“I believe in mathematics more than politics. Steve Wozniak - RBC: “The digital revolution is making us more and more the same
Last few years Steve Wozniak began to appear in front of cameras more often, give interviews and share memories from the past. Someone 64 years old genius inventor somewhat annoying, and some people treat the antics of the extraordinary engineer with condescension. But precisely thanks to sharp mind Wozniak saw the world see the first computer. Today, the co-founder of Apple spoke with reporters from Bloomberg and talked about the origins of the company.
You said that even then you understood that a revolution was coming in the world of computers. What is the merit of Steve Jobs?
Steve Wozniak: Steve always talked about how he wanted to be the person who would make the world move forward. But at the same time, unlike me, he could not create a product or come up with its design on his own. At that time, Steve had little understanding of what exactly a successful company should be in order to take a confident place in the market. Initially, he didn’t care what place the computer would take in the average family. He radically changed his point of view about people’s perception of the personal computer a little later.
You have repeatedly emphasized that you tried to avoid conflicts. How was Steve in this regard?
S.V.: Steve was always sure that only his point of view was truly correct; it was his opinion that should have been dominant. Fortunately, nature endowed him with enviable intelligence.
He rarely gave a sufficient number of arguments, he simply expressed his thought and considered it the only correct one. And he was always right.
How many computers have you sold?
S.V.: When our first Apple I computer was ready, we were able to sell about a hundred machines. First year of sales Apple II allowed the implementation of several thousand computers. Then we started developing software and released the first version of the application to work with spreadsheets. What an office worker previously spent 10 hours on, he could now complete in 60 minutes. Sales skyrocketed. Over the next five years, we sold our first million computers.
Were you confident that Apple would become one of the most influential companies in the computer industry in the future?
S.V.: From the first days of the founding of Apple, I understood that a computer is something that, in the evolutionary hierarchy, is significantly ahead of all surrounding objects and technical achievements of mankind. We knew that the revolution was happening right before our eyes.
Everyone who joined Apple later recalled their days at the company as some of the best in their lives.
Tell us a little about the summer when you created the Apple I.
S.V.: Before I started working on the Apple I, the human understanding of a computer was something incomprehensible, cumbersome and inaccessible. Like in a historical museum or a science fiction film. This is exactly what they looked like: a bunch of switches, huge metal panels, light bulbs and diodes - only a trained person could work with such a machine.
Released in 1972 IBM 370-168
The Apple I was the first computer to have a keyboard and display. You could type a word and immediately see it on the screen. The ability to play games, type... This was a turning point in history.
Where did you work on the Apple I assembly?
S.V.: All the rough work had already been done before. All that remained was to collect everything in a heap, think through the design and placement of the boards, and install them. I did all this at my workplace at Hewlett-Packard.
It was a great time. I was able to work on several non-target projects in parallel. Five years later, in 1975, the Apple I appeared. A year later, the Apple II entered the market.
But we have repeatedly heard that the assembly of the first Apple computer took place in a garage?
S.V.: The garage is rather a beautiful myth. We did not develop, design, install and assemble computers in a garage. The garage was rather our place of rest, the corner in which we felt at home. We didn’t have money then, and in order to earn money, we had to leave the walls of the house. [bloomberg]
The co-founder of the most valuable company in the world - Apple - and the developer of the first commercially successful personal computer explained to RBC why people will not become immortal, will not turn into cyborgs and will not give jobs to robots
Steve Wozniak (Photo: Anton Sergienko / RBC)
Steve Wozniak is one of the most famous figures in the IT industry. In 1976, he, along with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, founded the Apple company, which soon launched the first model of the computer of the same name (it is believed that Wozniak developed the hardware for the computer almost single-handedly). Steve Wozniak now works as an engineer and scientist, collaborating with a number of companies and non-profit associations . He is also known as a futurist: for example, back in 1982, Wozniak was able to predict the appearance of portable PCs (laptops) in the future. He is still considered one of the leading experts in the field of technology development. Steve Wozniak visited Moscow on April 4, 2018 to participate in the AMOCONF-2018 conference, organized company amoCRM.
