Iconic designer shares tales of how lack of money spurred affordable personal computers
Long before he met Steve Jobs and the two changed the face of computing, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak was innovating. As a 10-year-old, he strung wires along fence posts in the neighborhood so he and his friends could talk to each other over intercoms.
And as part of a high school class, he spent a day a week programming a computer at a Silicon Valley company. A chance encounter there with a computer manual led him to undertake an exercise purely for fun – redesigning commercial computers so they could be rebuilt with half as many parts.
“The best work I did on all these projects was partly because I had no money, and had to find inexpensive ways to do everything,” said Wozniak, in a keynote speech at Rutgers’ third annual Entrepreneurship Day. “It’s just the way you think when you’re hungry. And also I did best when I didn’t know anything – writing a programming language, designing a floppy disk controller, or even a microprocessor. But I studied them and figured it out on the way.”
Wozniak engaged an audience of hundreds of budding inventors and business leaders earlier this month with tales of geekdom about growing up in Sunnyvale, California, and lessons of entrepreneurial resourcefulness. Ultimately, this resourcefulness would transform computers from room-sized machines that he said cost as much as a house to desktop units that individuals could afford to buy and figure out how to use.
Wozniak met Jobs, his future business partner, during one of his early computer-building projects.Their friendship grew even as Jobs headed up the coast to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, while Wozniak stayed close to home, studying at the University of California in Berkeley and taking time off to work at companies such as Hewlett Packard.
Their first collaboration was creating a home video game for Atari based on the original “Pong” arcade game. Jobs tapped Wozniak to be his partner because Wozniak could simplify the task and complete it in an inconceivable four days. Later, the two witnessed a friend using a teletype machine to communicate with a computer across the country in Boston. Wozniak was inspired to cobble together a keyboard and a black-and-white TV that could do the same job for thousands of dollars less.
One day at a hobbyist gathering known as the Homebrew Computer Club, everyone was talking about a new personal computer design based on a $400 microprocessor.
“I took a data sheet home, studied it that night and said, these microprocessors are just like the computers I used to design back in high school,” Wozniak recalled. “But an Intel microprocessor for $400 was way too rich for me.” He later found out that he could get a Motorola microprocessor for $40 and a MOS Technologies microprocessor for $20, and then adapt the computer’s design to work with those parts. At a trade show, he handed a company representative a $20 bill over the counter and brought home a microprocessor, because there were no stores that sold chips.
“So my choice of microprocessor came about because I had almost no money,” he said.
Jobs came back from Oregon and saw the interest that Wozniak’s computer design was generating. Jobs found sources for the other parts they’d need and proposed to Wozniak that they form a company. Wozniak wasn’t sure.
“It’ll be easy,” Jobs told him. Wozniak asked what would happen if they didn’t earn back their investment. Jobs replied, “so what?”
Shortly after taking the leap, Jobs called Wozniak and said he had a $50,000 order from a store in nearby Mountain View, one of the country’s first computer stores. The owner said that people coming into the store didn’t want to buy computer kits. They wanted to buy complete computers. And Wozniak’s and Job’s computer, which they dubbed the Apple I, was the closest thing to a completely built computer. The store had ordered 100 of them.
“We had no money at all, zero,” Wozniak recalled. “So we got the parts on 30 days credit. We built the computers and delivered them to the store in 10 days, where we got paid cash on delivery. And that was the entire Apple I experience.”
Within three months, Wozniak was at work on a successor, the Apple II. Once again, his lack of money coupled with out-of-the-box thinking led to a feature that would make their computer wildly popular. He wanted to equip it with a color display for more exciting video games, but generating color signals would require a thousand dollars worth of electronics – a prohibitive expense for the home and hobbyist market. Wozniak figured out how to make a color display with a part that cost one dollar and a design appproach that no one else had ever thought of.
Similarly, when it came to data storage, Wozniak wanted to use floppy disks rather than slow and cumbersome cassette tapes. But floppy disk drives needed up to 40 chips, he recalled. He designed one that used eight chips, and the company was able to whittle that down to five by the time they got it working.
But it wasn’t the floppy disk drive’s affordability that propelled Apple II to success; rather, it was what floppy disk technology enabled.
“A computer isn’t useful on its own,” Wozniak said. “People didn’t want microprocessors; they didn’t want memory. What they wanted were complete programs ready and running.”
Floppy disks made it possible for software developers to create programs and distribute them to computer users. An early success was Visicalc, the first spreadsheet. It transformed the Apple II from a hobbyist’s toy to a business tool.
“You have to be able to write the book,” Wozniak said. “When you figure it out, you’re probably going to do a little better. And you have to believe that you can succeed.”