(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.

I don't, not before this deal. I don't think before this deal I did. I wasn't a look-for-a-computer-to-buy person. They were all around the Altair.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I went to the Byte Shop. Not too many times. But anyway, the deal got worked out. So where are we going to get the money? Alan Baum, who is the person who told me there's this club of people interested in technology starting up, you know, and that my video terminal would be popular. They want those sort of people. He was the one, he and his father loaned us $5,000. Now, the rest, when the parts, we had parts to chips because Paul Terrell wanted things completely built. I think Steve fooled him a bit. Steve worked a deal his marketing wise that we'd only give him a board with the chips on it and he still had to, like IKEA, plug a keyboard in, plug some transformers for power, plug in a video display. He had to, it was a build-it-yourself, wasn't really that complete, but a store could make it kind of complete, wooden case, whatever. And so the chips cost the large amount of the money. I mean where are we going to get ever $50,000? The chips would come out of boxes just as the PC boards got made. And at the same company that was making our PC boards, which I forget the name, they had a lot of assemblers that would assemble all the chips in and then put them over a wave solder and solder them to the boards. And it only cost $13 to have each board completely made with chips soldered in. Why are they selling all these kits of computers? That's how the other people were trying to start it. Sell kits of parts with instructions how to build it if it only cost $13 to go from the design to the building of it. So anyway, we did that and then we would bring them, we'd bring about 10 or 20 of them to the house. Eventually we had to move out to the garage and it was Steve's house and we moved to the garage. And it was never a company. There were never like tables set up there. That's a mistaken thing. You know, every desk that have phones and manuals. No, it was nothing like that. Was there ever a computer design from Apple ever discussed in this garage? No. Was there ever any engineering done in the garage? No. I did all the engineering. Was there any discussion of future products? It really wasn't a company, but we'd have to take these things that were assembled for us at a company in Santa Clara, put them down, and turn them on. They wouldn't work. And I'd sit there with an oscilloscope and I found out just determine some methods to find the usual failures. Usually when Steve Jobs' sister who was paid a dollar a board to plug the chips in, sometimes a pin, one pin of the chip would bend under and not go in the socket. And you by probing with the oscilloscope, you'd kind of find one line blank and pull that chip out and fix it. Or you'd find a mixed signal. It wasn't zero and it wasn't one. It was kind of in between. That meant two pins were shorted on the board. And we'd find these traces on the board. The PC boards weren't all that good. And we cleared the traces. Those were the two types of errors. And eventually we get through most boards didn't work right as soon as we connected them up to a keyboard and power and a monitor. And we put the good ones in white boxes and Steve would drive them down to the bike shop and give them to Paul Terrell for cash. Remember, we had 30 days credit on the parts and we had a loan and got paid cash and we didn't have big complicated scheme going through company lawyers and approvals and signoffs. So it was fast enough we could kind of cycle them in 10 days and Paul paid us the cash. And that was just a start because you know we knew the Apple II was coming, that was just an incredible breakthrough coming up and that would be worth real, you know, much bigger money. And I don't know if Steve Jobs ever told Paul Terrell that we had that even before we delivered an Apple I to Paul.

No, I had it in mind before, but I had it actually built before we ever delivered an Apple I. And it was based largely on some schemes of violating the rules of color TV by doing it digitally, violating the mathematics in all the books on color TV. I did a lot of things so far out of the box in all my designs, but especially on the Apple II and it worked. I mean, we had colors, but they weren't even legal necessarily, but it just worked on every TV. So, the Apple II was coming and that would be a big one because as I mentioned before, games were going to be the heart of the start of computers in the home. You didn't get a computer in the home to do inventory levels and sales figures. No. Yeah, it better play games. I want to write programs to solve puzzles myself, to solve little puzzles or store data or whatever. I want to write my own programs. But mainly, it was the games. And we had the color machine and that machine was what got us an investment from an angel, Mike Markkula. But the Apple II was the only computer that made money. The only product made money for Apple for the first 10 years of the company got bigger and bigger and went public and we got bigger and bigger and the Fortune 100 level moved up and up. One product did it all really. That was the start of Apple business side of things. Steve Jobs tried to present himself as oh the big brain that thought up computers and all that. But look, it was Paul Terrell who took a risk, who believed in a market. You got to believe in the future and risk and we didn't have money of our own. And Mike Markkula, who invested in us with the Apple II, had the same forward vision, looking at it that way. But yeah, the Byte Shop, I look at the picture there and I remember that. I don't remember that picture for sure but it was kind of a tiny little place to get to but heck when this industry was zero when we started luckily it was zero, you know, luckily it was zero for Paul as well as us because all the big existing computer companies and their distributors didn't see us as any threat and didn't go out and try to compete or put us down. Publicity was astounding because it was all young people who never had success before doing this thing. So real good articles got written and got it going. But the Byte Shop was definitely first in this area and first for us.

