“i Thought Computers Were Just An Interesting Hobby.”
STEVE WOZNIAK PIONEERED THE PERSONAL COMPUTER AND NOW DEVOTES MOST OF HIS TIME TO SCHOOLCHILDREN
GROWING UP IN SILICON Valley in the 1950s and ‘60s, Steve Wozniak loved building things from parts scavenged from old TVs and radios. He couldn’t afford new components, so he had to come up with his own inexpensive solutions to problems. His first Apple computer, completed in 1976, when he was 25, was a masterpiece of low-cost elegance. It was probably the first computer to use a simple keyboard, as opposed to a Teletype console, for input and a television set for output. With those advantages, its successor, the Apple II, appealed to people well beyond the hobbyists who had tinkered with microprocessors so far. Then he proved that this triumph of electronic improvisation wasn’t a fluke by going on to design the first disk drive inexpensive enough for consumers.
Many of his fans, who call him Woz, see him as a proponent of a brand of forward-looking optimism that challenges the idea that technology is dehumanizing. He was among the vanguard of shaggy youths who argued in the 1970s that computers would endow individuals with powers and freedoms once reserved for governments and corporations, a claim now broadly vindicated by history. The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted him into its ranks in 2000.
He was interviewed in his office in San Jose.
How did you deride to become an inventor?
When I was a boy, I read stories about people who invented contraptions to solve problems or entrap aliens or fly into space. Like a lot of kids, I felt I’d love to be one of those people who invent things and go in new directions. And electronics was bigger than it is today. Almost everybody who was going to be an inventor would sit down with a soldering iron, soldering pieces together to make something interesting, something useful.
When I was in fifth grade, I read a book that was a big inspiration. It was about a ham-radio operator, and it talked about how people could build radios from parts and use Morse code to communicate with other people all over the world. They didn’t do this to make money (it wasn’t a business), they did it to help people. At the end of the book it said you could get a ham-radio license at any age, so by the end of the sixth grade I had my license. My parents bought me a transmitter and a receiver. I bolted all the transformers in place according to the instructions. I put all the parts together one by one, soldered it together, and tested it out. We don’t hear much about this any more. Electronics has faded out as computers have come in.
Did your father, who was an engineer, influence your decision to become a computer designer?
In the Tom Swift books, Tom Swift was a guy who had his own company. He was an engineer, he could design any product in the world, and if he couldn’t, he had friends who would help him design it. They would solve mysterious problems or beat crooks who were trying to endanger people. I was inspired by this. I was in a neighborhood with a lot of other electronics kids, and our parents were engineers, so we got encouragement and support whenever we went in that direction. I didn’t get pushed into engineering.
I didn’t know I was going to design computers. I thought I was going to be an engineer, and I thought engineers designed radios and television sets and missile guidance systems. I thought computers were just an interesting hobby. I had no idea I was on the exact right path.
What path were you on?
All my life what has mattered to me hasn’t been to create the most complex stuff for corporations or big moneymakers or the military. It has been trying to make things that normal people can have in their homes, things that I would want to have. All I’ve had to do was build the machine that I could have fun with. A lot of the thinking was really accidental.
Before Apple I worked for a great company, Hewlett-Packard. They believed in engineers, having been started by engineers. I thought it was the best place in the world for me. I made a decision that I wanted to be an engineer my whole life. I didn’t want to go into management. I didn’t want to do what managers do. I just wanted to design good circuits and write good software.
The engineers are at the bottom of any company organization chart. At the top are a chief executive, a bunch of vice presidents, and division managers and middle-upper managers. At the bottom is where the engineers are. They do the designing. They put the chips together. They’re the ones with the most freedom to make choices and go in new directions. I was at the bottom of the organization chart at Apple when I started, and I’m at the bottom of the chart today. I’ve never had anyone work for me.
When I built the first Apple computer, the idea of using a TV as a display was forced on me. I didn’t have the money for a Teletype. I didn’t have the money for a terminal. But I had a TV, and I knew enough electronics to snake wires into the set so I could put a signal on the screen. Also, I thought about putting a keyboard on the computer. Nobody had thought of that before. Computers came with ugly wires and switches for getting data into the chips. I said, “Skip all that.” Well, five years earlier I had built my own computer out of switches and lights and all that, and it was neat, and it was an invention, but it wasn’t quite what I wanted. So a lot of these little directions came together to make the personal computer a reality, a computer designed for the people.
You were well established as an engineer long before you earned your degree. How were you able to start so young?
For the most part, my inventing was very individualized. I just went into myself. I thought, if you were trained as an engineer, you designed stuff yourself, and anything you made you’d make on your own, out of your own head. You don’t take something and copy it. I was shocked when I encountered people in engineering who’d copy stuff. That’s not invention. Nowadays you rarely hear of the inventors of computers. Every once in a while, every decade or so, you hear about someone who has invented some device almost on his own. But it’s pretty rare. I’m one of the rare ones who slipped through.
There was a group of people in Silicon Valley in the late seventies—the Homebrew Computer Club—who got together just when the cost of computer components was coming down. They were people who were intrigued by what was approaching, and they wanted something that could be programmed a bit just to show off. I was in that group. I’d listen to the stories, hear the little rumors, and hear all the talk about how computers were going to change the world forever. I just happened to be in the middle of it. I knew how to build these things, I was inspired by it, and I couldn’t wait for it all to happen. This was better than any TV show I could watch.
