Apple's Early Days: Massive Oral History Shares Stories About Young Wozniak and Jobs (fastcompany.com) 55
Apple's 50th anniversary is this week — and Fast Company's Harry McCracken just published an 11,000-word oral history with some fun stories from Apple's earliest days and the long and winding road to its very first home computers:
Steve Wozniak, cofounder, Apple: I told my dad when I was in high school, "I'm going to own a computer someday." My dad said, "It costs as much as a house." And I sat there at the table — I remember right where we were sitting — and I said, "I'll live in an apartment." I was going to have a computer if it was ever possible. I didn't need a house.
Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it — "not from anybody else's design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron." Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak's bedroom.
Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn't get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses.
But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs "wasn't a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days." Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak's high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard — where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. ("When he needed some parts, even if we didn't have them, I could order them.") Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later.
Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people "talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value." And once he'd built his first computer, "I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices — public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it."
But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers: Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own.
In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple's founding contract, "which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time." And it was Allen Baum's father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they'd need for their first 500 computers.
After all the memories, the article concludes that "Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible." But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through.
Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It's totally different. They own Cupertino now.
Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive...
Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons — to build something transformative — not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results...
Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy... When you're about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it's not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It's really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it
I'll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.
Woz even remembers trying to build a home computer early on with a teenaged Steve Jobs and Bill Fernandez from rejected parts procured from local electronics companies. Woz designed it — "not from anybody else's design or from a manual. And Fernandez was one of those kids that could use a soldering iron." Bill Fernandez: The computer was very basic. It was working, and we were starting to talk about how we could hook a teletype up to it. Mrs. Wozniak called a reporter from the San Jose Mercury, and he came over with a photographer. We set up the computer on the floor of Steve Wozniak's bedroom.
Well, the core integrated circuit that ran the power supply that I built was an old reject part. We turned on the computer, and the power supply smoked and burnt out the circuitry. So we didn't get our photos in the paper with an article about the boy geniuses.
But within a few years Jobs and Wozniak both wound up with jobs at local tech companies. Atari cofounder Nolan Bushnell remembers that Steve Jobs "wasn't a good engineer, but he was a great technician. He was pristine in his ability to solder, which was actually important in those days." Meanwhile Allen Baum had shared Wozniak's high school interest in computers, and later got Woz a job working at Hewlett-Packard — where employees were allowed to use stockroom parts for private projects. ("When he needed some parts, even if we didn't have them, I could order them.") Baum helped with the Apple I and II, and joined Apple a decade later.
Wozniak remembers being inspired to build that first Apple I by the local Homebrew Computing Club, people "talking about great things that would happen to society, that we would be able to communicate like we never did [before] and educate in new ways. And being a geek would be important and have value." And once he'd built his first computer, "I wanted these people to help create the revolution. And so I passed out my designs with no copyright notices — public domain, open source, everything. A couple of other people in the club did build it."
But Woz and Jobs had even tried pitching the computer as a Hewlett-Packard product, Woz remembers: Steve Wozniak: I showed them what it would cost and how it would work and what it could do with my little demos. They had all the engineering people and the marketing people, and they turned me down. That was the first of five turndowns from Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and I had to go into business on our own.
In the end, Randy Wigginton, Apple employee No. 6 remembers witnessing Jobs, Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne the signing of Apple's founding contract, "which is pretty funny, because I was 15 at the time." And it was Allen Baum's father who gave Wozniak and Jobs the bridge loan to buy the parts they'd need for their first 500 computers.
After all the memories, the article concludes that "Trying to connect every dot between Apple, the tiny, dirt-poor 1970s startup, and Apple, the $3.7 trillion 21st-century global colossus, is impossible." But this much is clear: The company has always been at its best when its original quirky humanity and willingness to be an outlier shine through.
Mark Johnson, Apple employee No. 13: I was in Cupertino just yesterday. It's totally different. They own Cupertino now.
Jonathan Rotenberg, who cofounded the Boston Computer Society in 1977 at age 13: People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive...
Mike Markkula, the early retiree from Intel whose guidance and money turned the garage startup into a company: The culture mattered. People were there for the right reasons — to build something transformative — not just to make money. That alignment produced extraordinary results...
Steve Wozniak: Everything you do in life should have some element of joy in it. Even your work should have an element of joy... When you're about to die, you have certain memories. And for me, it's not going to be Apple going public or Apple being huge and all that. It's really going to be stories from the period when humble people spotted something that was interesting and followed it
I'll be thinking of that when I die, along with a lot of pranks I played. The important things.
Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit, plenty of others could have done what he did. VERY few could have done what Wozniak did and its a damn shame that not many people outside of the tech world have heard of him.
Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
It's too convenient to just write off Jobs. The truth is somewhere in the middle, as it always is. The idea that plenty of others could have done what he did is just too dismissive. When he died the company was worth a third of a trillion dollars. Not just any sociopath can pull that off.
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Complete assholes run the world.
It's not about brains, obviously, it's about aggressively bullying people into doing what you want. It's never been different and it's never been a secret.
Only difference between now and back in the days of Saddam Hussein, is that they used to just blow your head off if you failed to do their bidding, but now even Trump and Musk just fires you and you end up selling your real estate to pay your legal bills. So much more civilized.
Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,
Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?
Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it. Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.
Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...
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"He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company."
Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK. Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.
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The Sinclair was popular because it cost $199.
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That by itself is no mean feat of engineering.
Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Clive Sinclair's company collapsed within five years of shipping their first computer. Perhaps not a good counter-example.
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Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK.
Kinda, I mean he did well, but it went under. Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.
Furber and Wilson lacked that marketing muscle. Were they a unique talent? I mean... no one else did that. Their CPU worked first time, outperformed their contemporaries, ran at a fraction of the power cost a fraction of the amount and went on to become massively popular.
Maybe Woz could
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Acorn did somewhat better and parts of Acorn are alive and well to this day.
Not the least of which are inside every single Apple Silicon SoC!
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"He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company."
Check out Clive Sinclair - he was an engineer and did pretty damn well selling his computers in the UK. Maybe Woz couldn't have done that, but it doesn't mean Jobs was the one required to help him, any competenant marketing type could have done the same. Vew few people could have designed the hardware and software that Woz did at the time.
I hate to disagree, but there is a huge difference between conceptualization and marketing. But you realize you are saying that Apple would be where it is at today with a marketing person as CEO.
Marketing people might be able to sell refrigerators to inuits, but someone needs to come up with concept and direction. I've been involved with marketeers for a long time. They pitch products, not conceptualize, design or built them.
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Once again, Jack Tramiel gets no credit despite pushing computers into more hands than anyone else...
(Yes, not an engineer, but neither was Jobs. Jobs was always management and marketing, whatever his background might have been.)
I think the reality is that multiple people turned a hobby into a market and phenomenon. The reason Jobs gets so much focus is, I'm guessing:
1. While like Tramiel, Sinclair, Chris Curry/Hermann Hauser, and the largely forgotten names behind the TRS-80, he pushed for home computers t
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Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit,
Suit? The guy who famously wore a black turtleneck all the time?
Anyhoo. I think people outside tech overestimate the importance of CEOs and people in tech underestimate it.
So much this.
While it doesn't fit the standard Slashdot meme of the CEO as worthless psychopath, there is a value, and an ability that goes with the work. Being a CEO in two organizations, and now interacting with them in my present position, I have to say I work my ass off to keep things running. I get called asshole at times, and sometimes people have to just trust me - it's my career on the line - but it isn't the fever dream people have about the position.
Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all. He wasn't a product guy, and you need a product not just raw tech to sell. Selling stuff being somewhat important for a company.
Steve Jobs also had a functioning reality distortion field, something not all that many people have and that's really important for building a company...
Also this. Wozniak was Wozniak. And Jobs was
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Also this. Wozniak was Wozniak. And Jobs was Jobs. They had an important synergy. But without Jobs, Woz would almost certainly be as you described.
Synergy is the exactly correct word.
The world would not have heard of either of them without the both of them.
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Without Jobs, Woz probably would have been a really great engineer in some company and you'd never have heard of him at all.
And very much vice-versa!
It was one of the great accidental business synergies in history; at an amazing time that can never happen again. . .
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FWIW he wore the turtleneck in his "comeback" after he rejoined Apple as iCEO. Before that he really was known for his suits.
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Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit
checks out. that's exactly the "skillset" you need to succeed in getting all the accolades and fame in society, specially in western capitalist society.
Re: Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:1)
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agreed, these classist people use our wealth to abscond with the inventions of honest people, this is exactly how classsism works, the upper class uses our capital to cheat and steal from us
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It took a visionary to really understand what Wozniak already had and what it could be. That was beyond even HP at the time.
Re:Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:5, Informative)
That is false. Jobs and Wozniak actually are the yin and yang of Apple. Wozniak by himself, left to his own devices, would still be working at HP. Jobs by himself, would have been a has-been engineer. Jobs was actually competent as an engineer (unlike say, other "engineers" like Musk).
Jobs though, was more tuned into the business side of things than the engineering side of things, while Woz was the opposite.
Woz and Jobs got started by making a blue box - Jobs had read about them in the Esquire article, and Woz built one of the first digital blue boxes. Both of them went around Berkeley selling them to college students for $150 or so and they made a few thousand.
