Steve Wozniak on the Early Days of Apple

hi it's really good to be home tonight it's like I grew up in Sunnyvale you know part of Silicon Valley and I went to school here in Berkeley for one of my college years and ever since then any time I Drive into Berkeley it feels like you're home if I'm in one of those two places I feel like I'm in the home where I grew up and what a great time I lived in Norton Hall and walked down to top dog to have this event catered by top dog I mean you couldn't do better you know I liked I always like to pull pranks I'm doing them all the time I've done a few here Berkeley already today but I had this idea once for the Stanford Chancellor and the whole idea was to somehow kidnap him or trick him into a meeting and with a dentist that was going to clean his teeth but the dentist would then employees and go bears on his teeth in blue and gold and a little a little nitrous oxide so we could you know tattoo is rump and put it on the internet and then hypnotize him so that anytime he heard the phrase terrorist he'd say go bears well uh I've never been a professor it's interesting you look up now I know what it's like I have the life of an electronics kid and that was where you build stuff all the time you open up magazines you get little inexpensive parts you hook them together with glue called solder and you make your own little stuff and there were a bunch of kids in my neighborhood that did this sort of stuff so we hung around together and we were all electronic kids you know building devices and getting walkie-talkies and things and back in those days there were companies that sold surplus parts any big manufacturer buys a lot of parts and they always have extras leftover bins and bins when I was in school they take us down to Hewlett Packard and show us rooms full of junk that look was good stuff that they were just going to give away to employees or to schools or to somebody they never quite knew where and they often wound up in these stores called surplus stores and surplus stores would sell tons of electronics parts and there was a guy on our block that had worked in a surplus store had run one any and he had all this stuff in his garage so when we did the gardening we were young kids doing the gardening is want instead of being paid in cash we'd say open up your garage door we'd look at all these mayonnaise jars full of parts of resistors and capacitors and batteries and things oh that looks cool give us those so we would get paid in parts it was just more important to us than money live in this little electronic life one time we built a house house intercom and we laid the wire down the fence and across the the yard and we went down to Sunnyvale electronics on our bike and pot and microphones and speakers and buzzers and we could buzz each other in the middle of the night to open up our windows and sneak out and go toilet paper houses and things like that house to house intercom on our own and it was so neat we did it all with no parental suggestion no parental know-how one of the matter of fact one of the people law on the defense cut our wire into about 50 places so what we did was we ran the wire on the other side of the fence of his house and you know just kids thinking you do what's interesting you know you don't know about laws and property rights and those sort of things and it was so neat that we could press a button and it'll buzz bill down in his house and that was like reaching further out it's like remote control we were in charge of the world and all the kids in school that didn't know electronics didn't get to share this magical dream in this big upcoming existence you know we'd buy lots of electronic kits and you know generally you'd put the parts together yourself solder them all together and build things in those days the hi-fi in our home my father had bought a high-five from a company called heave kit and it came as kits bags of parts that you put together and make your own working HiFi and hi-fi in those days was moving from monaural to stereo and getting better and better quality and fidelity and more low frequencies and more high frequencies quality was a big thing until mp3s came along and then we'd rather have the convenience well when I was in about sixth grade I read a book by accident nobody gave it to me um called SOS at midnight and the heroes were ham radio operators ham radios were no operators were noted for knowing how Radio electronics worked and setting up their own devices with Morse code and with voice and they would always jump in when there was an emergency in the world a hurricane on some tropical island they would start dishing out messages to get communication with people and we were the do-gooders we were protecting the airwaves from bad spurious signals and I read this book and at the end of it it said you can get a ham radio license so here's how you do it I said oh my god you don't have to be sixteen years old like a driver's license anybody can do it so I went I got a ham radio license by studying nobody else in my school around me did it my parents didn't do it all on my own I decided to do this and I got a kit for Christmas a transmitter kit and a receiver kit hundreds of parts that you solder together and bolt things into place and run little cords for dials and it was like such a neat discovering with ham radio you could make contact with other cities with other states with other countries it's like that reaching out and it makes you feel like you're a Superman and nobody else in the school did this so I was all alone and I felt it was my little specialness I went to a thing my mom dragged me to once and Richard Nixon was running for governor California and I decided to I was a little joke or even then and I took assignment said ham radio operators of Sarah's school it's an elementary school unanimously support Richard Nixon for governor unanimously being the joke all of a sudden 20 flash bulbs went off and I was on the front page of the San Jose Mercury representing a school group that they didn't get it was a joke so that and the best kind of jokes are when they don't know it's a joke when you tell a joke and they think it's somehow real you know it's like I was just at a meeting with a bunch of engineering professors and my assistant had an epithet to me last week and I said oh yes she just had an appendectomy today and she walked out and here she is they said whoa she has too macho well that's that's a technique Lockheed and NASA grew up in Silicon Valley and they were so important to the development of the transistor industry the early transistor companies and the move towards chips and the move towards chips was really spurred because imagine that you're trying you're in a space race with Russia and you're trying to go into space in the early days every fraction of a gram equated to so many tens of thousands of today's dollars that if you could put six transistors on one chip for the same weight the same mass you had a big benefit in terms of money and Lockheed was building stuff for the military like launching missiles out of submarines NASA was heading into space and they were the only ones who could afford to buy this new technology where a single chip with a single decision-making device called a gate three transistors maybe would cost of today's dollars maybe 500 of today's dollars nobody could afford that it takes a million to build a computer how could you ever build a computer with that price so they weren't for normal people they were for the military the people who could pay for it financed by the government my dad working at Lockheed was close to the starting companies he took me to a show when I was 10 years old and there were booths showing off products of you know making components for electronic devices and this one guy showed a picture that looked like a bunch of houses on a street looking down on it and he said these are six transistors we're going to make a chip with six transistors on it Wow it might have been Gordon Moore himself that was showing me this and I was a young kid how incredible to go back and have memories of seeing this such an important transition from the transistor on down everything often starts in one place and and everything funnels out from it for decades and decades of development so I was able to get some cosmetic reject transistors from some of the transistor companies and I learned I accidentally picked up a journal in our house and the journal talked about binary a system of ones and zeros for mathematics and I said my god these ones and zeros are as easy for a 5th grader as math and school is you don't need complicated math you don't