(video) Floppy Days 162 - Interview with Apple Legend, Steve Wozniak

Well, then it was around this time Steve Jobs came into town and he'd never been to the club and there's a movie that shows him hauling me down to the club. That's so phony. I've been to every club meeting since the day it started, the most important day of my life, every other Wednesday. And I took him down with my TV set and my board and my keyboard and demonstrated it and he saw the interest in it and that's when he said we should start a company.

Real good.

Oh, good. Yeah, usually just takes asking.

I didn't really look deeply about them or think about them, but I'll just go with whatever gets asked.

We can go as long as you wish to.

Yes, I am. I plan to make the dinner tomorrow and the event Sunday.

It was a little uncertain. We were on a long road trip visiting relatives and all out east but there was a reason we had to come back early so we're here.

Ah well, at the time I was at the Homebrew Computer Club and I was reading some, you know, I don't know, electronic magazines and hobbyist magazines and there was very little in the way of computer stories. There were a few around the country trying to start up. They were just nothings. Mom and pop, you know, one person trying to figure out a way to do something. And the Byte Shop was local here in Mountain View. And I didn't know Paul Terrell, but he was at the Homebrew Computer Club where he saw me, you know, demonstrating my computer. And this is before Jobs knew it existed or was even around, demonstrating it and showing it to people. I was too shy to ever raise my hand and talk. But the way I was, I was such a great designer, I would design clever little things, impress people and then I could talk. That was my method of socialization. Always included a little bit of fun and pranks and things. And I guess Paul saw me there, although I didn't know it and I didn't know him, but I gathered a group of friends, some in high school that just believed in what I was doing. It was so different than the other computers. It was really the very first time that said a computer when you buy it has a keyboard and a video display. And the word personal computer has been interpreted to mean a lot of different things. You know, I knew, like a lot of other people knew, that you make a processor and a bus and you connect some switches and lights and you plug in bits of data, ones and zeros, into memory bit at a time and then that processor can run them. That's sort of been the history of computers. And of course people can design, you know, in those days it was rather expensive, but you could design boards that send data out on big serial lines and talk to a teletype for input and output. That was by far more expensive than any processor would be to even build on your own. And the product that people were trying to build had a pre-built processor called a microprocessor. And it ran out on a standard what's called a bus, the address and data pins, and you could plug in boards and somehow adjust those boards to look to certain addresses and do things and you could build up a computer but the computers that they were selling were really just low-cost affordable. So it was a microprocessor, some switches, some lights, some parts, take dozens of hours of your own time maybe and hook it all together and now toggle some switches and get some bits into memory. You could work for, you know, half an hour and get a little program in that made tones. But I had built that exact computer of my own design five years before. Built it when you had to build the processor out of TTL chips. And I designed a very simple processor. And I demonstrated it to a local newspaper and everything. And now I was a little past that in time because we built the first handheld scientific calculators at Hewlett-Packard where I was working. I was designing them. They had little one-bit processors, one bit at a time of data flows through and you could add and subtract and this and basically you started it up and it had some code and the reason we used RPN, reverse polish notation, we couldn't afford enough chips to have the code to parse an equation. We would say what the computer wants. Here's a five. Store it. Here's a seven. Store it. Here's plus, add 'em. That's what we would do. But it was kind of human. You could see it in display. That wasn't advanced. It was only because we didn't have the memory to do what you're taught in school. 5 + 7 equals. And you see the result. We just couldn't do it because memory was so expensive. You get so few transistors on a chip then. But it was a processor. Soon as you turned it on, it started saying, is a key being pressed? Is a key being pressed? Is a key being pressed? And if you pressed a five, it said, 'Ah, five got pressed. I'll put a five in the display.' It was that sort of thing. So I thought, 'Oh my gosh, you know, first of all, I had solved the output problem when Pong came out a couple years before.' Ah, television can be a Pong game. I was a television engineer if I wanted to be. So it was easy to build the digital circuits that scan the horizontal lines and the vertical frames of television data. And so that was easy for me to just build out of digital chips. I used very few chips for everything I did. And that was the output. How do you do the input? The most expensive step on the way to the personal computer. It cost 60 bucks then. It's probably $600 now for a keyboard that didn't even have lowercase. It was called the ASR-33. That's a teletype model that has no lowercase. Oh my gosh, that 60 bucks was so hard to come up with of all the money I had to put out on the way to the personal

