Steve Wozniak - 50 Years of Apple & the AI Future | Alan Frei Podcast | A3F 2026

Thank you so much. So, see if these are only entrepreneurs and they're big fans of you. I get to travel the world and man, this is just more exceptional than ever. Thank you. Good. Congratulations. You're the most important people in the world if you're entrepreneurs.

No. That's great.

Interesting. You're asking kind of a psychological question. What's your personality? And some of us grow up young and we get interested in science or math, whatever we're good at, that's what we value and think is important. And I was... I mean, I go back and I say, "Well, I kind of accidentally wound up in this area. I love interesting, unusual things." I could show you things right out of my pocket. And I just grew up being one of those people that... what's going on, interesting people, interesting movies, interesting stories. And I was very, very young, elementary school, 8 to 10 years old. And I was very good at electronics. My father was an electrical engineer and he got me interested and I loved it because it was close to math and I was the top math student in all my schools. So I was very good at electronics. In those days you'd buy a piece the size of a fingernail and it would have little colored icons around it. The colors told you what the value was and you knew the formulas for how electrons flowed through different kinds of materials, different kinds of devices. And I got a ham radio license when I was 10 years old. You bought a kit with 100 parts and you soldered them together and hooked them together and ran wires around dials and you could tune in radio frequencies on the receiver. Then I built a transmitter with hundreds of parts. I still think my parents thought it was incredibly expensive for what it was back then. But I got a ham radio license. You had to study a lot of the formulas of electronics and a lot of the rules of radio. We were the protectors of the radio waves, that was our theory. If there was an emergency in the world somewhere, you didn't have cell phones, you didn't have communication, even regular phones would usually be out. Ham radio operators sending messages from a country that was having a disaster for communication was very important. And I loved being in this area. Now, I got into science fairs. If you're in school, you have subjects that you learn, you take tests, and you do so well. But a science fair, you kind of come up with your own projects. And I went on a string from 8 years old, 9 years old, 10 years, I was going upwards as to what is the structure of the atom, what is an electron, how do electrons flow through water and devices like that. That was just my life because I was good at it. It had nothing to do with school. You didn't get a grade for it. You didn't get money. You didn't get recognition or anything. You just felt proud about doing it. By 8th grade, 12 years old, I built a project. I got the award for the best electronics project in the entire San Francisco Bay area, which includes Silicon Valley where I lived. I was competing with up to 12th graders and I was only in eighth grade and I was head of in electronics. Meanwhile, there was this digital side to the world that was the old analog world and it was a lot of mathematics and I loved it. I was an analog engineer first. They didn't have digital engineering as a course anywhere. You couldn't find a single book about what was in a computer. How do you make a computer? There were no books in bookstores, no magazines about computers. It was just an oddball word like space science, done in places like research and military. I stumbled on a journal. My father was an engineer at Lockheed. I stumbled on a journal in the hall closet. I started reading and it described ones and zeros that computers use and how their numbers are arranged and how you can add numbers in ones and zeros. I just sat down and practiced on paper. Then it had articles about logic, like philosophical logic statements with ANDs and ORs and inversion. Inversion means if you say true, inverted it's false. If you put false in, you get true out. Just reverses it. If it were light, it would be blue in is red out, red in is blue out. I learned about these things and I learned how to draw little symbols on a piece of paper that recognized logic. If this and this are both true, the output's true. If it's Wednesday and it's June, then the output is true. I loved practicing with that. I told myself this is going to be my passion for life. My thing in life is going to be this digital world. I was very young, 10 years old, and I just decided that was going to be it. Could I talk to a single person about it? No. Nothing like computer in school. No knowledge, no teachers, no friends, nothing of this. I became very shy. I had almost no friends anyway. Couldn't talk to almost anybody normally. But when I got home, I just loved playing with these little logic ideas on my science fair projects largely. Anyway, what is a computer came up to me one day. I didn't quite know how do you find out what a computer is? No books in bookstores. I was in high school and we didn't have a computer, but my electronics teacher arranged for me to go down once a week and program this thing called a computer, an IBM computer, at a company. I wrote my programs and got intrigued by doing that and how it worked. I saw a little book there, the Small Computer Handbook, and it described an early computer called the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation. I was intrigued by it. They let me keep the manual. I got to take it home. Inside the manual, it told me the architecture of a computer, holding spots for numbers, how to put addresses on a line to get it from memory, and how to go through making decisions if this is true or if that's true. That was the architecture of a computer. I said, "I wonder how you design them." I went back to elementary school and middle school and the projects that I built out of logic gates. I said, "Can I sit down and draw all the logic gates on many sheets of paper that would add up to a computer?" It took me many, many months at