“I am sincerely sorry that the development of computers has led to the emergence of surveillance tools”
— Mr. Wozniak, what technologies do you think will change the world in the coming years?
“I can’t say that I know any secret technologies—both you and I have heard about all the most important ones today hundreds of times.” As Moore's Law (an observation by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors fit on a chip doubles every two years) RBC) is reaching its limit, more and more attention will be paid not to hardware, but to the development of new programs, optimization of algorithms, data processing and everything that will allow computer technologies bring more benefits to people. This, in particular, is a blockchain, which makes it possible to track all user actions within the system, as well as the payment channels built on it, in a completely different way than before. This is also machine learning (a class of methods for creating artificial intelligence, characteristic feature which is not direct solution any task, but learning in the process of solving many similar problems. — RBC), which will play an increasingly important role in our daily lives.
But any benefit has back side- society is becoming “plastic”: we are more and more alike, we have less and less creativity, individuality, and independence. Even the houses we live in are basically the same. And the digital revolution makes us increasingly dependent on technology and in some ways more the same.
— How justified are the fears that Big Brother, using “big data,” will know literally everything about us? Governments, companies and other interested parties are already actively monitoring people through their own electronic devices.
“I think this problem is very important, very serious. And I am sincerely sorry that the development of computers, to which I had a hand, has led to the emergence of surveillance tools that many people are not even aware of. I have always been committed to liberal values and, as you know, I am one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - non-profit organization, which, among other things, protects people's rights to prevent companies from sharing their personal information with a third party. Constitution various countries determine what the government can and cannot do. And the legislation of many countries enshrines the right of people to immunity privacy- no one has the right, say, to listen telephone conversations and observe what they do in their own homes without court approval. And I don’t like that modern technical capabilities make it easy to violate what the law is trying to guarantee us. One day people will have to start fighting for their rights - stand up and tell the state: this will not work.
— Will cybercrime become a much more dangerous threat in the future than it is now?
“Cybercrimes are becoming more widespread and dangerous from year to year, and in the near future the situation will only worsen. I think that we must quickly limit the opportunities for their commission - as has previously happened with other types of crimes. We need to do this before the situation gets out of control. Of course, you will never be able to reduce to zero the likelihood that someone will hack the network you use, steal valuable information from it, your money, personal data, or harm people in some other way. Just as it is impossible to reduce, say, cases of car theft to zero. But over time, we will be able, for example, to build a blockchain system in which any serious action will require confirmation from users. Such systems will be almost impossible to hack. They are not possible now due to technical limitations, but I am sure that sooner or later they will appear. True, for them to work, we will gradually have to rebuild the entire Internet. But it will become truly safe.
Tops and roots
Stephen Gary Wozniak was born on August 11, 1950 in San Jose, California. He owned 45% of the shares of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), but to date Wozniak has less than 1% of the company's shares. In 1981, he was involved in a plane crash, after which he retired from participating in the management of Apple. Subsequently, Wozniak was involved in a number of projects, most of which did not become commercially successful. In 2002, Wozniak co-founded Wheels of Zeus, a “physical reality search engine” that would help people find everyday items they need. The project's technology used GPS tags that could be attached to a suitcase or keys, and a special search device that could track the location of these items. The project managed to attract $6 million from venture capital companies, but was never able to take off. In 2006, he stopped working. Wozniak later participated in projects such as Acquicor Technology, Fusion-io and Primary Data, most of which involved leading scientific developments. But so far all these projects have not turned into a large-scale business.
Wozniak was not officially fired from Apple and continues to be among the employees, receiving a salary of $120 thousand a year from the company and appearing at some official events. As Wozniak himself explains, under the terms of his contract with the company, the only person who could fire him was Steve Jobs.