need geometry trigonometry calculus all these exotic things we've heard of all you need is normal a normal young student could understand everything about zeros and ones and they have decision-making devices called gates decision-making devices that follow rules and each one of them electronically was very very simple to understand and I said my god this is my secret for the rest of my life I am going to love computers and everything about them and I don't know why I'm never going to have a job doing this jobs are only in some weird places called Rhys wherever those are and so I'm never going to be working with computers but guys it's so neat to study them and understand them well one year for a science fair project I took hundreds of transistors and resistors and diodes pounded nails into a big piece of plywood soldered all the transistors to the nails every transistor made one decision one rule in the game of tic-tac-toe tic-tac-toe you can never lose if you follow a good set of rules if there's an X here and an X there and an O there where do you move it's all a set of rules that will guarantee you never lose except you can be beaten psychologically people can trick you into losing but built that device I had no idea that I was taking exactly the right steps up this nice smooth ladder that leads up to the Apple 2 and things like that now my rewards why was i interested in this computer logic stuff none of the kids in school did it my parents didn't do it I didn't do it with teachers it was just my own interest well there's two kinds of rewards extrinsic rewards and intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards are on the outside the ones that people can see they can see your title they can see your salary they can see how many yachts you have they can see your awards your grades in school but the intrinsic rewards are the ones that are in your own head and they matter the most who are you really what are you really going to stand for and what's really important to you and you know the fact that you're getting satisfied with computers learning about them that's an intrinsic reward that's much more powerful than even grades in school by high school we had a great electronics teacher great classes teacher military guy he wrote the course himself we did more slide-rule calculations in our electronics class in high school than you had in physics or chemistry I mean it was just wonderful for somebody like me so mathematical and I loved numbers and I was the slide-rule whiz in my high school and usually in electronics it's like a vocational course and the top academic students don't take it but a few of us talked to academic students would take electronics and we were the ones you know kind of more superior like engineers the teacher in my case I had so much electronics experience from ham radio and a whole bunch of digital science fair projects including adders subtractors and all that that my teacher said you already know all the electronics here and you're just going to play pranks and why are other people's radios up so they explode so I've arranged for you to go down to a company once a week outside of the school he went beyond the school boundaries you know I never saw any other teachers that did that most teachers say here's what we have to teach here are our books and here's what the learning is and you go find the extra on your own but this teacher every year helped a few students get into business kind of on a co-op basis so I got to go down to Sylvania once a week and program a thing called a computer we didn't have computers in high school then so this was Wow I was like the most important person in the world my dream in life computers I got the program one what can a computer do a million things a second a computer can count a million times a second how fast can a human being count figure it out and it takes you know two weeks if you don't go to sleep and you might count to a million but I doubt it so this computer can do it in one second how powerful one of my first programs I wrote was the night store where a night piece on a chess board tries to hit every square exactly once and not twice and then you get stuck and bouncing around randomly and you back up and you try a different approach back up and try different approach and you'll get the solution and I wrote the program and it would do a million things a second and get the answer and nothing came out and the next week I printed chess boards and I finally saw that my program was good but it was going to take 10 to the 25th years to solve which is a very good early example of raw speed raw power in a computer isn't how you solve a lot of problems that are simple and especially problems that are complex you need good approaches that come from the mind you need good methods good algorithms while I was down I discovered that year I in my senior year of high school I discovered many computers what they were about many computers were big boxes with lights that had a 0 a 1 a 2 a 3 all these geeky sounding nomenclature and it's a front panel it's like the old computers that you see glorified in movies and you're afraid if you walked up and you were a normal person and maybe half the people in this audience or normal people and half might be engineers or or vice versa we might have some business people here I'm told so so then you'd walk up and you would say I would not ever dare touch that machine because I wouldn't know one thing about one button that I'm pressing that somehow says you know arrow to memory or something and so that's what these machines were they were very sterile they looked like they belonged on a factory floor but I accidentally discovered a manual that described the architecture of one imagine that you have a lot of experience with lumber and I had a lot of experience with logic at the time and you have a design of a building with certain windows and doors and rooms well you could theoretically start to put down the pieces of lumber you're familiar with and construct a drawing of that building similarly I took ship manuals of the day and chips were pretty weak back then you know one gate on a chip and I would design on paper my version of this computer that I now had a description of its architecture the pdp-8 and it took me quite a few weeks quite a few tries and on weekends I would shut the door in my room I was a very shy person then wouldn't involve anyone else I'd sit on my white table and I just start trying to teach myself how would you design a computer no books no reference materials they didn't sell books on how to make how computers were made in stores back then and eventually designed this computer and then I thought wow what about other many computers so a friend and I thought I'm so interested in computers but there's no books in the technical library where would you find a good technical library Stanford Linear Accelerator Center I hate to use the word Stanford Linear Accelerator Center had some of the brightest minds they would surely have manuals on computers there so a friend and I drove in on a Sunday so we wouldn't get caught and we kind of figured out where the main building was and we discovered that wherever real bright people work they tend to leave doors unlocked so so we every single Sunday we went there we'd climb stairs and find a door on walked somewhere we'd get into the building go to the library and I would read magazines for engineers on computers and I could fill out little cards and order manuals for the very end many computers of the day for the hewlett-packard many computers of the day for the digital equipment many computers of the day and every time I got a manual that described the architecture of a computer close my door at home on a weekend and start designing my version of it and after a while I made a game how can I do this better and better and better kind of like seeking perfection how can I be better than I ever was strange ideas in my head ways to use parts of gates that were supposed to be something called a register but use it as something else called an inverter just because it will work even though it's not designed that with everything I could to save parts and I thought engineering is all about efficiency so many times we're looking for output divided by input getting the most out for the least in and to me that was you if something is very short and simple be it a program be it Hardware fewer parts was more valuable and it just became a little game and I got very very good at this I looked at my designs and they were like half as many chips as the companies that were shipping the computers and you know it's kind of like you know