first, over and over trying to figure things out. Self-taught. There was not a single book on how you design these things that I used. I eventually was able to design a mini computer. Around the end of high school, minicomputers were starting to come out. That's 1968. They were coming out from various different companies. But how could I ever hear about one? How could I ever get any information? I was so interested in computers and there was nothing in the local libraries, not even the scientific bookstore, anything on computers. But we had the CERN of its day, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the highest level physics research place in the world, and it was nearby. I found out that smart people don't lock doors. It's a strong metaphor. So I would drive in on a Sunday and always find at least one door open on the main building and I could go up to the second floor. I'd usually do it on a Sunday, nobody there. I'd be reading computer magazines and journals and I could send cards to the manufacturers and they'd send me their manuals of the computer describing the architecture. So I started practicing just designing everyone I could: all the Varian computers, all the IBM computers, all the Digital Equipment computers, the Data General ones, the Hewlett-Packard computers. I would sit down on my weekends just designing them. Could never show anyone. Could never get any credit for it. It's just the thing I loved so much in my heart. I thought about if I had a design that was 78 chips, I'd go to bed thinking, can I combine some chips or get a chip to do two things at once? Can I get it down to fewer chips? 76 chips maybe. I got really good at that. I praised myself. I didn't have a class that gave you a grade based on whether you complete a design. For me, it was how simple was it, how did I get fewer parts than other engineers would ever think of. I came up with tricks in my head. But the more important thing was I had the ability to come up with tricks to use fewer parts. So this was my life. At the end of high school, I told my dad, "I'm going to have a 4K Data General Nova computer." I had posters on my wall in my bedroom of computers. Nobody even knew what a computer was back then. And I'm going to have a 4K Data General Nova. 4K is enough to have a programming language where I can have an idea, something I want to solve, type in a program, and get the answer. You need at least 4K for a programming language the normal way. Other than that, you have switches and lights and you turn on ones and zeros. I understood those. Push a button and they go into a little address register, put in some more switches, switches up to ones and zeros, and that little data that was ones and zeros will go into the memory location and the next one and the next one, and then you can say run a program at one by toggling all these switches and lights. That was my life. Anyway, I designed all these mini computers. My dad said it'll cost as much as a house. That's when I sat for about two seconds and I said, "I'll live in an apartment." Who does that when you're in high school? When there's no computers ever in the world, nobody's ever gotten close to one. I'll live in an apartment. I really wanted a computer in my life because I knew how they worked and that was going to come true. Also, I was in Silicon Valley and got to see the changing from... I learned how to design things with vacuum tubes mostly while I was in high school and the world was going to transistors made out of silicon. The reason Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley now: the inventor of the transistor moved to Silicon Valley and had a company, and when it failed, a bunch of engineers split off and formed other companies and other companies, and then they came up with the idea to make a chip. I was at a show, I might have been seven years old with my dad, a show in San Francisco called Wescon. I went to one booth and a guy held up a poster, a piece of white paper poster, and it showed all these kind of like building tops and connecting roads and he said, "This is a chip we're going to make with six transistors." Six transistors. Oh my god, my six transistor radio was the best gadget of my life. I could listen to music all night long. I asked my dad later that night at home, "Are we going to have better six transistor radios now?" He said, "Oh, no, no. The new technologies are way too expensive. They're for the government, for the military. They can afford them. They don't go to people." I didn't tell my dad, but in the back of my head, I said, "I want to build things for people in their normal lives, in their homes that they really want to use. I want to enhance that. My real reason for being an engineer is to make better appliances for the average Joe in the average home." I kept that in my mind. I knew computer architecture, how computers were developed. You had processors that could operate a bunch of instructions one at a time, get in and out of memory, and you could write a program for a processor. They all came out with all these mini computers that had switches and lights for the input and the output. I built one of those. Finally, I was working one year after my second year of college. I worked for a year programming and an executive got me the chips I needed. I could never afford a single chip. It cost like $50 back then, $500 now. You think a little kid could afford a chip. He got me the chips and I built a little computer that I designed called the Cream Soda Computer. My friend Bill Fernandes and I would ride our bikes down to the store and get green soda and drink it while we were wiring up my design. That was when I met Steve Jobs. I don't know, I just loved... You have different kinds of people. Some are engineering smart, go to the university, get A's in all the courses, and you know how to design this and that and you know how it's been done. But there's other types that are more like inventors. You talk to them and they're really talking about the far out things in the world, almost science fiction things, trying to bring it to reality. I was one of those inventor types, not just an engineer.