Computers. That was it. But now I had built a device. The reason I got that keyboard was I saw a friend from the home computer club, John Draper. Steve Jobs and I went over to his house. He was in an apartment, a basement of a Cupertino house. The engineer that lived in the house was designing a telephone you could carry around your home, kind of the first portable phone that you could carry around. It would talk with the little base station. This is long before cellular, well before cellular. And we went over and John Draper was typing on a teletype playing a game of chess with a computer in Boston. What? And he didn't have a computer account. He just phoned a number in Palo Alto that got on the start of the internet. That was the ARPANET, the first playing around with, you know, US government trying to switch packets between far away computers. There were only six computers on the ARPANET: MIT, Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and another one. And I wanted this. I want to be involved in everything. I'm excited by this stuff and I can design anything. So I designed a little device that put letters of the alphabet on my TV and now I could type. I could call a number that was actually, I had to pay money to call from Sunnyvale to Palo Alto. It was a pay call back then. Long-distance calls cost money. I would call and get on the ARPANET and then I could type data to a faraway computer. I could choose which computer, log in as a guest, see some files and run some programs. And I could go to one computer and then to another and to another and it was just so fantastic. But I had this keyboard that worked with your TV. I did not know that a guy named Don Lancaster had a Popular Electronics article about a TV typewriter. Later looked at his circuit. It was more analog, but he did some clever designing in his too. Mine was pure digital so it can never operate differently. And I took and I said the first night of the home computer club, I thought it was, I was told by a friend you might want to go to this club, it's for people that have TV terminals and things or that invent them. Nobody had one so I wanted to go, I'll be a hero. And I took my design to pass out and I got there and everybody was talking about this Altair computer. Okay, and the Altair was sort of often gets credited start of personal computers. But what do you mean by personal? I'll tell you what I mean. I mean a low-cost, useful computer. Some of these computers coming out were low cost and they were totally useless until you put a huge amount of money into them, including all the money for a teletype that cost as much as a couple of cars. But I wanted the whole solution. I already had a terminal that talked to far away computers and I said, 'Oh my gosh, why don't I put my computer right here?' The microprocessor is the brain. And I went for dynamic memory, which was 1/4 the cost of static memory. Everybody else was coming out with these little kits. They only had static memory because they weren't real engineers. They were just copying Intel's data sheet. They knew how to copy the data sheet. But on a data sheet, there's no way you can show dynamic memory because it has complicated refreshing of every bit inside every 2,000th of a second. So I went down, I just said, I'll put on my microprocessor dynamic memory and a little program like we had in our Hewlett-Packard calculators. I called it a monitor program. And what you did with switches and lights, you toggle in a number and you'd push a button and it goes into an address register and you toggle another number and push a button and it goes into that place in memory. And you do that over and over and over and over. And I said, 'No, no, no. Why don't I just write a short little program that I can type data in in binary, the language of computers, hexadecimal, actually, type it in and we'll tell it to store it at a certain location.' I'd say at a certain location, data, or you could say certain location, show me what's there and it would show you all the bytes that started at that location. You could just scroll it on screen. Or the third thing you had to do with when you had switches and lights, front panel on a computer the way they were done back then, you could say here's an address, ones and zeros on switches, push a button, it would run it, the run button. So I also said you could type in an address and say run. And oh my gosh, it was just the whole thing with absolutely no front panel. Every computer before had ever had a front panel. And people started looking at the computer club. They would look over my shoulder. They'd see that I didn't have very many chips and they weren't that expensive and it did the whole job. I could type on a keyboard and have things show up on a display. And I started writing a BASIC program. Bill Gates had written a BASIC program for the Intel microprocessor. I couldn't afford an Intel microprocessor. $400 back then and I could get a $40 Motorola processor because I was an HP employee. I designed it around that. But then another one came out which was pin for pin compatible with the Motorola. So it matched all my designs on my drafting table. And I bought