when you create energy these days energy is one of the big engineering problems of the near future it's like we've got to look at how can we get a little more efficiency a little more energy out of some molecules out of the sunlight whatever to you know make some of the the new advances the green advances go a company came out with a committee computer called this company started up called Data general they had the Nova mini computer it was one of those rectangular boxes with a front panel switches for ones and zeros and buttons to push him into memory and had a very different architecture than all the others I sat down one week and closed my door and started designing my chips into this computer the data general Nova and it took half as many chips as all the other mini computers and I was stunned and I came to a realization if you design an architecture exactly matching the parts that are available you can use very few parts and have just as good a computer and that's stuck with me for rest of my life that was going to be my philosophy of what good design was very few parts I told my father someday I'm going to own a 4k nova computer so I can write programs and he said that'll cost as much as a house and I said I'll live in an apartment that was good I would rather have a computer in my life than a house I was lucky to get either is it but um no computers well Moore's law took care of that already my first year of college computer courses in most colleges all but a very very few were graduate courses only introduction to computers was a graduate course and I was enrolled in engineering so I was allowed to take it and Wow I got to write Fortran program there was a great course I learned a lot I got an A+ and I got to write Fortran program so I started writing programs that calculated tables of numbers I had seven programs that calculated things like powers of two Fibonacci numbers they would print 60 pages of output and stop before I got kicked off the computer and then punch out the card so I could substitute some punch cards in run it again and get the next 60 pages in order and the next 60 pages and the numbers were growing till they were longer than a whole page and I was piling up reams of output in my dorm room seven programs a day three runs a day on the supercomputer at our campus time sixty pages each and they stopped my programs from running and I got put on probation for what I call computer abuse but it turns out I didn't realize I thought when you signed up for a computer class you've got to use the computer unfortunately I didn't realize that as a little there's a little structure in the background called budgets and I ran our class five times over budget for computer use and it was more than out-of-state tuition so that was a good year because electronics people that don't know electronics you can have an awful lot of fun with them or imagine if they don't know computers the little tricks you can put onto their screen that might come up and what is going on here the fun you can have well I went down to RadioShack and bought a high-speed transistor I wanted a coil and put a little pasture on designed up a little tiny tiny transmitter that would jam TV signals and the black-and-white TVs in our dorm it would jam just real going to test it and so I went over to this hall Libby hall and down in the basement they had a color TV and sit in the back and I finally jammed it a little it fuzzed up the picture it didn't really jam it just buzzed it up a friend of mine in the front row without even any planning whacked the TV so I made it go good and then after a while I would jam it and he would whack it and it would go good and it was amazing to watch this effect because I hadn't planned it but it was like a psychology experiment and for two weeks they put one person next to the TV set every night whenever the picture went bad he had to turn the controls or whack it till it went good and sometimes one time they held the antenna up in the air to make it good and eventually they had to stand on a chair another time one guy had his hand on the middle of the screen three guys were fixing the TV one guy had his hand on the middle of the screen and a foot up in the air on a chair and I made it go good and eventually that they relaxed and it went bad and they said put your bodies back where they were because by now they were sure that where their bodies were made the TV work eventually he put his hand on the TV and it worked and he put his foot down on the floor and it failed they put his foot back up on the chair and it worked they turned to the audience and announced it's a grounding effect I think he was an electrical engineer um because they were going to charge they acted like they were going to charge me so much to go back they scared me away from that school and and the next year I went to college in Cupertino and a friend of mine worked in the computer room with the IBM 360 model 40 and he had copied the key to the room so we would go in at midnight to me have you ever watched happy gilmore any of you the ball wants to go in the hole the hole is your home well a computer sitting there at night unused wants to compute doesn't it so we'd go in at midnight and put paper in front of the terminals that shows the jobs and I'd run programs late into the night to 3:00 4:00 in the morning then we close things up and go back home so that was a great year I just wanted to write every program I could take every core I could even once it wouldn't carry credit to Berkeley next year I didn't have money for Berkeley so I took a year off to work and earn the money for my third year of college walked into a door by accident and they were building a medium-sized computer this computer was going to run the DMV two of them for the next 20 years it was that good at computer and I got a job there programming and while I was there I mentioned to one of the engineers how I used to design computers back in high school I would design all the mini computers I said you ever build one I said no I could never get the parts I could never afford them and he said well he had connections with chip companies and he would get me some parts if I designed a computer so I went home and designed a very minimal computer and came back the next day and he gave me the parts and I went home and took about a week or two to wire it up down the street this friend of mine we were wiring it in his garage he said you've got to meet this guy Steve Jobs he goes to the same high school as us and he's into the things you're into he likes he knows digital electronics and things that have counters and numbers on them and he likes to play pranks at school so Steve came over we're sitting there on the sidewalk sizing each other up you know he played a couple of nice pranks you know with phones on some lines that were in tunnels under the school that I didn't know about and I had tons and tons of my own pranks and then we talked about our electronics and I talked about my computer designs and all that so we were we became best friends for the next eight years we had a nice home and family his mother father sister I didn't realize they were adopted I didn't realize he didn't like his dad his dad was always showing us lasers from where he worked and interesting stuff I thought the sort of stuff that you'd be interested in and though his dad was really nice but Steve didn't get along with him that well Steve had worked selling surplus parts at a local surplus parts dealer and he and he would sometimes discover somebody that had a bunch of parts for six cents that he could sell for six dollars each and he'd make a purchase of a hundred parts and and make money like that and I thought whoa that just sounds a little wrong you get it for six cents and sell it for six dollars why wouldn't you tell the person you're selling it to what it cost you and another thing that Steve did back in high school he talked to me that first meeting we ever had he talked to me about how he and some friends had made a movie frame-by-frame claymation animation movie so you know you never hear about that we hear about Pixar yeah he did it started way back early in his life he'd also read a book and he said that there were a few special people the Einsteins and the Newton's that moved our progress forward in the world moved life forward and there were only very few of those and in this book all the rest of the people kind of didn't matter they didn't make any difference to how history went and Steve always talked like he wanted to be one of those special people that were the ones you know moving the world in a forward direction um well you know and I and