The early days | Steve Wozniak | TEDxBerkeley

well I have to say I'm actually nervous here for a very few reasons and that doesn't matter when I was young you know I'm going to talk about reality I'm going to talk about my real time here at Berkeley is a student a couple of times and not about founding Apple and all that that stuff leading up to it but you're going to see a lot of clues in there and you're going to get an idea of how I think I was academically lucky in school and for some reason I decided I was going to be an engineer because engineers are going to give us products that make life easier someday engineers were going to bring products in the world that we're going to let us work for days instead of five days we missed but that was my that was my motivation I was also very strongly motivated towards education and of course at the culmination of your education is often the University and education universities education which leads to success and success is sorted make you happy I like to cut things out when I'm designing a circuit and there's ten little parts in between the middlemen get rid of them figure out a way to get things done simply with the fewest parts and I said go straight to the happiness so I came up with the formula H equals s minus F happiness equals smiles - frowns that easy if you feel good you smile if I were to die and I felt good and every day of my life I joke with people out on the street and I didn't have a home I'd be better off than the guy who ran everything and was grilling and you know sort of unhappy inside but how do you get but happiness equals smiles - frowns how do you get rid of the frowns well you don't care so much about things that they're going to give you frowns you don't have to win arguments you know everybody everybody's good both sides are good you don't have to win the only proof fifth win argument with is against yourself so don't really get upset when your car gets scratched these sort of things and that that formula took me a long way through life by the time I came back to Berkeley my second time I did modify the formula little to H equals F cubed happiness equals 3x food fun and friends food food is a metaphor for the necessities of life in a shelter and clothes and stuff and and fun and friends is obvious when I told this I was being inducted by high school Hall of Fame and seven of the first ten people instrumental in a starting Apple Computer actually went to the same high school you start with your friends and of course the university friends all go back to different cities so you're never together but they were all yeah that's how you do when you don't have any money it's starting a house you start in your garage well I told that when I was being inducted in by high school Hall of Fame and the students started laughing I had to embarrassingly say into the microphone there might be a fourth F now in those years before I got to Berkeley in my bedroom at home hanging on my wall was I don't know if you can see it maybe it's not projected but it's actually a I had posters of computers computers in racks cut this computer could sit on the table told my dad I'm going to have my own computer someday he said it costs as much as a house and I said I'm going to live in an apartment and stuck with you now in high school I was kind of a prankster I did a lot of them but I don't have time to tell all that those stories but I remember one that I favored I got into the daily announcements to everybody that Stanford's head janitor was going to speak on hire custodial education you know and and the students would laugh and the teachers would tell them no no no that's serious it's real so somehow during high schools I said I was academically lucky I somehow there were no classes on computers there were no computers I taught myself from little materials I'd stumbled onto taught myself on paper and pencil only paper and pencil how to design computers and took those thousands of hours they say it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something every weekend I shut my door and just worked and I taught myself in essence writing the book you can write the book you don't have to believe the only challenges I get in the world comes from books it comes from classes if I have the same answers everyone else I get a good grade and they call me intelligent well that's not what it really is got to Berkeley Berkeley was a symbol of free speech back in those days it was a symbol of civil rights and the movie The Graduate hit when I graduated from high school I'll also that year 1968 was when Leonard Nimoy wrote his comments about the girl that was biracial and worried you know about being bullied and all that you might see that it's going around in the news today well got here Vietnam war was going on and I become a pacifist I thought brain over brawn some people are strong they have force they have power they have wealth and some people use their brain and figure things out and do things smartening I wanted to be on the brain side and I also became pacifist as far as Wars go and things like that but here I got to Berkeley famous for you know tear deaths in people's parks and all that and I and there was a protest going on like my first day here there was a protest going on out in some field and I went and I joined in with all these people and I was all alone I wasn't with anyone just watching what's going on all of a sudden some cops drove up and they got out and they were having heavy arm lunch they started marching towards us and I was too scared to run everyone else ran away I thought you run from a cop you're guilty right so I waited there the cops came up to me and I said what do I do I don't know what to do they said run so I ran they were there were a lot of students in our dorm Norton Hall that we're collecting like little rubber bullets you could find