RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif. - Is your credit union destined to be an Apple Computer? Or an Atari?
According to the person who was one of the driving forces in the personal computing revolution in the country and around the planet, the answer lies in clearing your head of everything you know, not laughing and dismissing new ideas, stressing simplicity, and investing in research and development.
Steve Wozniak, the cofounder with Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and widely hailed for his engineering, mathematical and computing genius, shared with credit unions the lessons that separated the Apples of the world from the Ataris in remarks before CO-OP Financial Services Think Conference here.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Wozniak’s told his story and that of Apple in linear fashion, beginning with his own youth. In recounting his childhood and later his young adulthood, Wozniak made it very clear he is a computer and math geek in every sense of the words, and that he would go on to play such a crucial and fundamental role in computing was not a surprise.
The son of an engineer, Wozniak said that for much of his early life his only goals were to follow in his father’s footsteps and to someday also teach fifth grade. His pace in talking about his fascination with zeroes and ones was nearly as quick as the data those same zeroes and ones can crunch, and he moved through his life in rapid order.
Financing From A Credit Union
Wozniak, who noted he financed his first car through Hewlett Packard’s credit union, recounted the developments in technology and computing that were really exploding as he was coming of age. One of his early goals as a kid, he said, was to someday have a transistor radio, and by age 11 he was a ham radio operator who spent his free time soldering together electronics parts both alone and with friends with similar interests.
Wozniak, 57, told credit unions the next step in his young life was when “logic came along,” explaining that “tic tac toe” is just a game of rules, and each rule required a transistor,” which led to his fifth grade science project. “Computer science can be learned by a fifth grader,” said Wozniak. “You don’t need higher education.” By high school, he knew “the computer was going to be the most important thing in my life.”
Wozniak eventually enrolled at UC-Berkeley but he often headed south to Palo Alto to sneak into the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. “I would drive down there on Sundays where I discovered that wherever really bright people work they tend to leave their doors open,” he recalled.
Early on, in an epiphany that would become a cornerstone of Apple’s products, Wozniak said he found that “technical people are really good at keeping things vague from the ordinary person.” Similarly, he said he learned another lesson that is quite applicable to credit unions: “The fewer parts it takes, the better. The simpler, the better.” As a result, he developed what would become his mantra, “For the rest of my life I tried to build (computers) for a lot less cost than the original design.”
Despite the seriousness of his approach to computing, engineering and mathematics, Wozniak is fond of pranks, and throughout his life he has used the aforementioned interests to pull many of them off. It was that history as a prankster that led to his introduction to Steve Jobs, who attended the same high school as Wozniak but was several years behind him. The two met on a street, and “the first thing we talked about was pranks. Then we talked about electronics and computers.”
Wozniak acknowledged Jobs is the yin to his yang; Jobs has a counter-culture personality, Wozniak’s dream was to be a computer engineer with a large corporation such as HP. “Although he won’t say it, I think Steve really wanted to be one of those people who change the world,” observed Wozniak.
Following that now famous introduction, the two went on to work together on a number of projects, with Jobs always seeing and/or seeking ways to make money from various ventures. Wozniak preferred a more orderly existence, observing, “I decided engineers were the best people in the world because it either works or it doesn’t, and that’s how you’re judged.”
Laughter, But It Was No Joke
Wozniak left college for a year–stressing he did not drop out–to work at Hewlett Packard. “It was an incredible place in life, because they respected engineers,” he said. But those same engineers weren’t infallible, with Wozniak recalling numerous missteps and missed opportunities. Engineers at HP, for instance, “laughed” at the first simple-to-use calculator from Texas Instruments. “Sometimes you have to clear your head of what you know,” he said.
For Wozniak, another awakening came when he first saw the electronic game “Pong” while in a bowling alley. “That was unbelievable. It was a whole different approach to using a TV. I said I have to build one. It told me TV (monitor) was the future.” He noted he destroyed his own TV experimenting with it, and had to get a loan from his credit union for another. “Without that TV Apple never would have happened,” said Wozniak.
After working on a project for then industry-leading Atari Computer, Wozniak said, “I started to pay a lot of attention after this to the whole computer world, and began filing away all the information that would lead us to small computers.”
Those small computers were something that Wozniak was all but willing to give away, until Jobs found out. “I gave away the design. I wanted people to have the machines and change the world.” But Jobs convinced Wozniak to build boards for $20 that they, in turn were able to sell for $40. Their little company was named Apple by Jobs.
“Steve Jobs called me one day to tell me we had a $50,000 order (for the Apple I computer). We got a supplier to give us 30 days on the parts, and we got instant payment from a computer store,” said Wozniak, adding that both Atari and Commodore declined to buy into the company when approached. A corporate angel finally invested in the fledgling Apple Computer.
Apple has made mistakes, including the expensive and poor selling Lisa model, noted Wozniak. And business users had initial concerns with other Apple products. “The Mac was initially thought of as a toy because it had pictures,” said Wozniak.
But it overcame mistakes and perceptions because it stuck to some simple philosophies, according to Wozniak. “Steve Jobs always asks, ‘What is it that a person wants to do?’”
He recounted how in the earliest days Apple would place a computer in a room by itself and then invite someone who had never seen the computer, or any computer for that matter, to use it and providing them with no instructions. Watching from behind a one-way mirror, Apple’s execs wanted to know if someone could figure out what a mouse was for, how it worked, and how to open and execute files.
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