Iwoz Quotes

Artists work best alone. Work alone.

I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.

when you don't have the hardware resources, you have to take advantage of what you have inside the chip

A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone.

In iWoz, he recalls HP as a meritocracy where it didn’t matter what you looked like, where there was no premium on playing social games, and where no one pushed him from his beloved engineering work into management. That was what collaboration meant for Woz: the ability to share a donut and a brainwave with his laid-back, nonjudgmental, poorly dressed colleagues—who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you're perceived as intelligent. I'm a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you're told it is.

And soon I was getting involved in one of the most amazing projects. Someone asked me to help design the digital part of the first hotel movie system, which was based on the very earliest VCRs. No one had VCRs then, of course. I was thinking, Oh my god! This is going to be incredible—designing movies for hotels! I couldn’t get over it. Their formula was this. They’d line up about six VCRs. Then they had a method of sending special TV channels to everybody’s room. They could play the movies on those channels. There was a filter in each room to block those channels. But the hotel clerk in the lobby could send a signal to unlock the filter in a particular room. Then the guest could watch the movie they ordered on their TV. Someone in the VCR room had to literally start the movie, but this was still a really cool system.

It wasn’t very long after I’d divorced Alice and met Candi that we decided to get married. She had an uncle down in San Diego who made jewelry, and I had this idea. Let’s get a ring for me, I said, that has the diamond on the inside so nobody can see it. I thought that would be more special than a normal ring.

He took the time—a lot of time—to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.

If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen.

But you know what? I knew deep inside that it didn’t matter that I had built this computer. It didn’t matter because the computer couldn’t do anything useful. It couldn’t play games, it couldn’t solve math problems. It had way too little memory. The only important thing was that finally, finally, I’d been able to actually build a computer. My very first one. It was an extraordinary milestone in that sense.

So I went down to register at De Anza and saw that the classes for chemistry, physics, and calculus were all full. What? I couldn’t believe it. Here I was—the star science and math student at my high school and all set to be an engineer—and the three most important courses I needed were locked out. It was horrible. I called the chemistry teacher on the phone, who said if I showed up I could probably get in, but I couldn’t shake this terrible feeling that my future was shutting down. I could see it shutting down right in front of me. I felt my whole academic life was going to be messed up right from the start. And it was right then that I changed my mind, and decided to see if it was still possible to go to Colorado.

How Ma Bell Helped Us Build the Blue Box In 1955, the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled “In Band Signal Frequency Signaling” which described the process used for routing telephone calls over trunk lines with the signaling system at the time. It included all the information you’d need to build an interoffice telephone system, but it didn’t include the MF (multifrequency) tones you needed for accessing the system and dialing. But nine years later, in 1964, Bell revealed the other half of the equation, publishing the frequencies used for the digits needed for the actual routing codes. Now, anybody who wanted to get around Ma Bell was set. The formula was there for the taking. All you needed were these two bits of information found in these two articles. If you could build the equipment to emit the frequencies needed, you could make your own free calls, skipping Ma Bell’s billing and monitoring system completely. Famous “phone phreaks” of the early 1970s include Joe Engressia (a.k.a. Joybubbles), who was able to whistle (with his mouth) the high E tone needed to take over the line. John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) did the same with the free whistle that came inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch. A whole subculture was born. Eventually Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Oaf Tobar) and I (a.k.a. Berkeley Blue) joined the group, making and selling our own versions of the Blue Boxes. We actually made some good money at this.

without having to actually walk up to someone and ask questions. I was too shy to even go to a library and ask for a book on computers called Computers.

Because I could never afford the parts to build any of my computer designs, all I could do was design them on paper.

I went to talk to the project manager, Kent Stockwell. Although I had done all these computer things with the Apple I and Apple II, I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything. I would even be a measly printer interface engineer. Something tiny. I told him, “My whole interest in life has been computers. Not calculators.” After a few days, I was turned down again. I still believe HP made a huge mistake by not letting me go to its computer project. I was so loyal to HP. I wanted to work there for life. When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive.