I kind of agree with that you know what if you um you know if you don't want to solve problems or move the world forward you're not gonna you have to want to having the want and the desire the inspiration to do something is more important I taught elementary school for eight years after Apple I did it quietly with no press but it was more important to inspire the students to want to learn than it was to actually teach them material on the company that I was working for making that great computer that they sold to the state of California went bankrupt there was a big recession they went bankrupt they had a great computer all done operating systems and languages incredible hardware and it was difficult to understand how can you make a product successfully a good product and still go bankrupt that always bothered me um headed I'll hit it off to a great year at Berkeley oh my god a little bit a little bit on a prank side this was back in the Vietnam days and we had demonstrations that came down you know Shattuck and and Bancroft and broke every single window in every single store and there were the cops were shooting rubber bullets and it was always fun to find one and I I kept trying me I kept trying you know I'd like to do the things you can never get a chance to do again in your life so I always wanted to go out there when they were about to throw a tear gas canister I always wanted to run over and get somebody to take my picture by the tear gas canister going off never quite succeeded now did I ever have an engineering schedule for Berkeley I I was now a junior and I could sign up for the courses I wanted so I took a couple of grad courses in hardware design a couple in software design they were all in the same room in quarry hall all four of my courses and on Monday and Wednesday I go to this classroom the same classroom sit in the same chair for two classes in a row and Tuesday and Thursdays I go to that same chair and sit for two classes in a row and none of my classes started before noon always in the same chair you just couldn't do write that into a book um Steve Steve Jobs was coming up a lot to visit me in the dorms and I'd drive down 2 km and we had discovered these little devices that if you put tones into an American telephone you could make free calls all over the world and it was a little startling and it wasn't like you know I was careful that I didn't make any of my own phone calls that way but I sure did explore the system how far can you get how do you get these international operators and talk them into connecting you through satellite to another international operator and around the world and you talk in one phone and hear yourself a second later it was just so interesting so that was the first time Steve took one of my designs and he said let's sell it and so so we actually sold some of those here after that year at Berkeley I had totaled my car it's a great page in my book the night I met Captain Crunch I'm not going to go through it I'm not going to go through it it's the best best few pages in the book for a great story but I I didn't have the money I told my car and didn't have the money for my fourth year of college so I went to work for a year supposedly one year didn't drop out of college and the hottest product in the world I managed to buy one with all the money I did have it was the hp-35 scientific calculator the first handheld scientific calculator of all time the one that was going to put slide rules out of existence in a couple of years this was an every single engineer every scientist had to get this calculator because instead of slide rules you could type in ten digit numbers and see digital answers and get them instantly and immediately and accurately and this for engineers this product changed the world somehow HP heard that I was some hot computer designer and they brought me in for interviews and hired me as an engineer designing the calculators so what an incredible chance in life to be on you know the hot moving products of the word get to work there it's like if you loved Apple products so much and you got a job at Apple so my job was designing the digital logic inside of chips and then laying out doing some chip layouts actually and I would go and use the computer we had one hewlett-packard mini computer and teletypes and big apparatus that we all shared so 40 of us engineers would sign up for time slots get on the computer run our programs and I would write simulations that simulated my designs ones and zeroes bit by bit and see how they came out and make sure they work so that's what I would do on that computer and I kind of you know would have loved to have my own computer but that comes a hair later our calculators hewlett-packard used what was called reverse polish notation anybody know what reverse polish notation is you know anybody's been through computer software or algorithm expression Solutions knows that art the end you put in if you want to add two numbers you put the two numbers in first and then you say add them and that's how our calculators work and it was like things that computer scientists do who were writing computer languages so we thought our calculators are more sophisticated more computer science more powerful and macho than normal calculators where you say two plus three and we had a big equation on a card that you could solve with our calculators but boy was it hard I tried over and over had so many sub terms you know this minus that squared and it was kind of like the big statistics problems I could solve it on my calculator Texas Instruments introduced a new calculator they came out with a calculator that used parentheses instead of reverse polish notation parentheses five plus three parentheses times six and that's this parentheses told you what order to do things in for a long equation and we laughed at it we said parentheses make it a toy the same way people were going to some day say graphics makes the Macintosh a toy and we laughed at it in hewlett-packard and they brought the calculator over by my cubicle and about six engineers were standing around and one marketing guy and I said hey I'll try the big equation we had this big card I said I'll try it because I thought of myself as being pretty smart and I sat down there and looked at the equation saw here's the turn you do first so I have to hit about six parenthesis or is it seven and I'm thinking there's no way in the world I'm ever going to get this straight no human could do this and I did something that's very important that a lot of people have trouble doing cleared my head out you pretend you don't know anything what would you do there has to be a way wait a minute why don't I type it in from left to right I typed in the equation from left to right as fast as I could go guessing if the square root was prefix or postfix first you're left and got the right answer the first time and the other engineers were kind of stunned how did he do that and I held it two handed it to each of them and I said type it in from left to right I couldn't get one other engineer to type it in from left to right parenthesis and everything they all wanted to use the skill that they had built up of looking at a complicated expression figuring out which part to do first and which part to do second and wanting to do them in that order you don't want to give up a skill sometimes so you miss spotting when something comes along that's easier and simpler you know why have two languages one for the calculator one for handwritten expressions Steve Jobs around this time wanted to go to Reed College because one of those special people in the world that got a Nobel Prize was at Reed College and I drove Steve up to Reed College in Portland Oregon and visited him quite a few times in the next month's and the first day he got there he brought a card to me said look here's the classes they're telling me I have to take and I looked at it and it was literature you know and calculus and you know we're some kind of math and and history was the normal stuff that you take and I said yeah that's what you get when you go to college and he said oh no he only thought you'd go to college and you take Shakespeare and quantum physics and all these neat things and and so he didn't go to classes for the first week he just sat in this tent with his girlfriend in the dorm and I thought this I could never do that I could never be that brave well Steve was more like a true hippie of the day a counterculture as' kind of going through life with a lot of friends and everybody lives on nothing and has almost nothing no money in just some sandals and lives the very very very simple life and so he and me