For many, "Vice President in
charge of R&D" sounds like a
good job - reputable, good pay,
and maybe even exciting. But
tack the words "at Apple Inc." to
the end of that title, and you
have, well, a whole different barrel
of apples.
Steve Wozniak didn't earn this job with a good
resume. He forged it, inventing the first single-circuit
motherboard with embedded ROM in 1975.
He and Steve Jobs had to sell their most valuable
possessions to assemble a product line of Apple
Is. Some people can't put a price on fame and
fortune, but they can. About $1300 and a few
IOUs later, they kinda made their money back.
Follow the Silicon Road
Wozniak didn't want to become an entrepreneur
or take the world by storm. He was content
with his job at Hewlett-Packard and even more
content as a hobbyist. Wozniak worked at a bench
from 1973 to 1976, optimizing designs for calculators
other EEs developed.
"I wanted to be an engineer in a lab," says
Wozniak. "The spirit of engineers was most important.
I loved the engineers, loved the project, loved
the company!" He spent his days at the plant and
his nights batting around design ideas and inventions
with the Homebrew Computer Club. "I'd be
off in 'computer design world' and Steve [Jobs]
would ask where it could go," he says.
This dynamic led to the sale of a wood-cased
CPU comprising roughly 30 chips for $500 (then
$666.66 after a markup) and the beginning of a
revolution. "After Apple I, every computer used a
keyboard," Wozniak says. "Before, they used
geeky switches. It was a trading transition in history."
The Apple I was a quantum leap in the
available technology. Before Wozniak threw his
hat into the ring, the Altair 8800 was the closest
thing to a personal computer.
"You could turn it into a computer, but it was
basically an Intel processor," Wozniak says. "A
computer to me has to have the ability to program.
Altair couldn't. You had to buy extra cards. I
was well past that point. Sure, it used ones and
zeros, but I wanted a real computer my whole life.
I would've sold my house for a computer, but it
had to run a program."
He created a motherboard and compatible
components, but the product was more for a hobbyist
or engineer than a consumer because users
would have to add input sources, a keyboard, casing,
and a display themselves. He wanted to bring
it all together so anybody and everybody could
operate an Apple right out of the box.
Playing Games
Born in 1950, he didn't have much technology
available to him as a child, but he would stumble
onto information about technology here and there.
Picking up little scraps wherever he could, these
bits of info would be like "little secrets" to him and
his young mind - information he would keep that
other people would flat-out ignore.
When he was 10, a book about a ham radio
operator inspired him to not only earn a ham
radio license, but build a transmitter and receiver
by hand as well. He also conjured a game where
he would experiment with adding and subtracting
transistors to his gadgets. "It helped me very
much. You sit down, think, plan, and make sure
what you build is efficient. It's good practice for
what engineering involves," he says.
Wozniak left HP in 1976 and formed Apple
Computer with Jobs, asking himself how he could
put these things in his head into the smallest
number of chips. As a result, he would write his
own Basic, even though he never programmed in
Basic in his life. But that wasn't the only thing he
would have to do on the fly. "Everything was created
from scratch," he says. "Everything I did had
to be made up for the first time."
Wozniak abandoned the wooden frame for plastic,
added dynamic memory, had tape interfaces,
and added color graphics and sound. "The Apple II
connected everything. [It] was a 'Woz' from the
ground up," Wozniak says. Users could also plug in
cards to add floppy-disk or printer functions - or as
Wozniak calls it, a true "plug-and-play" device.
Seeking Alternative Routes
Because of Wozniak's work with Apple, he had
to bury other projects. You would think such a
computing mind wouldn't drift toward other
desires, but an urge to impart knowledge hibernated
in his mind. After he left Apple in 1985, he
formed his own company, CL-9 (Cloud 9). But
after two years, he moved on from that to other
endeavors, including teaching kindergarten.
"I wanted to be a teacher my whole life," he says.
"Secretly, I wished it. I can't tell you how much fun
it was when they learned something." Though he
doesn't believe it would work for other people, discovering
how much you can smile over how much
you can frown is a lifestyle. "I was just doing what
was fun for me," Wozniak says. "I would be doing
this at home if there was no money."
He misses his time with the Homebrew
Computer Club and Apple, though today you can
find him playing polo on a Segway, working at Jazz
Semiconductor, or off promoting his autobiography.
"I miss the technical camaraderie," Wozniak
says. "The whole feeling of being on a revolution,
on the edge. I miss the intuitive philosophies."