Jobs knew about computers, Woz built a computer. Woz was basically giving the Apple I away at the Homebrew Computer Club and it was one among dozens of others doing the same. Jobs had the business acumen to recognize he could do one better and sold it to a computer store and get the production of it going (requiring Woz to sell his HP-35 calculator). They'd build 10 (all they could afford), sell them and use the money to build 20 and so on.
Wpz designed the hardware. Jobs saw the potential and could leverage the confidence he had to not just sell it, but to get it produced - arranging the suppliers to give them 30 days credit.
These days it's a lot easier since if you want something built, China can handle the production if you meet the minimum order quantity. But back then, it's not like there was a huge electronics supply chain, production lines, or anything else.
Both Jobs and Woz were soldering Apple Is in that garage too - like I said, Jobs was an OK engineer, but he knew talent. Woz was an excellent engineer, but was happy at HP and didn't really have the desire to start his own company.
It's Yin and Yang - you need both, which is how Apple got started. Woz would likely have kept this computer as a nifty prototype then bought a Commodore when they came out a few years later whilst still at HP. Jobs would likely have drifted among various electronics companies (he was at Atari) once the crash happened.
You have to remember Jobs went and found NeXT after Macintosh got the Apple board to oust him. He sold his Apple stock and basically created NeXT. He used the earnings at NeXT to basically backstop Pixar (who was struggling and about to go under) and eventually fund Toy Story.
And he brought the second coming to Apple, recognizing talent in Jony Ives to design a computer so unique everyone knew what it was.
Doesn't excuse Jobs being an asshole, though. The only redeeming personal quality Jobs had is that he managed his RDF (reality distortion field) to push the people who work for him to do their best work. He was a pain to work for, but if you actually do good, he did reward you to encourage you to do more great work.
Re: Wozniak - the real reason for Apple (Score:1)
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Doesn't excuse Jobs being an asshole, though.
There is a bit of a different mindset/skillset involved in CEO or visionary work. And a lot of people seem to think anyone could do it. Like the one guy who said a marketing person could do what Jobs did.
No, they can't. A person with the proper mindset and vision can market if they have the ability. But the bog-standard marketeer can't.
And a person with vision can be a bit testy to be around. I've been CEO of two corporations. You work your ass off, despite the memes. You have to deal with people who challenge everything - which is okay, except when the challenges aren't all that clever. And you are called an asshole. By people who believe that worth is inversely proportional to position. You deal with it.
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I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, but you're perspective is skewed.
If you were talking about Apple, the struggling computer company that ensured schools had access to computers and catered to creative users, then yes Wosniak was the critical enabling piece. If you are talking about the behemoth built on the back of creative design (iMac/iPod/iPhone) and functionality, no. Wozniak had almost nothing to do with that and it was largely thanks to Jobs.
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Lots of people could and did design and/or build personal computers in the 70s. Magazines published designs and sold mail order kits pior to the Apple I. There were also a bunch of pre-built home computers contemporary with the Apple I/II, and several of them were more popular.
Neither Steve was really the singular genius people like to retrospectively paint them as. Together they did good work and were in the right place at the right time with the right motivation.
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Only found your comment because it was at the end of the FP branch. No help from the moderators, though I think your comment is quite insightful and I mostly concur. I'll go farther in a minute, but first I have a meta-reaction to how active the FP branch was. Your comment appears to be about 3/5 of the way to the bottom, so I think it is reasonable to say that it was a productive FP.
But I think the credit/karma should be limited. I think a lot of the favorable reactions are based on a kind of projection co
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I was going to say that the Woz/Jobs duo has become such an archetype because the different sides of computing can project themselves onto it. The geeks give Woz all the credit, the suits give it to Jobs. As someone who thinks lots of people would be happier and more productive working for themselves I'll project that and give credit to HP for pissing them both off enough to go off and do their own thing.
If you haven't read it, The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen is a good read, and relevant:
https://ia801301. [archive.org]
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Thanks for the citation. My records do indicate I read it in 2011, but no details come to mind. The date indicates I probably got it from the Chiba library...
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I do hope that Woz gets a special recognition from Apple on that anniversary day, since Jobs ain't around
Early prototypes funded by HP policy (Score:3)
I didn't know about that before.
That's always a big factor in early experimenting. Who pays for all the components and test equipment? Even when the labour is free, if you don't have the R&D resources you're forever dead in the water.
Re:Early prototypes funded by HP policy (Score:4, Informative)
It's odd because it's a pretty well known story. Wozniak loved experimenting and HP had a policy that lets engineers have access to HP's parts to produce a product. The only restriction was that HP had the right to your invention if they wanted it.
Wozniak presented HP management with the then Apple I computer, but they rejected it because they couldn't believe anything using a standard TV would meet HP's quality. The reason being that TVs from random manufacturers will have different visual quality and there was no way to control it.
is Apple the only one? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the early computer start-ups, Apple is the only "started in the garage on a shoestring budget and passion to create something everyone would love" that I can recall hearing about. Were they they only ones to get started like that?