What the people at the big companies did was sit back and say, “These little computers aren’t quite there yet.” Which was true. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Data General, all those big companies talked to their customers, and their customers said they didn’t want a little $800 computer; they needed the big machine that could do the job. What the companies failed to do was talk to dentists, schoolteachers, and people walking around saying, “Hey, I want to get one of these machines.” So there was a big vacuum, about three years of development that the big-computer world just missed. They didn’t see it happening. And this was during a little window of time when it didn’t cost much for a computer. One person could do it.
You, for instance.
Often I talk at schools about groups and collaboration. I was always very open to the idea of collaboration, but with the sorts of programs I wrote and circuits I designed, I never really collaborated with anybody. Only one other person helped out with the whole Apple II project and wrote some of the code. He did have some very good ideas, and I was really thankful for that. I had grown up doing my homework in my room alone, reading books, pretty much being an individualist. In my computer design I was the same way. I would design a whole computer and never show it to anybody, never share it with teachers or friends. When it came to the Apple design, I did start to show it off a little bit and talk about it. There I was in a sharing community of small computers, and I felt a big part of it.
The world of computer design has changed radically since you introduced the Apple II. Is there anything you miss about the early days?
At Apple I made sure we had schematics, code listings, and program after program, a big package we’d send out to anyone who requested it. It was called the “Woz pack.” For many people, the Apple was their first encounter with a computer, and we made sure they could study it to see how it was designed and built. I get e-mail all the time from people who say that’s what got them started in computers. I wanted to make it something you could learn from, and a good computer too.
Programming is less important now than it was in the seventies and eighties, even though back then we didn’t have computers in the schools. Today when you want to use your computer for a certain application, you go find a program that’s already written to do it. It’s already been thought of. In the early days people loved to write simple little programs in BASIC or machine language, learning the little tricks you could do. It was amazing how much fun that was. That side of it is gone. We were masters of the computer for a little while, masters of a tool that could make us more powerful than the corporations were. Now we’re slaves to learning how it works.
There’s a famous story about a computer you built as a child. How did that happen?
The computer I built when I was 13 grew out of one I saw in a book. It had a set of logic gates that made an adder. I couldn’t buy chips back then; they cost about $50 apiece, so forget about them. But I had transistors because my father got them at his job. I saw this diagram of gates you could build to make an adder, and I saw another diagram for a subtracter. I noticed that they were similar in a lot of ways, but not totally. So I redesigned the circuit, put in a switch and a couple of other little parts, and made it both an adder and a subtracter. I had to build each gate out of transistors and diodes and resistors, and I put them together into a 10-bit adder. That was my science-fair project. It was great because I had to learn the algebra of logic. I had to learn the syntax, how to draw logic gates, how to think about logic gates. I had to learn how to build logic gates out of resistors and diodes and understand the electronics of them. It was a real thorough project, and that’s why the Air Force gave me the prize for the best electronics project in the science fair, even though the fair went all the way through the twelfth grade and I was only in the eighth.
You’ve devoted a lot of time and money to running computer classrooms for fifth graders in San Jose. Why?
From the day we start school, school tries to put us on a narrow little path. There are tight rules because there are 30 kids and only one teacher. We do this in life. We make our kids follow rules and procedures. That’s the opposite of creativity. Kids should be encouraged to go out and think. They shouldn’t be taught to read something in a book and just believe it without asking questions.
I go to schools to see the young people because when I was growing up, I liked education. I thought it would get me where I wanted to go in life. It was fun. It was entertaining just to learn. I’ve always thought teachers were very important and underrated, and they didn’t get paid enough because students don’t get the vote. If students could vote, teachers would get more money. I’ve dedicated a lot of my charitable donations to children’s projects in San Jose. I’ve gotten involved in working with schools, donating computer equipment to schools, teaching in schools, and planning computer projects in schools. That’s where my heart is. When I was in the sixth grade, I told my dad, “I’m going to be an engineer like you, but my second choice is to be a teacher.”
Every kid in my classes gets some education. I don’t just cater to the top kids. But I do try to tell them stories of what I did that was interesting, maybe when I invented something just for a prank, just to get laughs. Laughter leads us to good places in life.
I tell stories about my own inventions and how much fun they’ve been. I try to inspire the kids, but I don’t tell them I’m trying to inspire them. If you say, “You should do this because of this, and you should do that because of that,” that doesn’t work. I sometimes tell them about my first job and what a wonderful time it was in my life. It was the happiest time. It wasn’t like a job. I got to stand up most of the day and work over equipment with oscilloscopes. It’s where my heart was, but I wasn’t even an engineer. I was only a technician.
Why are your designs considered unique?
Sometimes I’ve done a better job because I didn’t know how to do a thing. You don’t have to know who’s done it before and copy his work if you know how to figure things out for yourself. You don’t have to go to school and learn in classes. You just have to say, “I’m just going to figure out a way.” And if somebody puts elements in it that are a waste, I’m going to get rid of that waste. I always think in terms of minimum parts.
When I think of a creative work environment, I think of large, spacious, clean, and all that. But you know what? When I think of my own life, wherever work has really gotten done, it has been pretty messy. Lots of piles of paper and so on. Places that are really clean are not places where work is truly done. When I see a messy kid, I think, “Oh, he’s busy.”
How do the kids you’ve taught compare with you at their age?
When I was young, teachers always seemed to be smarter than I was about everything. But nowadays, when it comes to computers, there’s no competition between the teachers and the students. The teacher doesn’t know nearly as much as the kid.
Any final thought?
Someday I want to retire and fish all day. I really do.