I admired all the counterculture thinking of those days but didn't become it I was still going to be middle-of-the-road feet on the ground an engineer have a home someday have a family but I really admired the thinking my head was very free and open so on he lived he somehow talked them into letting him stay at Reed College for a couple of years with no money for dorms and no money for tuition but they liked him if you're persuasive and people like you you can get a lot of things and he always got lots of things easy bite by being who he is and he's very impressive and intelligent well I'm back at hewlett-packard and my love in life is engineering and I'm so shy in such a gig that I'm never going to have a girlfriend or a wife so when I came home from work on calculators I went to work on other projects that I loved in electronics I just did it I worked on hotel movie systems for friends I did all this for free I would just take jobs and fly to LA and design some digital stuff for the first hotel movie systems when nobody had ever seen a movie in a hotel in the in their life I got to work on the early VCRs before anybody ever saw a VCR the first consumer VCR was not the Sony Betamax it was an American company called cart revision built them into some Sears TVs went bankrupt right away and we hewlett-packard engineers could go down and buy them in San Jose for 60 bucks each a color VCR when black and white ones cost a thousand bucks for schools incredible incredible opportunity I started the first dial-a-joke in the San Francisco Bay Area you'll meet a lot of people who have started companies but this is the only time in your life you'll meet someone who was the first person to start a dialogic in a regional area where you can dial a number I take credit for that one you've dialed this number and I would tell a Polish joke hello Dan can for dialing dial a joke and then the Polish American Congress complained and I said what if I switch into Italian jokes and they said that's fine this was before political correctness and dial a joke well that's I did this in 1972 when it was illegal in the United States to own use or purchase your own telephone it was illegal in the United States to own use or purchase your own answering machine so um so it was I had to lease the one machine that the phone company offered and it costs as much as my apartment rental you know imagine you're just out of college and you're paying for an apartment and then you have to pay again that amount just for an answering machine but I want I was so into humor I wanted to run the first dial of joke and I ran it for a couple of years and because it was like a chatroom I was anonymous all these people were calling they didn't know who I was and so I could come home from work and take calls live and I actually met my first wife that way and prankster as I am I the first thing I said to her was I can hang up before you and I did Steve Jobs you know oh oh before that I went into a bowling alley with Allison there was a pawn game the first time ever I saw a little TV screen playing a game and I might jaw open I couldn't believe it television set can play a game who ever heard of that pinball games were always had all we had before that and as I stared at it I said I could build one of those because I know digital electronics and I know television signals from high school I can build my own pong I'm going to build my own I couldn't afford one so I had to build it and I did and it was you know very few chips that I even put in a couple of proms from work and had programmed them so that when you missed the ball it spelled a four-letter word like heck Steve Jobs came back from Oregon and he and he's the sort of person I told them all about pong and everything he went down to Atari and got a job so that quickly and so he was in there kind of like fixing up the machines they designed he wasn't quite engineer level and he came to me one day and he said Nolan Bushnell who owns Atari wants you to design a game he's sick and tired of his own engineers designing games with a hundred chips 120 chips 150 chips 180 chips he wants small ones and he knows you design things small and he and Steve described to me this one player pong game called breakout and I said yeah I might god it'd be the greatest thing in my life to design a game that people are going to play in bowling alleys and stuff kids are going to play how incredible Steve said well there's a hitch we have to build it in four days and nights it wasn't software back then it was Hardware little chips with voltages that went high and low and you had to hook wires to make other chips go high and low to get signals into a TV set that showed up his balls and paddles that was a six man month job so for days and nights I didn't think I could do it but I sat down started designing we didn't sleep for four days either one of us we both got the sleeping sickness mononucleosis we delivered a working breakout game to atari while I was there I was kind of you know how you are when you're falling asleep and you're hardly awake and your mind's drifting it's almost like you're like I don't know it's almost like you're hypnotized sort of Lucinda genic or something all the games and Atari at that time were built with black-and-white TV sets little dots going in black and white and I went to the factory floor and this one game had a bunch of mylar on the screen red green blue orange and as the ball went across the screen it was changing colors like a rainbow I was just mesmerized by this color effect color is so important in the world and then into my head popped an idea of a way to take a little $1 chip spin it around at the right speed and get all sorts of signals out that would look like color on an NTSC television arts in American television so I filed that idea way next thing after breakout Steve Jobs and I went to visit a friend who said he had something big to show us and he's down in a basement typing on the big teletype machine he says I'm playing chess with a computer in Boston and he was on the ARPANET the early forerunner of today's Internet and he brought up a list of computers Stanford Berkeley UCLA you know Illinois um MIT was on there about 12 computers and you could log on it's not getting far away thing that makes you super powerful and a human you know superhuman and I said as I drooled and I said I have to have this so I went home and instead of designing a game that put balls and paddles on my home TV and I had no money at all Steve Jobs and I are we're in our young 20s realized we had no savings account we had no checking account really we had no cars we owned we had zero so the only output device I ever had was my television because it was free I already owned it televisions didn't have video in in those days you had to take it apart scope around find where to put the video signal in inject it and you'd get a picture on your Green and I just redesigned my game I I designed the new product that would put letters of the alphabet words on my television set and then I bought a keyboard for a huge amount of money and I could type and through a modem that I built I could type to that computer in Boston or Stanford or wherever or Berkeley and I could type and run the programs that were forgets and it would type back to my television set and this I was so happy and I hardly ever used it I just wanted to actually create it more than I needed to use it see if Jobs came along and said why don't we sell this design to a local time sharing computer company and we did and got some money for it so it was I was a TV terminal on my own now a friend came to me and said a group of people are getting together that are interested in things like TV terminals video terminals I thought wow I'm so shy I never talked to anyone but I love showing off my devices and then people talked to me so I said I'll go it was the homebrew Computer Club we started in Menlo Park it was a rainy night the garage door was open were and everybody was talking about one of these geeky look and front panel little computers based on a microprocessor and I had not followed microprocessors so I felt very shy I was the only one in the room that didn't know what this meeting was about it was about the Altair 8800 thing that called itself a computer but it was really just a glorified microprocessor with switches and lights for ones and zeroes and buttons you could push to get them into memory and I thought back I mean I built that computer five years before but so I took home a data sheet for a microprocessor and that night I found out that a microprocessor was roughly the mini computers I used to design in high