Well, they used to ask a ton. Everyone did. But now it's a little bit less, a little bit lighter. They kind of know the answers. You just have to live with things. I get asked fewer questions that a computer maker would know. An engineer that engineered the computer might have answers to some of these. I'm sorry. I'm not that person. I'm just a user now. I got a lot of experience. I can tell you a lot of shortcuts that I've encountered that are really good. So, I don't get asked that much by my friends, but there was a period in my life in the early days of the internet, the 1990s. I taught 11-year-old kids, fifth graders. I'd wanted to, my whole life, I'd wanted to be two things, an engineer and a fifth grade teacher. I taught them for eight years of my life, no press allowed, because I'd always wanted to. I forgot what the question was.

So, okay, I'm teacher and I had up to three assistants that were really knowledgeable about how to use the computers, helping out in the class, getting it going, but the students could call me on a phone, just call me with a question. It's so hard to solve problems over the phone. In those early days of laptops, very earliest days of laptops, oh my gosh, I might buy 30 at the start of the year for all the kids. We'd have to turn in 60 at least repairs. Usually when we turned in a repair, it was five different things wrong. A disc on this one, a modem on that one. Man, a lot of unreliability. So hard to give support over the phone rather than in person. In person's better.

Yeah, I was in a club and it became known as the Homebrew Computer Club when it started. I just heard it was for technical people and I'd been designing these incredible technical things. I saw Pong in a bowling alley, so I built Pong with 28 little $1 chips. Then for Atari, I actually designed Breakout. So I created the first Breakout for Atari. Input and output was important. Pong taught me you can use a television as an output device. That was a problem I always had. I could design a processor but switches and lights for data was kind of limited. Your television... I was a television engineer if I wanted to be one. I knew how they all worked inside. So now I could put balls and paddles on TV. Then along came the ARPANET. I stumbled into that. You know what the ARPANET is? It was the start of today's internet. Six universities in the United States linked together far distances. If you logged onto the ARPANET, back then I had to make a phone call for a modem and I only called 8 miles away and it was a pay call. You had to pay for long-distance calls back then. The world has changed quite a bit now. I could get on but I built a device with a keyboard, the most expensive thing I ever had to buy, like $500 of today's dollars. I was young. The keyboard... I knew on a television what signals to put in to put letters and words up there. Then I built a modem and the modem called to the ARPANET and I could choose a computer. The ARPANET would talk back to my TV and I could choose which computer: MIT or UCLA or UC Santa Barbara or University of Utah. I could log on and I could say I was a guest. Then I could list a bunch of programs and games and things I could run, things I could read, files about computers. Wow, that was exciting. It was like a typewriter. You had a keyboard and a video display. When the Homebrew Computer Club started up, they all had these companies that had been inspired by the fact that a microprocessor, which is just the processor, could build these little things with switches and lights on them called a computer, but not able to do anything useful at an affordable price. These microprocessors allowed kits to be made at an affordable price. But they couldn't do anything useful. You'd have to add so much memory a human being couldn't afford it. A company could. You'd have to add cables and you have to get a teletype that cost as much as two cars just to type anything into it. I said, "Wait a minute. This microprocessor chip, I'd looked at the early ones and they weren't capable of building the computer I wanted all my life. Now they were up to the 8-bit microprocessors and they could do it." Oh. So I searched around. I couldn't afford a $400 Intel microprocessor, that's like $4,000 today. I searched and searched. Finally, they came out with one for $20, the 6502. It was the latest greatest microprocessor. It was the best one from a programming point of view because, like the IBM 360, you could easily have a register that counted its way through an array of numbers and data and made decisions. I got that 6502 only because I could afford it. I put it onto my little ARPANET terminal and now I was talking to my own computer and I started writing software for it. A BASIC programming language was a lot harder for me than the hardware I designed. I would take it down to the club. This club had Stanford professors, Berkeley professors saying, "Once we have our own computers, my gosh, society can't stop us. We can type messages in and somebody else could call in a couple minutes later and read your message and 10 people could read your message. It was going to be incredible for communication and for education. You're going to have immediate response on reward punishment. Did you answer correctly or not? You don't have