In 2017, Wozniak's net worth was estimated at $100 million, a modest figure compared to the $11 billion that his former partner Steve Jobs was worth at the time of his death in 2011. However, Wozniak himself does not consider money to be a criterion life success. “I don't invest. I don’t do that kind of stuff,” Wozniak told Fortune last year. “I don’t want to be around money because it can destroy my values.”
"We can't make an artificial copy of the brain"
— Many people are afraid that robots will soon take away their jobs. You used to talk a lot about the dangers of artificial intelligence, but last year you sharply changed your mind and began to say that robots will bring a lot of benefits to humanity. Why?
- Yes, that is right. I used to think that robots would quickly take people's jobs away, pushing them to the margins of society. But, following developments in this area, I realized that artificial intelligence will never be able to completely replace humans. I look around and see high level employment. Automation of labor began about 200 years ago, when the first factories appeared in Manchester, sewing cheap clothes using machines. And even then people were afraid that machines would take their jobs away from them, but that didn’t happen.
Steve Wozniak (Photo: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News)
Yes, robots will take jobs from people in some areas, but in other areas robotics itself and other digital disciplines will create new vacancies. For example, specialists will be needed who will program robots, develop their new models, and so on. I am sure that society will always find an opportunity to give people work, to benefit from any new technology benefits for society itself.
— Many futurologists believe that our generation will already face a technological singularity, when technological progress will become so fast and complex that it will be inaccessible to people’s understanding. What will happen next - people will merge with robots into some new forms of life, become some kind of cyborgs?
- On a very limited scale. I do not share the enthusiastic views of people who believe that man and machine will merge into single organism. Of course, we will be able to place nanodevices into our bodies that will solve various health problems. But in fact, this will be a development of things that have been known for a long time - such nanodevices will be able to deliver, say, antibiotics and other drugs into the body. But in order to penetrate the sphere that truly makes us human - into our brain, into our thoughts, into our memories... To bring something new into the brain, we must first understand how all its processes work. I took psychology classes at Berkeley and became particularly interested in how memory is organized. I can say that no one knows this yet: we do not have a clear idea of how the brain works, how it works, and we cannot make an artificial copy of it that could think. While all this is missing, there can be no talk of any merger of man and machine.
— What about “digital immortality”? Will people be able to live forever because their personality can be rewritten onto another medium?
— You mean something like what is shown in the movie “Transcendence” (2014 film, where Johnny Depp’s hero creates a digital copy of himself before his death. — RBC)? This is the same problem as with the singularity - before we can transfer a person's personality into a new body or computer, and one that will allow that person to retain consciousness, we must first adequately read the person's memory from his brain. Can we do this? No, we can’t - and for a very long time all this will remain just a funny idea from science fiction novels and films. And even if we understand how memories are encoded in the brain, imagine what mountains of information we will need to read from each person’s brain without damaging or losing anything. In the foreseeable future, it is impossible to imagine that we will be able to solve such a complex problem.
— What do you think about space tourism and private space launches? Will Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk's dreams come true soon?
— It’s difficult to give any exact dates. The development of the industry depends on many factors, and the main one is cost. How many people can afford a tourist trip to space?
I would really like Elon Musk to be able to implement his plan - to launch ships into space with two hundred people on board at once: that is, to make commercially viable flights that would be comparable in price to traveling by plane. I would like to see more people and companies working to make space travel accessible. If I could get on a ship and fly to Mars with a one-way ticket, I would do it. I think that in the future people will be able to move to colonies on other planets as part of projects by NASA and other space agencies, as well as as part of private projects. But do I think people will move off Earth en masse? No I do not think so.
I’m not at all sure that humanity will live to see interstellar travel. Imagine: to spaceship could travel at near-light speed and reach other stars, it requires colossal energy. If we learn to receive such energy, we will probably destroy ourselves faster in a war or other disaster.
“Cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications have already become part of reality”
— What about electric cars and self-driving cars? These technologies are already becoming part of everyday life.
— The transition from conventional cars to electric ones is most likely inevitable: many states have already set dates from which they will ban gasoline-powered cars. But designers of self-driving cars will have to solve a huge number of problems before such cars finally become truly safe. I will note that [now] most of these models are not in the true sense of the word autonomous - for example, Tesla calls the model that it developed “fully self-driving”, but this is not the case - you still need a person who sits in the cockpit and watches everything whether the autopilot is doing the right thing.
Steve Wozniak (Photo: David McNew/Reuters)
— In an interview with USA Today three years ago, you predicted that existing IT corporations (for example, Apple, Google and Facebook) would dominate the market in 2075. We are moving towards a world where an IT startup has no chance of growing into new Apple?
“I didn’t mean that they would necessarily dominate, I said that they would still be in the market, remaining large and successful. But something like what happened to IBM could happen to them. At one time, IBM was as huge a company as Apple is today. She now occupies a more modest position, but still earns a lot of money. So there is always a chance to build a new Apple.
— How can you distinguish truly promising IT technologies from marketing bubbles? For example, are cryptocurrencies a bubble or part of our future?
- This is very difficult to understand, especially if you have some kind of personal interest in the success of the technology and, therefore, emotions about it. It all depends on whether the technology can survive the initial surge of interest in it. Many cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications have already become part of reality. They survived the initial surge in interest, and now their creators and supporters will have to work to make them compatible with existing monetary system and brought some benefits to people - for example, they allowed them to make payments quickly.
Household futurism
From time to time, Steve Wozniak makes predictions regarding the development of technology. For example, in 2014, Wozniak predicted the dangers associated with more companies storing their data in cloud services- in his opinion, in the future this could lead to numerous problems associated with the loss of control over information, including legal ones: “If you use the cloud, nothing belongs to you anymore.”
It is noteworthy that the engineer’s opinion on some issues changes over time - for example, back in 2015, Wozniak frightened with the dangers that the development of artificial intelligence brings with it: “Like many, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, I consider the future frightening and sad for humanity . If we build machines to do everything for us, sooner or later they will learn to think faster and get rid of slow people to make companies more efficient.” However, last year Wozniak announced that he had overcome similar fears and now believes that artificial intelligence will make our lives better.
Last year, in an interview with CNBC, he predicted that Bitcoin would eventually become a better standard of value than gold, since the theoretical number of Bitcoins is finite (no more than 21 million), and therefore they are not in danger of devaluation.
In an April 2017 interview with USA Today, he made a number of predictions about what the world will look like in 2075. According to Wozniak, housing problem they will decide on new cities that will be built from scratch even in the middle of the desert. Artificial intelligence will become ubiquitous - people will communicate with interactive walls of their homes, medical devices will make recommendations and prescribe medications without the help of doctors. Earthlings will create colonies on Mars, but it is unlikely that they will establish contact with extraterrestrial intelligence by the end of the century.
Before answering this question, let me tell you a little story. When Steve Jobs and I decided to start Apple, we had a goal. We talked and decided that we want to build a technology that will one day make blind people equal to sighted people. You know, we were almost able to do it because today everyone is looking at their smartphones, and they are equivalent to blind people. This is, of course, a joke.
What do you need to do today in order to be at the pace of life you need to be in tomorrow? I will say this: everyone is different, and society needs a whole variety of disciplines. I can't say that everyone should become purely digital engineers or just analog engineers - some should write music, others should write plays. There is no single right answer here. One can look with interest at professions that are disappearing. They are not disappearing because technology is getting smarter, but rather, these professions are disappearing due to development and the fact that mechanics are becoming a thing of the past. Today engineering is developing, and we can design huge robots that assemble cars. Previously, if you remember, assembling a car on an assembly line was a human profession - today it is no longer. Maybe these categories should be left out, but no matter what you choose, let's say you choose the profession of a digital engineer, any company chooses its own way of communicating with business and society through the digital world. Or you could become a specialist in assembling small devices.