school I said I'm in business oh my god that computer I wanted my whole life now I see the path to get it and I took my video terminal and I redesigned it to put a microprocessor in some memory a little startup program like our hewlett packard calculators so I could now type to my own computer and it could type to my TV set and in the in the Intel world the other machines that were coming out the Hobby kits were usually based on the Intel chips and Bill Gates had written a basic for it we knew his name you know this little hobby community a few people here a few people there hardly anyone you know not even thousands of people in the country maybe followed these new developing micro computers and Bill Gates name was famous he had written a basic and I thought wow if I write a basic for my microprocessor I'll get famous so I had never programmed in basic by the way I had to learn the language write a syntax charts I've never taken a course in doing this but I'd read a lot of Medicine books on it and managed to write my own basic and I'd go down to the club and pass out my schematics and I pass out my code listings no copyright notices give it away for free because our club members were young people the people like yourselves it wasn't money people it wasn't CEOs it was the people who were technicians that new computer logic that wanted their own computer didn't want the company to own it and they wanted to prove that if you can program you can do more for the company than the CEO and I wanted to help these social dreams come to reality the kids with an interactive book would now use a hundred percent of their brain set of ten percent so I gave away my schematics so that everybody in our club could build their own computer unfortunately a lot of people aren't skilled at building things and soldering wires so Steve Jobs came along then and he saw the interest in my design and he said why don't we start a company and what we'll do is we'll make a PC board for $20 and sell it for $40 to make life easy for the people who want your computer and I didn't I would have to invest a certain amount of money and I didn't think we'd get it back and he said yeah but for once in our lives the two of us will have our own company and so I said next I said well everything I do belongs to Hewlett Packard my employer I'm never going to leave he'll at Packard I'm going to be an engineer for life this is an engineering company that respects engineers that came from engineers we engineers at the bottom of the org chart actually come up with the new ideas for products and I went I implored my company Hewlett Packard to please PLEASE build a machine that looks like a typewriter that you can actually run programs on and they turned me down the first of five turndowns so Steve and I I sold my most valuable possession my HP 65 calculator Steve sold something and we invested in a pc board the next thing that happened was Steve called me at work one day and he said I got an order for $50,000 my salary was twenty four thousand this was scary this was like big-time oh my god we're more than just a little fun thing at home so I went back to Hewlett Packard's legal department they circulated it I got turned down again and we were off into basically starting Apple we had to garage going for the next half year it's called the garage we didn't do any designs in the garage we didn't do any sales in the garage the telephone was in Steve's bedroom it's just that you had to have a place to gather our friends would gather and talk about the computer and try out a new program on a bench in the garage the computers weren't manufactured in the garage they were manufactured at a place in Santa Clara we would drive them to the garage test them put him in a white box driving to the store as I said we had no money Steve and I so what we've got was we had 30 days credit on all the parts to build the computers once we got the computers out of Santa Clara and tested them we drove him to the store and we got paid cash on delivery so the store was taking the credit and that's how we were able to run this Apple one thing it's like sometimes you could have dreams that are far out and cost a lot of money to accomplish and it might cost if you had a little bit less money you can do a little bit less of that dream but basically stick with whatever money you have do what you can it's a step forward that will get you on to the other steps within on so many people would come by Steve's dad was always in the garage working with his laser stuff and his sister we pay her $1 aboard to plug the chips into the socket sometimes she'd make some money and that was a lot back then and she was making a lot of money and Dan Kottke was a friend who came by and he learned how to test them and find some of the fix some of the problems on the boards and a couple of high schoolers that we met at the homebrew Computer Club would come by because they were interested that we had the computer that was going to be affordable within three months I designed really a computer from the ground up the Apple 2 and for some reason it wound up half as many parts 10 times the computer the nobody would have ever expected color to be in a computer just a shock to the world that it could be done at an affordable cost in that year nobody would have expected graphics what do I mean by graphics well you could say type a number like 7 into a memory location and a blue square would pop up on your TV and instantly you can realize if you just manipulate all the numbers in memory you can have colors moving around on your set graphics we had high resolution meaning pixels on a screen that long ago with the Apple 2 and we knew that this product was a big winner so we didn't give it out for free and we started looking for the money to build it because we knew we could sell a thousand of them how do you build a thousand of them if they cost two hundred fifty thousand dollars two hundred fifty dollars each to build you need 250 thousand dollars it's like a million of today's dollars at least we went to Commodore and tried to get them to give us a bunch of money Steve start talking real big money give us a few hundred thousand bucks and give us some jobs and give us some stock and I was so embarrassed I'm thinking how can you ask for that I mean by salaries only twenty five thousand you know I've designed two computers in a year and it's like just good engineering is all it is and they turned us down and built their own every one we showed this Apple to to decided to get into the business we went to Atari they were friends of ours but they had their hands full with the first home pong game so they turned us down we went to venture capitalist and we couldn't speak like businessman neither one of us had any business experience or any business schooling like I told you how young we were so that didn't go we ran into this guy Mike Markkula he was an angel and he came across he figured that this was going to be a big thing these computers were going to be the next big explosion in in the technical world in terms of money and we were going to be a huge billion dollar company in a few months and he knew how to run business he'd retired on a stock option so he would invest in us but I had to leave hewlett-packard and that was a very difficult decision for me because I decided I wanted to work for Gila packer for the rest of my life as an engineer I've designed on the side just at night I've designed to computers and built them and cassette tape the interfaces I wrote a basic I did all these other interfaces and stuff and why don't I just keep doing that on the side and keep my job at hewlett-packard as well and Mike Markkula said no I had to leave hewlett-packard and he gave me till Tuesday to decide and on Tuesday I you know I was one of those people I grew up very independent my whole life and I wasn't going to be influenced by money so on Tuesday I turned him down and said nope I'm gonna keep stay at youlet Packard and design computers for myself at night and Steve went into a frenzy Steve Jobs he caught got all my relatives to start calling me and all my friends take the money take the money and one friend finally said the right thing he said look you can start this new company and be an engineer and stay in engineering you don't have to go into management you don't have to run it and that's what I needed to hear because at that point I was a sort of person that could never really run a company I couldn't step on other people's toes I think we're about done but I'll give a couple of the good highlights real quickly the Apple 2 was introduced started selling very well kind of took over this