because the cops would come and start shooting rubber bullets down the street at people and and gives them big bruises from that and they would fight teargas would go off once in a while oh my gosh I hung out where I thought there might be some tear gas canister launch and I always hoped that I could get right at the canister when it puffed out and my friend across the street would take a picture of me by it smiling it never quite got that picture I was in Norton Hall it was an all men's dormitory back then and the first night I arrived late at night my roommate came in he talked about a bunch of them together in the lounge and they hung this guy named Harvey off of either the first floor lounge or the seventh floor lounge by his feet I don't know why I think they lowered into the ground off the first floor lounge I said this is going to be a good year we're going to have some fun yeah I designed this little big slingshot made of four rubber bands type of horeb instead of four bands you could stretch it across a dorm room all the way out into the hallway and shoot an egg across the Jayant and it would hit the pay phone or or an m-80 or a cherry bomb and and we would do this I don't know how we never got caught for these things the only guy they got caught the whole year for a firecracker was up stairs somewhere sometimes at that payphone we had a lot of fun we put shaving cream on the earpiece and then we phone it from our dorm room watching across the street and when somebody ran into the payphone and grab the grab the payphone we'd start you would hear him cussing and then we tell him it was product marketing for some shaving cream I was first I was the electronic guy leading a little electronic crowd we had all the phone lines of the entire dorm going right up our unlocked cabinet on the first floor and it was easy to grab the RA was a li Steinberg he's very famous because they made movies like the color movie about the first one of the major sports reps that rep sports figures and all that and he was the RA and I would like take his phone line attach it to an unused phone in room 134 nobody was there go in and use that phone and try testing dialing numbers all over the world on his expense went over to the payphone did a trick I heard about undid a yellow wire on the payphone and then you know people came all day long couldn't make phone calls and at the end of the day we attached the yellow wire and ding ding ding ding ding ding ding all this money came out a magazine sold right here right here in town I bar here and a book came out that year that told how to make a deal a thing called the black box too little $1.00 parts in a switch you could buy at RadioShack put it on your phone line in the dorm and whoever calls you doesn't get billed ok it was really funny because there was a pole vaulter up on the 8th floor and his parents wrote him a letter wondering why they hadn't been billed for two calls from Florida so and I was by the way I was a pole vaulter in high school too believe or not skinny and all um I had a car I had taken one year off to work to earn the money to put myself through berkland not burden my parents I also bought a car a Pinto and every weekend I was the one who got to drive groups of us down to Harvey's house was in Taft California and we go to rows me to fill doubles house and they've treated us so well and and I'd go to see my parents and I go to Tijuana those dogs couldn't smell gunpowder I buy the big m-80s and cherry bombs and a drive back to the dorm man we our carpet was just totally burnt the whole way and the only guy that got caught as I said was upstairs well one time we decided to make a popcorn bomb a bag of popcorn with a cherry bomb in the middle and we'd slide it down this 40-pound fishing line I had the Steve Jobs and I'd done a prank with from the 7th floor lounge of Norton Hall over to the above the garden in Ivor Sproul hall of the first floor lounge and we it was the housemothers garden and we ran we put all the physics to calculate how long the fuse should be on on the blackboard in our seventh floor lounge we're real proud of that one in those days for computer programs the computer was in the basement of the new Evans Hall we go down the basement there were all these he punches you type on key punches and it punches holes in cards for your letters and at finals time it took 40 minutes to get on a key punch everybody was lined up for 40 minutes you have to wait there were two key punches over there for an IBM computer and it you know and it printed the wrong characters and it didn't it didn't it just wasn't right what was right holes I touch typed everything I was a good typist and in those computer punch days you had to get special characters like parentheses you had to hit two keys with the left hand little pinky plus another key little pinky plus a different key and I was good at typing everything I found out that those IBM key punches if you type to touch without looking at the wrong characters being printed the holes were right and the computer only knew the holes that was one of my claims to fame on the card punch we had a little boxes of all those little chips that came out of the card punches and of course one time they stuck an m-80 and one and shoved it under my bed pow I took forever to clean that thing up another another time I'd go to I go to that we had a food service and I'd bring back saltine crackers I had stacked up 17 pounds where the saltine crackers in my dorm room on the shelf just inside the door and I was down in the other the unoccupied room playing foam tricks one timon I heard an explosion I knew what it was Harv Harvey had set off an m-80 in the middle of those of the saltine crackers all over the floor bits of them my roommate John and I just scooped it up and scooped it into a full trash can then we thought we got an idea we'd go