Whatever you decide, whatever profession you choose, become the best in the world. How to become the best in the world? Become the best among your colleagues first. Think about those people who solve the same problems as you, do the same things as you - maybe they developed the same device as you, or wrote the same program. Imagine that approximately a million people a year study at the same universities (the same lectures, the same books), and you are, in principle, equivalent to them in education. What can you do that will make you special? Think about it. By the way, if you love your occupation, your profession, you can become the best in the world.
Personally, I have always loved mathematics. When I was at university, we were always asked to solve problems from the first to the thirty-first exercise. I solved up to the fiftieth problem, that is, I did everything that was required and a little more. Not because I wanted to get a higher grade, but because I love it. When I started my development career, which eventually led to the Apple computer, I, as a developer, thought about the optimal design of each element, and I strived to be the best. Almost everything that I have created in my life was due to the following: it is necessary to build technologies from small bricks - these bricks will form the basis final product. But the idea must be in your head. Neural connections in the brain are virtual. How to turn them into a product? As an engineer, I thought not only about what is written in textbooks, because millions study this, and I tried to find a different approach, an alternative.
If, say, I needed to build a device with seventy-eight chips, I would think: “Can I make fewer chips?” I would spend my nights - and that's what I did - thinking about how to reduce the number of chips. Basically it gave me a reputation and I was proud of it because I was good at it. But I really began to believe in myself when I started designing computers, but at the heart of it all is love - love for what you do. You will always notice this: specialists of any discipline, if they love this work, then they will be the best specialists.
When I was looking for old materials about Steve Jobs, in one newsletter I came across a mention of the ancient British magazine Practical Computing, which published two interviews, one with Steve Wozniak, the other with Steve Jobs. The newsletter discussed in the blog post was received only by members of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society and was not available to a general audience. I poked around on the internet, but couldn’t find a copy.
A couple of months passed, and an expert from the MindTribe website posted a newsletter for everyone to see. It turned out that the dude made a little mistake: in two issues of the magazine, two articles about Wozniak were published.
But it’s okay, it’s even more interesting. More or less passable material from 20-30-40 years ago evokes almost religious ecstasy in me. And it’s worth telling about Steve Wozniak no less than about his famous partner. Sorry for any technical inaccuracies: today certain terms are almost never used, as I understand it. So if you find any errors, please let me know.
In the first part I give material from the April issue of Practical Computing. All pictures are from there.
Robin Bradbeer met with Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the Apple computer, a few weeks ago. Today, Apple is one of the success stories of the microcomputer business. Apple is rich and independent and in extreme demand. Quite a pleasant position for the company.
Two years ago, Apple was two guys with an idea in a garage. If you want to set yourself up for commercial success in the world of home computing, read on.
The interview consists of two parts. Let's start with Steve's story about the birth of Apple. The next part addresses questions regarding ideas, developments, trends and opinions.
Long before Apple, I worked at Hewlett-Packard, designing calculators. Around this time, in 1974, I became interested in video games. Atari and other companies began playing their video games in cafes, bars, restaurants and other similar places. So I decided to try to create my own version - I was one of those guys who always had development as a hobby. That led to a couple of other projects: checkerboard displays and things like that.
Which, of course, led to video terminals, which you don't have to learn a lot of new stuff to create, especially once you've built a checkerboard display. I looked through the reference books and found the shift registers I needed. My trick is designing small, dense circuits, this helps solve many problems in the future - adhering to a single logic. I was able to design and build a very simple video terminal.
Beginning of the terminal
Of course, all this happened when I was still working at HP - but not for them. The Altair computer was introduced around this time. I was almost done with the video terminal and a friend noticed that some people were planning to start a local hobby club.
