which is an unusual thing to say for someone who's involved with or was built one of the most important companies in the world really. Most of the people who run these businesses say we've got to be bigger. We've got to make more money. Not saying that. That's unusual, if that's genuinely true.
In my own life though, I've always had much more of the independent streak and not wanting to go with the masses and the flow and just do things the normal way, but try to look for a better way.