Well, we left and heard back a few days later that, no, they’d decided they would build their own machine, it was cheaper. They didn’t need to support fancy things like color, sound, and graphics, all the cool things we had. Chuck Peddle, in the garage, had told us he thought it was possible for them to do their own computer in four months. I didn’t see how anyone could, but I guess after he saw the Apple II, it would be a lot easier to design something like what he wanted.

Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore’s PET. These would become our direct competitors. But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one. I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high-resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was—and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer. At first that mode didn’t mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic. The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.

I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. Because the committee would never agree on it!

Sometimes you can’t prove whether you’re right or wrong. Only time can tell that. But if you believe in your own power to objectively reason, that’s a key to happiness. And a key to confidence. Another key I found to happiness was to realize that I didn’t have to disagree with someone and let it get all intense. If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don’t have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone. So don’t sweat it! You have to trust your own designs, your own intuition, and your own understanding of what your invention needs to be.

hope you’ll be as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors—great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it’s within your reach. And it’ll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It’ll be worth it, I promise.

Now, I accept that Apple had to work the way a company has to. There are a lot of people who operate the company, and there are a lot of people on the board who run things. So the reasoning is very difficult to see. I mean, this was a time when the company had one reputation but it was totally different on the inside. It very much bothered me that you can get away with all kinds of things when you are successful. For example, a bad person can get away with a lot of things if they have a lot of money. And a bad person can hide it—hide behind the money—and keep on being a bad person.

We had to come up with a retail price for our literature. After all, we weren’t going to sell them just to Paul. We decided to price them at $666.66 each—a price I came up with because I liked repeating digits. (That was $500, plus a 30 percent markup.) And you know what? Neither of us even knew the number’s satanic connections until Steve started getting letters about it. I mean, what? The number of the Beast. Truly, I had no idea. I hadn’t seen the movie The Exorcist. And the Apple I was no beast to me.

It’s funny. I think back on it now—the Apple II would turn out to be one of the most successful products of all time. But we had no copyrights or patents at all back then. No secrets. We were just showing it to everybody.

Apple II C computer. This was the small Apple II—a really small one—as small as today’s laptops except you had to plug it into a wall. I thought it was just a beautiful computer, my favorite one to this day. I really think it was one of the best projects ever done at Apple.

And what was strange was, I could feel both states of mind. I had just come from a state where I wasn’t forming memories, and now I was moving into this different state where I was forming memories. I could feel both states of mind at the same time, which was so strange.

I mean, I was for my country the same way you root for your school’s team, right or wrong.

In my head, the guy who’d rather laugh than control things is going to be the one who has the happier life.

But we knew what were getting into because Mike Markulla told us. He said, “This is going to be a marketing company.” The product is going to be driven, in other words, by demands that the marketing department finds in customers.

They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.

Even HP had to cut back 10 percent on its expenses. But instead of laying people off, HP wound up cutting everyone’s salary by 10 percent. That way, no one would be left without a job.

Now, Joe had perfect pitch—probably because he was blind, I don’t know. His first whistle seized the line, and then he could make a bunch of short whistles to dial numbers. I couldn’t believe this was possible, but there it was and, wow, it just made my imagination run wild.

social games. The Vietnam War only solidified that attitude. That’s why I was sure, even at twenty-two, that I didn’t want to switch from engineering to management, ever. I didn’t want to go into management and have to fight political battles and take sides and step on people’s toes and all that stuff.

Gran Trak 10. In just those couple of nights, I got so good at it that many years later, when I found one in a pizza parlor, I was able to get the score you needed for a free pizza every time. After I did that twice, the pizza parlor got rid of the machine.

We thought computers were going to be used for all these weird things—strange geeky things like controlling the lights in your house—and that turned out not to be the case.

a lot of people confuse that story with Apple’s, saying that we started Apple in a garage. Not true. HP started in a garage, true. But in the case of Apple, I worked in my room at my apartment and Steve worked in his bedroom in his parents’ house. We only did the very last part of assembly in his garage