I had no idea about microprocessors; I knew something about video terminals. However, I became one of the founders of the club, which initially consisted of 40 people sitting in a garage while it was pouring rain outside.
Working on chips
We discussed microprocessors - which ones have which functions. To be honest, I just didn’t understand what was going on - I never understood this world; all I did was work on a chip for calculators, a completely different type of microprocessor. It seemed to me that this was a small thing, but I went to several meetings and began to understand what was happening.
Then I heard that Chuck Peddle (MOS Technologies) was going to sell microchips at an electronics show retailing for $20. At the HP lab, only two of us were really interested in this kind of thing, so we went there to buy ourselves some microprocessors.
At the time, the only microprocessor I was dealing with was the 6800. In fact, on paper I had designed a complete system based on the 6800, but Chuck was selling the 6502.
When we looked through the instructions and found out all its capabilities, the question remained - what to do with the computer?
I realized that the BASIC language was becoming more and more popular, so I tried to write a BASIC compiler with my own ideas. A friend wrote an Algol program that ran on an HP2000 Mini and simulated a 6502 chip, so I was able to write the basics of the BASIC compiler that eventually became our Integer Basic.
How to make it work
The next step was to develop the system. I had a video terminal on my desk, so I put a microprocessor in it with enough circuitry to make it work as a system. I connected it to RAM, installed the control program written in ROM, and connected it to power. The device began to communicate with the keyboard, and I could access various memory locations. A very simple first level system.
There were still a couple of errors left, for example, I forgot to clear the decimal mode 6502, everyone does this when they first start. I took my compiler that was running on the simulator, downloaded it and installed it into RAM.
Now that I had the system, I had to create the software. Therefore, I had to study BASIC further. This was during the first weeks of club meetings and I wanted to present the latest developments.
I learned to type hexadecimal code well, I had no developer manuals, no tape recorder, no floppy disks, no assembler, all the code was written on paper by hand.
Two boys, several circuit boards and a garage...
I passed pass 1, I passed pass 2, the linking bootloader, the text editor, in short everything: I became very good at creating operational code in my head and putting it on paper.
Then I got asthma. It even helped me develop ideas because I couldn't sleep: I would jump up in the middle of the night and work.
The friend I mentioned earlier was also building his own system. My idea was a single board system. He went the more traditional, slot-based, bus-based route - the processor was just one board, the memory was another board.
I was still doing board layouts by hand. Then my friend Steve Jobs said, why don't we make some of these boards and sell them? Our initial idea was to create about 50 blank boards to bring into the club, hold them up over our heads and ask, “Would anyone like to purchase one of these boards?”
First big order
I sold my HP calculator and Steve sold his van and we used the money to hire a circuit board designer. While we were thinking about producing the first boards, Steve received a call with an order for $25,000 for 50 computers, fully equipped. We planned to sell empty boards, but these were orders for boards fully equipped with chips.
The order came from a local Byte store. By arranging the loan correctly, we were able to obtain all the components needed to create the board.
We then sold the boards exactly on the day the order was placed and were able to pay our creditors. It was a very neat operation. We were able to complete the deal very quickly, in less than a month. We entered the business - sitting in the garage.
We decided to name the company Apple. Steve worked at a place called " Apple orchard", or something similar, in Oregon. It's a really great name - one of those names that hits the spot.
We sat in a garage for a year and we didn't make too many computers - about 200 - but our name moved sales and we advertised in national magazines.
Half-disassembled Apple-II; Note the neat PCB design, reflecting Wozniak's design expertise.
Fast development
Of course, all this happened on the side, and I worked at HP. Having received formal legal freedom, I left HP, which allowed me to do my own things. Stores were springing up all over the country like mushrooms; Apple was completely different from its competitors. It was not a completely finished product, like the Apple 2 - a regular board with a microprocessor, 8 KB of memory and a video terminal.