Sure. And yeah, and that was true for the Apple I and the Apple II, but people started writing programs and those programs just, it was inspiring. You'd go in and find a little program on cassette tape for the Apple I and the early Apple II and oh my gosh, it might be called Checkbook. It might be Color Math and put up math solving problems for school. These things weren't necessarily productive. There was a lot of money for, you know, that kind of value. It wasn't like a real business yet, but boy, it was so interesting to see. You can do this and own it and your company doesn't own it. The big guy with millions of dollars and huge computers don't own it. It was that feeling. You've got it for yourself and you got some people around that are like you that'll help you. You know, Paul and other people, all the people in the computer club were that sort. I like the fact that we were kind of, we were the underdogs, the under guys. We weren't the big huge rich wealthy companies and doing that, you know. And of course, a rich person could theoretically buy the old expensive computer for a million dollars or if they owned the company, they could just have one and they could hook up the expensive teletype or terminal and actually type in and do the sort of things we did with personal computers. But it wasn't available to everyone. Low cost, useful. And I say useful because low cost, you could buy these little kits with switches and lights that had 256 bytes of memory. The same thing I've done, you know, five years before, you know, and that's, I'm sorry, that's not ever going to do anything useful.

Well, the Byte Shop helped, you know, the people feel like there was a community. There were other people that believed in the same thing. And he certainly helped Apple get a start. My god, totally. And I also, he's, I also think the way that he did it, I admire his integrity and I tell him that. And you know, you got to have some people that really are not just trying to steal from everybody and be shysters and all that. And who would have ever put, what was the reason for putting a Byte Shop there? You had to be inspired. And that meant other people that wanted such a thing were inspired that there was a store representing us.

Oh, there might come a time where you can be helpful and you can afford to help other startups that nobody necessarily believes are going to go anywhere. And maybe they won't, but an awful lot of good can come out of what to you isn't too much if you can, you know, afford to help people start companies. I think that entrepreneurship is the most important thing in the world because entrepreneurship often comes up with a new industry that doesn't just take over for an old industry. It's like new things that didn't exist. It's new generated wealth. I think it's really the most important part. We always want to get better in life, everything in life. And that's only going to come about from change. And entrepreneurship is change, innovation, creativity. And so definitely inspire it. And boy, putting yourself into it. See, I'm not a salesperson. I'm not a company runner. I'm not a company runner even. So I would, to actually start a Byte Shop would be almost too scary, out of my range. But some people who think, 'Oh my gosh, I can actually, I want to get in on this new thing that's starting up and I want to use some money and open a store.' That is just so incredible to see a successful example, you know, that really inspired a lot like the Byte Shop.

Yeah, that's a lot. And Byte did it. Byte really did it. I mean, Paul, the way Steve negotiates, Paul otherwise, if it weren't Steve Jobs or somebody else, he might have owned a part of Apple as we started. You know, think about that.

But it is great to memorialize the Byte Shop and the Byte Shop to me is Paul Terrell.

Well, contact me if you need more.

Oh my god. From your calendar. How do we get the money? 50th anniversary mini podcast recording with Terrell and Gloria Bernal starts in 30 minutes. We can keep going. I apologize. That was a calendar, Byte Shop 50th anniversary mini. Stop record. I'm sorry. I'm having...

Yeah, 'cause I said Alexa. Yeah. Yes. What you do is you do a name like Alexa or Siri and then you follow it by call 911.