up to Harvey slaughter we'll get a friend of ours to put a tape over Harvey's door so when it closes it doesn't lock and then and then Harvey discovered the tape so then we went down by Harvey's room and there was a fire escape the fire escape had a window that you could open and right there was Harvey's window at right angles to it and he had no wind window was open no screen on it so we took we took up we took a broom and shoveled bits of these these crackers the entire thing onto his bed right onto this bed and and the RA came up with a vacuum cleaner to help him clean it up cause he was kind of pissed and the hatch totally plugged in the vacuum cleaner in Blowing mode I loved typing a lot I loved typing I was I was I beat the girls in high school at typing too actually which was unheard of in those days and I I would type people's papers in those days you know you type you can't make a single mistake where you have to go back and correct it with whiteout this wasn't like today's computer you know word processing days I would type the paper all night long to sit you in the morning and charge five cents and when I came back to when I came back my second time to Berkeley I would charge five cents for tutoring if we'll get to we had the blue box the night I met Captain Crunch the most famous phone freak I've been spreading the Laurel all over the campus and he came to visit me in the dorm and I opened up he taught his codes up in pizza hips pizza parlor too late at night Steve Jobs and I didn't had to drive home car broke down went over to up to a gas station there was a payphone we said we've got to try to use this blue box at a payphone and we've tried operator kid on the line Steve was all scared and then he tried again the operator came on the line he was all scared got me the blue box when the cops showed up cops said what is this device I said the Moog synthesiser was brand new the first music synthesizer ever where electronics created music and I said it's a music synthesizer makes tones when you press the buttons the cops finally put us in their car and we knew where we were going down to the police station cop turns around hands me back the blue box he says diamond move beat you to it oh my god that they were bamboozled yeah I took all I had four classes all graduate classes in hardware design software design all in the same room in Corey Hall I set the same scene no class started before noon either and I sat in the same seat for two classes on Monday and Wednesday same seat for two classes on Tuesday and Thursday you could make up something like that the end of the year my roommate wrote a report for English that he was supposed to offer literature for writing class and it was all about a guy named - Alfonso labeled fiction every bit of it was totally true about what we had done in our dorm that year but nobody would believe it I had this ain't got this incredible job eventually working hewlett-packard on the iPhone six of its time the HP 35 scientific calculator it was going to change everything and hewlett-packard values they valued you as employee of the company and an owner of the company and I did a lot of projects on the side for love people heard that they could come to this young engineer hewlett-packard and I didn't have a degree yet I had three years done at Berkeley but they tested they interviewed me and I was do the engineering job people would come to me and I would design products for them for free and once a year Steve Jobs would come into town and say that's a neat thing you built just for fun we got to sell this we can sell he turned them all into money homebrew Computer Club had a lot of college professors and academics talking about the social revolution it was going to come when we had our own computer and that eventually led to me build in a computer giving it away for free I was a hero at the club I actually took Steve Jobs don't believe the movie where it shows him taking me to a club and he speevak Steve didn't know the computer existing he came into town and saw the crowd around me and he said we kind of sell a part of this we can build it for 20 bucks itself for 40 and that was the start of Apple and when it came time to give stock I thought you know what there were a bunch of little other people around us that were like founders they were in those founding days they were young people in high school some of them and you know what how come a few of us at the top got this incredible riches when we went public with our stock and they didn't seem to get anything they didn't get stock or anything and you might have seen that in the movie and so I actually took 20 million of today's dollars of my own stock and I gave it to five of those young people that have been with us because why would I have done anything if I didn't have friends around talking about this is a good thing to do and then 280 other employees I sold I sold pre-ipo stock because you know you know what I just felt that it was just you know we need a better we I don't know equalization of income in this country more like Canada when I returned for my last year of college ten years in Apple my name was famous so I had to use a fake name and my diploma my Berkeley diploma I got them to put it that name rocky racoon Clark and I would walk home I lived on the north side that year and I'd walk home and every day at lavon's pizza parlor North Side I'd played defender oh it's a action game and it took me many years before I could roll the score over but eventually I did that's that's all I have go bears go Oskie go sharks for mathematicians go forth and multiply live long and find happiness or prosper thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 436,959

Rating: 4.9415355 out of 5

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Id: PwSyjz1off4

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 26 2015