I think we were the first to use the 4K DRAM that was coming out at the time, so the Apple I used a lot less power and cost a lot less. When the Apple I started making its mark, we needed a cassette interface. This was our second product and it came out very quickly. Today we could not do it at such a pace - then it took about a month.
It was March 1976 when we formed a partnership and began selling computers. In June I started working on the Apple II, which was designed to do everything Apple could do, only better. I was also very interested in color video.
Proved to be nearly impossible to develop for Apple I simple diagram for color, so I decided to start with absolutely new system, and in fact everything turned out to be simpler. Until now, systems have been built as single autonomous systems.
I developed a game for Atari called Breakout and wrote another one with graphics commands.
One day to write, one day to debug, two weeks to refine. I couldn't believe how easy it was to write in BASIC compared to assembly. We brought the system to Atlantic City in September for our first computer fair, PC-76.
"Beautiful"
We heard about the Adventa TV Projector and thought it would be cool to see what would come out of the Apple II on a color projector. We connected the Apple II to the projector and displayed the picture on the screen, it turned out incredibly beautiful.
The guy at the booth said, “I want one.” Remember, this was still a hand-crafted wired layout. We realized something. Surrounded by fantastic video and computer equipment, this guy wanted our system.
Things were going very well. We have come to high resolution graphics, 16 KB of memory were on the way. We actually started using 16K on the Apple I. I think we might have been the first to sell 16K of computer memory as an add-on to the Apple I.
The Apple II in its plastic casing was a first in the industry at the time!
More natural
The Apple II was probably the first small computer to use 16 KB of memory. We were aware of new technologies random access memory, and since we were the ones using this technology, it turned out to be profitable.
The final board design for the Apple II was made around November 1976. The product was formed in April 1977. We didn't have a designed body. Karl Helmers from Byte magazine became interested in us. He really wanted a small computer that he could take home and connect it to as part of his hi-fi equipment.
Straight lines
We took a hand-drawn design and digitized it for the computer. The lines came out completely straight and the board looked much better.
Meanwhile, the garage was filling up with shelving and testing equipment; there was no way to produce the Apple II under such conditions. There weren't enough people. We could go under because the demand simply wouldn't arise.
News about the product began to come out. For example, I was going to Los Angeles to demonstrate the Apple II to a group, and I forgot the transformers or something. All I had was a computer.
I demonstrated the Apple II, still in mock-up form, but about a dozen people were present at that meeting, and eight of them ordered the Apple II.
We knew we had an amazing product and knew we could sell it, so we started looking for other people.
Steve met a guy who is now our marketing manager who worked at Intel. Then we hired another guy, a friend of the marketing manager, and he became president. He managed the NationalSemi division, where he had a huge responsibility. His job was to keep track of the dollars and cents.
He's still our president. As for me, I continued to work for HP until the first quarter of 1977. We hired two more engineers, including a guy from Atari, with an excellent similar background. We still hire about 10 people a week. We currently have about 110 employees and have many contracts with freelancers, i.e. There are now about 200 people working for Apple full-time, if you include other companies.
An early image of the Apple II computer.
More natural
We started slow, and rightly so. The press spoke well of us. We found a good advertising agency - that's one of the first things we did - and things took off.
Apple began to be recognized, it was more natural and was no longer considered a completely new product - remember that at that time a lot of companies entered the market with really neat-looking products that were well advertised in five issues of the magazine and then disappeared somewhere.
So we finally got to the place where driving force she will drag us further. We knew that we would survive unless something very drastic happened.
How a real geek feels about money, what he thinks about happiness and Apple after Jobs, and how he behaves on social networks - read in the review
Over 40 years ago, Steve Wozniak invented the first Personal Computer- Apple I, marking the beginning of the creation of a world-famous company. And despite the fact that years later this brand is associated primarily with Steve Jobs, Wozniak’s contribution to the development of Apple is enormous.
