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Steve Wozniak Quotes

Article Overview: Steve Wozniak Quotes

Steve Wozniak Quotes

I wanted to be an engineer and design things that work like radios and TV's. I didn't express scientific ideals, only technical ones and I didn't fit the Cal Tech model. My counselor gave me a bad review also because I had done a lot of pranks at the school even though they had only officially caught me for one of them (when the cop tricked me with a lie). What are the rewards? We didn't have computers back then. You don't get to use it, you don't get a job, you don't get any money. You don't get any acknowledgment. You don't get a title. The rewards are intrinsic. They're in your own mind.

When we started Apple, it seemed as though nothing could go wrong. Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.

They were the first low-cost computers ever with built-in colour, graphics, sound, and programming languages. In addition, they were usable out of the box. Our vision was that people would find computers useful at home, for ‘people things' like balancing checkbooks, keeping address lists and typing letters.

My love wasn't starting a company and making money; it was designing computers and writing software. Things I could do without a company. I loved HP and wanted the greater job security. Steve went into a frenzy and had my relatives and friends call me and convince me that it was OK to start a company and just be an engineer.

Basically, all the game features were put in just so I could show off the game I was familiar with - Breakout - at the Homebrew Computer Club. It seemed like a huge step to me. After designing hardware arcade games, I knew that being able to program them in Basic was going to change the world.

I have never left the company. I keep a tiny residual salary to this day because that's where my loyalty should be forever. I want to be an ‘employee' on the company database.

I'd scrap things together - try this, try this, try this.

I once laid out the whole board, and then I got an idea to save one feed-through. So I took the board apart, I trashed maybe a week's worth of work, and then I started over.

I would up trapped by the world.

It gets to the point where you can't tell where your inventiveness was lost.

Doing something neat and fun.

My skill was that, if I know what I want for the end result - in those days it was a computer, in later days it might be a certain floppy disk that had to read and write some data - but if I knew what my end goal was, I know how to combine chips together very efficiently to get that goal done. Even if I've never designed anything before.

My skills weren't that I knew how to design a floppy disk, I knew how to design a printer interface, I knew how to design a modem interface; it was that, when the time came and I had to get one done, I would design my own, fresh, without knowing how other people do it.

Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.

When you are a startup or an individual on your own, you don't have very much money, so the fewer parts you have to buy, the better. When you design with very few parts, everything is so clean and orderly you can understand it more deeply in your head, and that causes you to have fewer bugs. You live and sleep with every little detail of the product.

Steve Jobs and I started with literally no money. No cars. The parts we used to create the Apple I were purchased on thirty days credit.

Don't think about the money you don't have. Rather, what can you do with what you do have?

You'd better have the technology knowledge to do it. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you'll end up owning so few of those ideas. You have to create a working model, something that you can show people and demonstrate that it works, and then you can start building a future for it.

I was shy, he was outward. I created, he sold.

It was a culture of information exchange. The computer club was founded as more of a social organization than technical. Our whole purpose was to help others. We were frustrated that we couldn't afford a personal computer; the companies we worked for did, but we didn't like that they weren't our own. And that common bond, the interest we shared in technology, bonded us.

We had a big club, and it grew to 500 members and it was huge. The club was all about giving, because back then there were not dollars in this business. It was: give some knowledge. Write down a program that you've got. Write down how to build a certain device. Offer some help. Offer some information. Offer some parts at a good price. Offer your own time.

Our idea was that these computers were going to free us and allow us to organize. They were going to empower us. We could sit down and write programs that did more than our company's programs on their big million-dollar computers did. And little fifth-graders would go into companies and write a better program than the top gurus being paid the top salary, and it was going to turn the tables over. We were excited by this revolutionary talk.

Apple I PC boards were manufactured at a company in Santa Clara. We had supplied them our design, the layout done by a friend of Steve's from Atari. After about 50 boards were made, our components came out of a closet there, starting the 30 day clock ticking on payment. Assemblers put all the components in the boards and the boards were wave soldered there, all for $13 in 1976. We drove down and picked up about 20 boards at a time and drove them back to the garage which had a single workbench.