it for $20 cash at a show in San Francisco, 6502 microprocessor. And I sniffed the wind and I said, 'If people are ever going to have computers in their home, they're going to want to play games.' And you need BASIC. I had never programmed in BASIC. I was a scientist. I programmed in the scientific languages, FORTRAN, ALGOL, PL/I. But I said, 'You got to have games.' So I started writing my own BASIC. I went to Hewlett-Packard one night and opened up the BASIC manual, started making notes on the syntax and making all my diagrams. And I managed to actually, I'd never taken a class in it, but I could figure out how to do things and it would actually, you could type in programs and store them and run them and all that. And it was based on Hewlett-Packard BASIC. I thought BASIC was BASIC. I found out that Hewlett-Packard's BASIC and Digital Equipment's BASIC were totally different in how they handled characters. So it wouldn't really run the games right out of the book, but I took it down and showed it off at the club and got interest. Every computer since I was showing that one to the club, every computer that came out was a keyboard and a video display. That was the paradigm that changed the world. It was, I wanted all these people in the Homebrew Computer Club, and this would include Paul Terrell, wanted people to someday, the day that when everyone would be able to afford computers or many of us at home would afford computers and they would help us do things we couldn't do without them and they would help education and they would make the geek an important guy, you know. And so I just, so I had a very useful format but I wanted these other people in the club to help start a revolution. We sometimes spoke of a revolution. We had Stanford professors and people from Berkeley, you know, telling our club how society was going to change. And I wanted all these people. Maybe there were 250 of us, whatever could fit in that Stanford Linear Accelerator Center auditorium. And I just wanted to help them. So I gave away my designs. No copyright notices, public domain, open source, everything. Let's do it. You could get these parts and build a working useful computer for $300 in parts. You just had to wire it yourself. Most of the club people in the club were not like myself. They were not builders and wirers who would solder wires. So they just wanted to buy something kind of more built. Well, then it was around this time Steve Jobs came into town and he'd never been to the club and there's a movie that shows him hauling me down to the club. That's so phony. I've been to every club meeting since the day it started, the most important day of my life, every other Wednesday. And I took him down with my TV set and my board and my keyboard and demonstrated it. And he saw the interest in it. And that's when he said we should start a company. But he'd been coming in selling my stuff for five years, you know, every once a year he'd come into town. What was my latest invention? A Pong game, whatever, and do that. I even got wound up designing Breakout with him for Atari. Well, he didn't design it, but he helped be part of it. Anyway, and I believed in games and I had this computer going there and so Steve had this idea. We would have a company and the way we would make money is he knew how to make a PC board. He'd learned that during our Blue Box days. He made a PC board for our Blue Box, the illegal device that could make free calls anywhere in the world. And so he knew PC boards. So his idea was we'll invest some money. I had to sell my most valuable possession, my HP-65 calculator for 500 bucks and he sold a van. And we got some money to pay a guy to lay out a PC board. We'd build the PC boards at a place in Santa Clara for $20 each and then we'd sell them for 40. Oh my gosh, to get our money back, we might have to sell 50 of them. I didn't know 50 would buy this computer, this, you know, computer at our club. But that said, we said, 'Oh, so what? We'll have a company for once in our lives. You know, you don't have to make money necessarily.' Now, it wasn't too long into when we decided to go ahead and start making this. And we didn't have any money. That's why we're going to pay 20 bucks per board and sell them for 40. Paul Terrell had the Byte Shop. He had the belief that this was not just a little one thing going on. This was going to be a future, a future for the world. Small low-cost computers. And he said ours was the best. And so he worked out a deal with Steve Jobs to we would supply 100 computers at $500 each. That's $50,000. May not sound like that much today, but that was twice my salary at Hewlett-Packard. Scary when you don't have any money. No, I had no savings account. Steve had no savings account. Where are we going to get the money to build these? You know, $50,000 deal. But Paul Terrell was the first one to take a step that was actually taking a financial risk and actually believing in this market, seeing like seeing the future was really positive.

I was a designer. I was a designer almost always working on designs, improving that. And Steve was a businessman, you know. And Paul Terrell, I think, contacted Steve.