Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak spoke to students at the University of Southern California about the company he started with Steve Jobs in the 1970s.
Atthe presentation on 19 April, Wozniak revealed that he wasdesigning circuits and learning about electrons at a young age, afterhe discovered a journal “in a closet”.
The journal contained “articles about these things called computers!There were no books, no magazines in book stores, no place where youcan run into anything about what are computers and this had thingsabout 0s and 1s about how we can add them. That’s when I fell in lovewith science,” said Wozniak.
Wozniak (left) and Jobs in 1976.
Wozniak told the students that he and Steve Jobs shared a commoninterest in pranks, as well as computers. “When you’re buildingsomething for yourself, you put so much emphasis in making it soperfect it couldn’t be finer,” Wozniak explained. “Steve Jobs knewwhere to sell things. I never thought about that. I just built thingsfor fun.”
So that’s how the partnership between the two Steves began. Wozniakwould design devices, Jobs would sell them.
Wozniak revealed that in order to create Apple Computers, he had tomake sacrifices: “I sold my most valuable possession, my HP-65calculator. It was worth $500; I only got $250 because the guy didn’tshow up with the rest.”
“The Apple Two computer was really the heart of the computer. Idesigned it in three months, back when I had four days and nightswithout sleep. Your mind, when you are falling asleep or waking up,your mind gets into a less inhibited work state,” Wozniak told thestudents. “Go to sleep thinking about the problem really hard, wake upin the middle of the night and have a solution.”
Wozniak advised: “Think different. The way things have been donebefore, that’s like a formula, you hardly ever step back. What if itwere all different? A whole new world, a virtual world that doesn’treally exist. With products, sometimes, oh my God, sometimes that leadsyou to a much better solution.”
Steve Wozniak recentlyexpressed his worries about the struggle faced byentrepreneurs aiming to start a technology business. He was also quotedas saying that he wished his iPhone did all the things hisAndroid does, and that the Macintoshwas a failure, but hequeued up for the new iPad nonetheless.