little hobby computer world but it was a completely built product take it out of the box and start typing on it it used a cassette tape to store your programs one year after one year we were allowed personal computers to go to the CES show in Las Vegas Las Vegas the City of Lights I'd never been to it and I wasn't going to be going but I said in our staff meeting I said if we have a floppy disk can we show it and Mike Markkula said yes that gave me two weeks if I design a floppy disk in two weeks I get to go to Las Vegas you can't get better motivation than that the real breakthrough came from person trying to write a checkbook program with cheques month by month and realized that he had really a financial forecasting tool the first spreadsheet called visicalc once visicalc was out on Apple 2 plus visicalc to a small businessmen they could do their work in in two hours three hours that would take them 10 years buy pencil and paper and they were just buying them by the hordes and we were a big lucky technical success story after after Apple was successful and I had a plane crash while working on the Macintosh project I did go back to finish my college and I came back to Berkeley and I enrolled over in the main building under a fake name rocky racoon Clark to finish finish my studies so I got my diploma in that name and I did other things that I'd intended my whole life to do I did go back and I taught fifth grade for eight years and things like that because just wondering how do you stay yourself I'm ready for question and answers I'm not sure how much time we have left probably running a little late so thank you thank you here's how it works okay here's how it works if you have a question raise your hand and somebody will bring you a microphone I'll identify you for them it can certainly be current questions I'm up on all the latest you know Apple stuff hi what advice would you give to new innovators because many new companies tend to like either boom and then somehow they kind of just like you know fade away and no one hears about them anymore or they get absolved by a much bigger company so what advice would you give to people who kind of have the same passion dream like you like you did yourself when you were younger yeah everybody's just as smart and passionate excited about what they're doing doesn't have necessarily the huge big successes like Apple and Google and all that and you can't expect it but you can you kind of keep trying one of the things I wish that a lot of the big companies once they get successful even if they buy smaller ones I wish they could identify the people on the inside that have some neat things going why didn't you let Packard spin me off and just invest they couldn't do my product they couldn't do it because of their corporate culture the corporate culture wasn't open to new products they had to be finally done engineering very finished products but they should have been sensitive to other things that were good a lot of engineers came to me and said the Apple to this is the best product I've ever seen in my life I mean they should have found a way to spin it off and own part of it and give it a different name and an ongoing existence it's not done very much Hewlett Packard did one very very good thing to help the young inside innovators and it came from Hewlett and Packard themselves in the early days they had a policy that any engineer who designed something on their own could get parts out of the storeroom for it with their supervisors approval so they figured that your intelligence it was a part another way of funding your own education right here well we're going to go in whatever what are we going two questions I one of them we talked about when you're on this weekend twit some podcasts at the Apple Store where do I get gold laser pointers is number one the best laser pointers for the best price deal extreme calm thank you and awful laser pointers in some weird colors but very expensive wicked lasers calm or big lasers calm cool and the other question is what do you see as some of the biggest challenges now in technology and in innovation that engineers and other technology architects need to look at solving as it approaches architectures or is it a combination thereof yeah I don't think I see any real I mean critical areas I see we're making big breakthroughs in especially um foldable displays I think that's going to be great maybe we can wear clothes someday or have Google Earth on a real globe I you know I see things that I like and if my own interest in photonics being one of them I'd love to see little gates those little decision-making gates done only with photons no electricity involved run some fiber optics into a chip and fiber optics out and there's no electricity at all love to see that happen because if the heat goes away and you can run a lot faster and not run into the heat problems although you have dimension problems robotics I love I love robotics and I think in terms of you know artificial intelligence how small the steps are that we've taken so far you know we always show something off that'll seem impressive but what if you think about the idea of a robot making a cup of coffee I could go into your house and make a cup of coffee you could go into mine and make a cup of coffee but if you think it out in your head what it would take all the steps that you did and how were you able to do it and part of its by having made a lot of coffee in your life and then in a lot of kitchens in your life that robot has got to almost live a long life of learning to be able to do it you can't program these things directly that's all first of all I just want to say I respect you very much here one of the greatest innovators of all time I think second you know the question is um how do you view the shift consumer electronics computers specifically into more consumer media for example the iPhone or the type bottom not that Apple has been in a Macintosh sector but there's definitely more of a shift towards that well you know what the sort of electronics projects that you have we have the skills to build have been pretty much consistent back in the time of Edison we may not have had computers so much but you know working on telephones audio photographs movie projection movie theater that the categories tend to stay the same thing and so if you once you have skills in that area and you can think of a good product how does a company like Apple yea come out with something that's not a computer um think about this all of the all over the world music devices were being put out and people being manufactured you could buy them and you had to transfer the files from a computer so they were becoming like computer accessories what Apple did was very strange until on with Apple's corporate philosophies that carry over to products which is we try to take all of the geekness all of the engineering away from the user so they don't have to know any of it we built the first music device that was not a music device it didn't have files and structure that you had to learn you simply plugged it in your computer and you know app but Apple controlled all the elements Apple Apple could control the experience because that they had the store they have the operating system they have the application they had the hardware they had the the iTunes app and they had the iPod she just plugged it in and invisibly the music was in your ear you didn't really have to think and that's a lot of what we did what we do that with the iPhone is another example of only wanting to make excellent products that you research and you try every approach in the world and just reject and reject reject until you get something that is just so outstanding good that anybody would drool over and say I have to have it you know and that's just Apple doesn't the Steve Jobs in particular does believes that we've only lost money when we've built junk that was so lousy we couldn't sell it um do you plan to invent anything new or are you working on something I plan yeah I'm actually always close to people inventing things do the sort of engineering I used to do I was one of those ones that for 20 hours a day and I'd wake up in dreams with solutions all the time I did even in high school for mathematics for classes anything just go to sleep thinking about it wake up and write it down but I can't do that name you know 20 hours a day concentrate on engineering I have a lot of public appearance stuff to this day I have family I have children I have other duties in the world and not the time that's kind of like why the news companies have come out of nowhere the startups you don't be it yeah you know Facebook