to wait 12 hours for class the next day to find out how good your homework is. Find out instantly." That's very important in psychology. Oh my gosh. The geek was going to be powerful, using their own computer to beat the company computers. I was so proud of that. I was too shy to ever raise a hand and talk, but I listened to all this. These were the people that wanted us to have our own computers. I knew how to do it better than they were. They were working on kits that were just like my Cream Soda Computer, a processor that could run instructions and toggle some switches and lights. I was 5 years past that. I was working for Hewlett-Packard on the hottest gadget of the time. I didn't have a college degree, but I knew everything about computers. I was designing the handheld scientific calculator, which was going to change the world. Before that, all we had was slide rules for engineering and scientific calculations. Now, we had a calculator that would have 10 digits of precision and you could read it and type numbers in and have it do things. It just took over the world. It really changed the world. I got to design it. It was smart. It had a little one-bit processor inside. You can't even describe how tiny it was, but it was enough to do the job. It had a program. When you turned it on, it ran a program. Which button is the user pressing? If the user presses a five, it runs a program. Puts a five in the display. If the user types one, it puts a one in the display. Oh my gosh. So, all I need for a little computer based on a microprocessor is a program that says, "What are you typing? What are you trying to do with it?" I made that computer and I would take it down to the Homebrew Computer Club, my big old TV set. We had TV sets in those days. They were big and heavy. I'd set it up with a wire going into it, a little board of parts. Everyone could watch over my shoulder. They watched and they saw that this was very affordable and it could do the complete job. It had 4K of memory because I used the right kind of memory, not the wrong kind everyone else was using. They could see that this was affordable and it was useful. Every computer after I showed that off would come with a keyboard and a video display. That was a total change in the history of computers. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody believed it was going to go anywhere. I passed out all my designs for free, open source, no copyright notices, public domain. I passed it out to the... I'm a real fan of that in many ways. These were the people that wanted to start a revolution. So I wanted to help them have a chance to start it. There was another thing that happened. Atari was starting an industry, an important industry called arcade games. They were starting it right in the town I live in now. I was down there at Atari designing Breakout. I said, "Wouldn't it be neat if one day these arcade games were in color?" They weren't. They were also 150 chips of hardware with a thousand wires with a skilled engineer getting the right signals to put balls and paddles on a TV. It was real. It was like a manure to make a new game prototype. But I thought about color and I went back to the analog color days. In the analog color days, there'd be a signal on a wire that could go to plus voltage, minus, plus and minus, like a wave, a sine wave. If it was the right sine wave, right frequency at the right time, it'd be a red dot on your TV in a certain place. But if it had come a little bit later in time, it'd be a blue dot. Oh my gosh. I'm thinking that in my head, and it would cost... I knew how to design those circuits with differential calculus. You'd have all these feedback loops and precision amplifiers and mixing reds and blues and greens. There were books on it using differential calculus to design color television. It wasn't digital. I thought, wait a minute, my head was... I'd gone four days and nights with no sleep. Your head wanders. My head said, "What if I took a digital number right out of my computer and just put it on the wire? Ones are plus, zeros are minus, ones are plus, zeros are minus. If I sent it at the right speed, I knew how color TVs were designed. Every color TV in the world would think it was color even though it violated all the rules of color TV." That didn't matter to me. I found a little secret. That's why our first logo at Apple was going to be six colors. The Apple 2 computer was the first time ever that arcade games were color, but more importantly, the first time ever they were software. A nine-year-old kid in a programming language called BASIC could set colors and draw lines and make a decent game in BASIC language in one day. A new good game. This was a rather startling thing for the world and it's what we really based our company we started on. We found an angel who believed that it was going to go somewhere, Mike Markkula, and he was willing to invest the money to build a thousand computers. It was more than a computer being such an incredible game machine. That one computer, the Apple 2, which I had conceived of, did all the engineering, all the prototyping all myself by hand building things I love to build. That one computer was going to be the only source of income for Apple, of profits, for the first 10 years of the company.