We paid Steve's sister or other friends $1 per board to insert the ICs. Then we tested them. I had to fix virtually all the ones that failed. Then we drove them to the local computer store, the only local store, the Byte Shop of Palo Alto, and were paid in cash. The store got our PC board in a box.

Keys to happiness came to me that would keep me happy for the whole of my life. It was just accidental. I don't know how many people get it. It's like religion or something that just popped into my head, walking home from school.

One thing was knowing that I was good and believing that I was good and having a good belief about myself. The other was knowing that I could disagree with other people.

I had my own little thought in my head, and it was well structured and it was correct for me. And they could have their own. It's like the song says: ‘There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, there's only you and me and we just disagree.'

When I was doing this work well, I didn't have a wife or a girlfriend. I couldn't do anything else.

The way I work requires so much concentration. Getting to know the problem well enough by thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And then you try every day to make it a little better, go through it again and again, cutting something off here or there.

Now computers are a big business. Sometimes I wonder, ‘Am I the master of the computer?' When we talked in our club, computers were going to be so simple to use that everyone was going to be a master and be able to create whatever they wanted to. Now I feel like a slave sometimes. I have to do it their way. It wasn't the feeling we were after in the first days.

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  Steve Jobs Bio
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  Lesson #4: “You try every day to make it a little better”
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Article Tags: acknowledgment, arcade games, breakout, cal tech, checkbooks, colour graphics, common people, company database, designing computers, first computers, frenzy, game features, greed, homebrew computer club, job security, low cost computers, pranks, programming languages, revolutionary spirit, writing software



Related Forum Posts
Re: Citizen Journalism: There's no such thing - This clearly shows that if Steve Jobs sneezes the price of the stock will drop. Since Apple is a great company why do they have to link the rise and fall of the stock to one man? So eventually when Steve passes on what is going to happen to Apples stock?
Re: What If Steve Jobs Hadn't Returned To Apple In 1997? - Thanks for sharing with us Yinko. Steve Jobs is definitely a visionary. Not only his products are innovative in a technological sense, but he's managed to turn a tech-company's products into a lifestyle.... a lifestyle!! [quote:zfqoq43n]Fast Forward to today. Apple has the sexiest products in the business: iMacs, Macbooks, iPhones, iPods and more.[/quote:zfqoq43n] I think not only tech would be different (music players and phones), but ways we can think of marketing and branding. What Steve Jobs did was of course no easy task for the smaller businesses, but he did start somewhere. What I did not know was that Apple is worth about as much as Google. How do you think Apple accomplish what they did? In terms of strategy wise? If you could advice Steve on one thing, what would it be?
Re: Citizen Journalism: There's no such thing - [quote="ideasuniversity":2zpdpyk9]This clearly shows that if Steve Jobs sneezes the price of the stock will drop. Since Apple is a great company why do they have to link the rise and fall of the stock to one man? So eventually when Steve passes on what is going to happen to Apples stock?[/quote:2zpdpyk9] That's a very good point. He needs to appoint a successor now or in some way affirm that the company will exist even if he goes under!
Facebook application - Hi Kevin - thanks for the suggestion! The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? I like your idea as well. We've got a rollout schedule of new features for the site that we are working on first before we can get to the Facebook app. We're also not sure how hard it is to integrate into Facebook. It looks like there is a php way to do it which is great because that is our core competency.
Facebook applications - ....[quote:36s714h1]The two that we were thinking of were Famous Entrepreneur Quotes and Which famous entrepreneur am I most like? [/quote:36s714h1] So far my own foray into Facebook has been a complete bust, though I expected that from the start. But if I do an Application for my own particular field of interest, such as Your Favorite Sci Fi movie...that might get people going. So Evan when you figure out how to do this please let me know how complicated it is!!


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