or whatever Google they come from young people who kind of haven't been there in the system very long you know Apple we came from almost nowhere and and after a while you just get older and you go into management because it's a lot easier yeah difficult to remain a very precise engineer where everything has to be so perfect that nobody can do it better than you that's that's a lot of intense you know you feel stress and mental work in your head you can only do it when you're young so so I guide projects now and I've had a few startup companies working in praat areas like GPS and remote controls the first the first programmable remote controls I did those just because I wanted to i love little startups with a few people talking about ideas now i like to meet with even high school kids or just out of high school talking about ideas where to build something and usually what they're missing there's so many people now that want to be an entrepreneur and start a company but and they have ideas but they don't have the engineering and the product done we were lucky when we started Apple we had the whole thing oh hi thank you so much for coming today my question is what is the joke today what's the joke today what's your favorite joke the joke oh I am let's see I'm tend to make up jokes when they come to me one came to me earlier today and I can't remember what it was I said it huh sorry I played a prank I told you the prank that I played on my assistant I mean I played it on actually the engineering professors here they think that she walked out of her append ectomy today so that'll what esque Cathy my comedian friend friend you're going to be seeing an awful lot of me in next year's my life on the d-list reality TV show Emmy award-winning show an awful lot I take her to Bob's Big Boy in Burbank and donate computers to schools in Mexico we do an awful lot together yeah and some big surprises but I can't say everything yeah she's real smart real smart hi very very simple question why name your company Apple that question comes up all the time why are we named Apple I remember picking Steve Jobs up at the airport in San Francisco when he flew back from Portland and we're driving down he says I got a great name for the company Apple Computer and right away the biggest record company in the world one of the biggest names that was known to young people our age was Apple Records for the Beatles I said what about Apple Records they said well they're a record company we're a computer company and I said that's all it takes he said yeah so I trust it okay we both tried to think up strong technical names Steve himself did you know in the car we would try to think of better names but nothing would ever beat Apple now when we raised the big money to really start as a real company with the Apple 2 we hired a PR agency the agency came and told us the name Apple has to go because it doesn't symbolize it doesn't speak of power of computing a lot of doing a lot of stuff and Steve and I just held our ground we said no computers are now coming to the homes they're coming to a new class of people and Apple has a goods is a good symbol in the home and you know apple a day keeps the doctor away and an apple for the teacher and apples are fruit and they're healthy and they're great symbol so we hung on to it and then then we got the PR agency went into designing logos that we selected so it was a back in those days there was no big money in this business either so when there's no big money any names okay if it sounds interesting that's a good enough reason yeah not to open a can of worms but why did Microsoft become who they are and when are they going to go away well what already we'll have one more question after this one but um Microsoft well as I mentioned Bill Gates actually started out as as a brilliant programmer but instantly went into being a businessman buying something here selling it for more there with you know subscriptions and making a lot of money off that there was a point in time with our Apple to where we dealt with Microsoft to write some application software for us and a floating-point basic for us and they were very cooperative and they were much smaller than Apple we didn't think that much of them at the time but the world was changing to where software was going to be more important and you could buy those Intel machines everywhere in the world every manufacturer made Intel machines and only one manufacturer made the Apple two and so we lost a huge amount of market share due to that we kept our prices high and it could have been a mistake but it could have been the right thing to do and how can you go back and try to point a finger and say it was right it was wrong Microsoft became very big but they were trying to give the world new tools that it didn't have computing tools you know a lot of people get get their best out of it I mean when I think of what's the worst thing about Microsoft stuff well a lot of people fall in love with Apple stuff and you know if you want to be passionate about the Machine you own like a car or if you want to feel special it's probably you're probably a Macintosh person most a lot of left-brain industries though are forced into a PC you can only get a lot of software for accounting on a PC for lawyers legal on a PC and for engineering a lot of the software is only on a PC so that kind of directs you but your own personal choice are we feel if we keep making good products people will learn and find out and of course I do worry about spam and like I saw the slash dot thing last week where somebody was suggesting that if your computer is sending splint spam because it got taken over by some spammer and it's a zombie well then you should be taken offline until you can get a certificate prove yourself take a test or something that you can manage the operating system you own because it's all Windows machines millions of them that the spammers control one last question okay I add two questions ones real quick I saw in your wrist um what do you have there is it a Nixie tube watch that Nixie tube watch that uses 140 volts on the Nixie tubes and when I turn my wrist it shows hours and minutes at the rate I would speak it and my head loves to read it that way I actually love it as a watch not because it's a geek watch but um that was the aisle where a geek watch for one week and then I'll go back to my pretty hands watch but this one I actually like the way it tells time and and and I saw somebody wearing one I looked it up on Google Nixie tube watch I found it I got serial number 14 handmade in America I'd like to tell people wow my other question was I know with the iPod and the iPhone there's been a lot of like a sort of battle between people who want to modify the system and Apple like trying to prevent that trying to make it into a paid system what's your opinion on that well I haven't seen that huge ax battle I'm sorry it exists I want I think it should be open what made the Apple 2 so successful in the early days it was an incredibly open machine we published every schematic and listing and information on how to make your own cards to plug in how to write your drivers on them how to add devices how to write software in many languages and all these companies thousands of companies sprung up from little people that never in their life would have a chance to have their own company some of them were in high school and they started writing programs or designing little pieces of hardware selling it for the Apple 2 and it was such a huge market to see the number of just really young and small people that had a chance now to be something in the world was an incredible time and it gets closed down when a company has a product that's not very open I hope that Apple's SDK leads to a lot more of these you know young startups you know finding a way to make some nice piece of software for the iPhone and we can get away for I hope I hope that they're adequate enough for the masses that we don't even need the hacking and I can understand some reasons why you'd have to close up a new product but I can't understand why you wouldn't let me put a ringtone into my iPhone I'm not going to destroy the world or why I can't have stereo Bluetooth there's some things that you know I just as an engineer it's just I'm sorry it doesn't equate so good luck with it yeah good luck with all your products I love mine

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Views: 350,255

Rating: 4.9045401 out of 5

Keywords: Haas, School, UC, Berkeley, business, Steve, Wozniak, Apple

Id: 5WBX6SACViI

Length: 66min 55sec (4015 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 24 2008