And I see so many people already trash-talking Jobs... business sense without a great product has nothing, but tech genius without business never takes off. Both are necessary! It takes a good product and a good salesman to make a successful brand. Apple was fortunate to have both, it was their recipe for success.
Re:is Apple the only one? (Score:4, Informative)
HP was started in a garage.
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It took both of them to get an Apple 2+ into my parent's living room in 1982. And that's where my passion and my career started.
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it only took fifty years to become completely evil (Score:2)
that's impressive, usually it does not take so long for upper class people to wreck everything for everybody
greed, classism and corruption has destroyed our economy and enslaved us all
Not me (Score:3, Informative)
According to Jonathan Rotenberg, "People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive..."
Not me. I hate Apple for entirely personal reasons. I've supported Apple products professionally for 28 years. Apple sucks. Their corporate sales policies suck. Their support sucks compared to other major PC vendors. Their device security sucks. (Realistically, their device security is pretty decent, but it makes it dramatically harder for me to keep them in good working condition.)
Re: Not me (Score:2)
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According to Jonathan Rotenberg, "People want to hate Apple, because it is big and powerful. But Apple has an underlying moral purpose that is immensely deep and expansive..."
Not me. I hate Apple for entirely personal reasons. I've supported Apple products professionally for 28 years. Apple sucks. Their corporate sales policies suck. Their support sucks compared to other major PC vendors. Their device security sucks. (Realistically, their device security is pretty decent, but it makes it dramatically harder for me to keep them in good working condition.)
Wanna know how badly Apple sucked? I had a Magic Mouse go dead. I got on the phone with Cupertino. After convincing them it was a legitimate defect,at 5 p.M, they had one at my doorstep at 9 the next morning - California to PA. Their only request was to send the old one back prepaid so they could do a postmortem.
I had a bluetooth problem with my headphones. I'm rather deaf. After posting on their support section, I got an unexpected phone call in 15 minutes. I dunno if text sent an alert, but one of their
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As a consumer brand, yes, their support is great. You are also paying a premium for Apple products compared to a $400 white-box laptop.
As a business customer, their support sucks.
The biggest issue is that Apple hardware is largely unrepairable. I call Dell with a problem and they either send a tech to my door with a part or they get me a pre-paid return shipping carton and I repaired systems back within a couple of days. Apple's solution is to replace hardware and say, "sorry we can't recover your data".
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As a consumer brand, yes, their support is great. You are also paying a premium for Apple products compared to a $400 white-box laptop.
As a business customer, their support sucks.
I've used Apple products professionally since the 1990's. Using it professionally today.
So your claim fails utterly. What's your next excuse? I'm sure you have one
So hey, we must remember this is the 2020's, where you can have your own personal truth!
Amen (Score:2)
Let's all get on our knees and say ten Hail Steves:
Hail Steve, full of vision,
Innovation is with thee.
Blessed art thou among creators,
And blessed is the fruit of thy mind, Apple.
Holy Steve, pioneer of design,
Guide us in simplicity and boldness,
Now and at the hour of creation.
Amen.
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Back in the day (Score:4, Interesting)
I was an electronics technician back in the late 70's. I had worked for a year or so debugging circuit boards that came off of an assembly line (many parts were soldered on by hand) so I had experience with the simple IC's and CPU's of that time. This was rare skill in those days, and I leveraged that to get a job as the technician at a Computerland store that sold Apple II, Commodore Pet, Atari 400, etc. I didn't know a thing about them at first, but nobody else did either.
We didn't have circuit diagrams for most of the computers so there was little hope for repairing them, but all the IC's in the Apple were plugged in to sockets and were removable. I was able to get a diagram that showed which section of the board was responsible for what subsystem - display, keyboard, memory, I/O, etc. This made it possible to set a working machine on a bench next to a broken one and swap IC's one by one until you reached the defective component. I fixed a lot of Apples that way.
They were hugely expensive. A fully loaded Apple II cost about $2,500 in 1980, which would be about $10,000 in today's money. But people bought them! I think we sold one or two a week.
Young Wozniak and Jobs .. (Score:2)
There's a biopic. (Score:1)
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this was an insightful view of the future (Score:2)
And being a geek would be important and have value
They kicked off a complete 180 degree change in society which took ~ 20 years / a full generational turnover to really begin to appear through society and now about half a century later is just a given.
It used to be a bad thing to be "unhealthily" obsessed with masterfully understanding any niche subject just because you wanted to know.
It has so completely gone the opposite direction that now after each new technology wave becomes established reliably there will be an inrush of non-technical wannabee's grif
Two unfunnies in a row? (Score:2)
Always feel a bit disappointed when a long discussion falls into oblivion without a Funny.