Today, Steve Wozniak, also known as WOZ, is the same technology-loving inventor. He attends major tech conferences to inspire young inventors. He has been awarded a number of honorary degrees for his contributions to technology. And he continues to be involved in inventions - since 2014, he has been the chief scientific consultant at the IT company Primary Data.
September 30 co-founder Apple will speak for the first time in Kyiv at the OLEROM FORUM 1 conference. The editors of PaySpace Magazine learned from the interview recent years, how the famous inventor lives and what he thinks about Apple, money and social networks.
About Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was not involved in the creation of any of my projects - the Apple I and Apple II computers, nor the printer interfaces, floppy disks, and other inventions I made to improve the PC. He didn't know technology. He had never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn't know software. He wanted to be important, and important people are always businesslike. That's what he was striving for - quote from interview for YouTube channel Reach A Student
However, Steve has repeatedly talked about Jobs as the cornerstone of Apple's success.
He sold the Apple II, the product that made us all our money within the first 10 years. I just designed it
Calling Jobs his friend, Wozniak does not deny that the head of Apple had a complex character.
The most creative Apple employees who worked on the Macintosh left the company and refused to ever work with Jobs again. Because of bad character Steve, Apple has lost impressive talent - in an interview with the Business Journal.
About Apple
“I’m very pleased with how things are going for Apple,” WOZ said at the Paypal FinTech Xchange 2016 conference.
In five years at the head of the company, Tim Cook managed to double its income. When he took office, Apple had annual revenues of $100 billion. By 2017, the figure increased to 200 billion.
Also among positive aspects Tim Cook as CEO, Wozniak noted the refusal to cooperate with the FBI and provide the agency with data on the owners of Apple equipment.
“I admire Tim Cook for standing up for people's privacy because my whole life Apple has made me question what's more important, the people or the technology.”
Also, according to Wozniak, under Cook's leadership the company never released a terrible or ugly product.
However, Steve can also criticize the company he created. The engineer is not enthusiastic about smart watches, wireless headphones and even Apple smartphones, which, according to the engineer, lack innovation.
At the same time, he acknowledges that Apple's model is not designed for immediate success, but for long-term customer loyalty. In this case, the smartphone war is not a sprint, but a marathon.
About smartphones
In an August 2016 interview with the Financial Review, Steve named his favorite smartphone model. Turns out it's not an iPhone. At the time, his favorite was the Nexus 5.
One of my favorite smartphones is the Nexus 5X. It is compatible with USB Type-C cable. I believe USB-C is the future - interview with Australian Financial Review
About money
Wozniak's net worth is about $100 million. Steve Jobs' capital in 2011 exceeded $10 billion. The reason for this gap in the income of the Apple co-founders lies in the fact that Wozniak was not initially interested in money.
I didn't want to be around money because it can corrupt your values - interview with Fortune
About investments
This quote from an interview with Fortune speaks volumes about Woz's attitude toward wanting to increase his savings. In a conversation with Business Insider, he added that he does not even invest in young projects.
I don't remember when I last time supported projects on KickStarter. Typically, by the time a product reaches the end consumer, it either doesn’t work, isn’t useful, or is no longer relevant, Business Insider interview
Wozniak also explains his reluctance to participate in crowdfunding by the fact that the investor cannot see how the startup team used the funds.
About social networks
Wozniak has never been too active in socially. And he himself has said more than once that social networks are not for him.
I have 5,000 Facebook friends that I don't know, why should I keep track of what they're doing in life every day?
However, there is a resource that Steve uses with pleasure. This is Foursquare - social network with geolocation function.
“Waiting for a train to Rome,” says Woz on Foursquare
Oh happiness
Steve Wozniak has his own formula for happiness, and it has nothing to do with money.
The first component is to smile and joke more often. The second is to avoid being in a bad mood.
Don't worry when things go wrong. Just think about how to be constructive - CNBC interview
Steve also advises creating things just for fun, even if they never make a profit. After all, this is how we develop our brain.
