Woz at Idea Festival 18.September.2007
Last Friday, Steve Wozniak was the big headliner at Kentucky’s Idea Festival. He was promoting his book iWoz and shared with the well fed audience for an hour about his childhood through developing the Apple II and founding the company.
Woz’s childhood was definitely the path that brought him to where he was when his Apple II “ignited the personal computer revolution”[1]. On stage he came across as a very humble person, even though based on his inventions and accomplishments as an engineer, would be able to justify a large ego. He grew up a shy introvert, living in what would come to be known a Silicon Valley. Intrinsically motivated by nature, he wanted nothing more to learn about electronics and computers just for “the fun that [he] did learn it”. Woz was so shy and quite that growing up he preferred to design circuits behind closed doors, he didn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder. When he got a job at HP, he loved working there so much that it took many calls from friends and family to convince him to leave to do the Apple thing full time. So driven to learn, he and his high school friends would sneak into technical libraries late at night, but that was pretty easy since as he said, smart people always leave doors open.
Starting in his young years, he was very focused on making things the best he could. And by “best”, I don’t mean making something big and full of features. He wanted to make everything efficient, as efficient as possible. He would design and redesign something again and again until it used as few parts as possible, and even using parts for things that they weren’t designed for. This is how he got the first computer to display color on a TV. Efficiently also meant simplicity. “Micro-computers”, before Woz, were wooden boxes with switches, lights and buttons. The Apple I was literally the first computer to have a keyboard and mouse. Even though he no longer works at Apple, you can still see his drive for simplicity as an underlying principle in most of Apple’s current products.
When Woz went to college, he started playing some of the pranks he is famous for. He created the first Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose area, which was tricky since it was illegal to own an answering machine, but did serve up 2,000 calls a day and met his wife through that venture. Woz is some sort of genius. He excelled at every thing in the field he did, which lead him to a high school teacher getting him an internship because the electronics class won’t teach him anything he didn’t already know. He had no problem getting jobs programing or maintaining any computer he came across. Shortly after being introduced to Steve Jobs who was working at Atari, he developed a one player version of Pong, Breakout, in only 4 days. Normally a team of developers would be giving six months to complete a game of that scope, and in those days games were all about the hardware. It was this game Breakout that also became the first software based game when it was released for the Apple II.