Behold the great Woz!

Founders at Work has posted their interview with Steve Wozniak and it is an absolute must-read for every tech entrepreneur. I had no idea. I mean, I knew he had been a part of Apple’s early and most important successes, but I had no idea that he personally made the major break-throughs that lead not only to their success, but to the creation of personal computing itself, literally out of thin air. His triumphs were fueled by a deep passion and understanding of the basics which other engineers just didn’t have. This story makes me want to be a better hacker, to know how everything works, to strive for perfect design, and to just get to work. The interview is quite long, so I’ve included a few inspiring quotes here for quick access:

First, an amazing bit of history. The Apple I computer actually introduced the concept of a keyboard and display, and every computer since has copied that concept. Also, Woz thought computers would be popular because the masses would want to “write their own programs and solve their problems that way”. Early on no one foresaw that it would be simple and specific applications like the VisiCalc spreadsheet that would drive mass adoption of a machine that could do so much more.

Behold, I have made color, one of Woz’ first eureka moments:

Now the Apple II was the great design. I designed it very efficiently with very few parts—amazing design. We added color. How could you ever have color and still cut the chips in half? It was half the chips of an Apple I. It had color, and it was just a clever idea that popped in my head one late night at Atari.

When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you’d normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work?

Man, when I actually finally put together this little circuit and put some data into memory that should show up as color and it showed up color, it was just one of those eureka moments and you’re just shaking inside. It was just unbelievable. Here we had it in just a couple of chips. I had color, and then I had graphics, and then I had hi-res, and then I had paddles and sound to put games into the machine. It had dynamic memory—it had the newest right type of dynamic memory that could expand almost forever. All sorts of slots with a little mini operating system that actually worked incredibly well. The Apple II was just one of those designs. Anybody could build things to add on to it, anybody could write programs, they could write sophisticated programs, they could write it in machine language, they could write it in my Basic. So that machine, there was just nothing stopping it.

Game development at light speed, Woz’ next eureka moment:

Back a year before, when I had worked at Atari, they were starting to talk about coming out with microprocessor games. Up till then it was all hardware. In other words, you solder wire to the right sort of chips and put it through some more chips and some other chips, and it determines where the score is on the screen. It’s not like you type it in software and say “put the score at this location.” No, it was all done with wires and gates and chips and registers, and it was very difficult back then.

So now I had a machine that I could program a game in (or somebody could) and I got this crazy idea to try to do Breakout in Basic. Basic is like a hundred to a thousand times slower than machine language, so I don’t know if it’s possible. I sat down one night and finally put in all the commands in the Basic to draw color, and I started typing away in Basic and, within half an hour, I not only had my Pong game working, but I had done about 50 or so variations of colors and speeds and sizes and where the score was and all that stuff. I had changed so many things around and put in little features that would just take forever to do in hardware. Little words pop up on the screen when things happen. I called Steve over and I was just shaking, I was quivering, and I showed him the game running, and I said, “This game was so easy to write! Look at this, go ahead—change the color of the bricks.” This would have taken me a lifetime to do in hardware and I did it in half an hour.

The creation of the floppy, “a change in time”:

When I got done, I’m looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, “Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!” It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say “run color math,” and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

Web 2.0 harbinger in 1980, courtesy of the great Woz:

We put out manuals that had just hundreds of pages of listings of code, descriptions of circuits, examples of boards that you would plug in, so that anyone could look at this and say, “Now I know how I would do my own.” They could type in the programs on their own Apple II and then see “that’s how that works” instantly and know how to write their own programs. Running cards was the most important thing. All these companies started up making cards that you could plug into your Apple II and write a little software (mostly games at first) on cassette tapes. You’d go to the store and they’d just have all this stuff that you could buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There’s a big world out there for other people to come and join us.

In the years 1980-83 when the Apple II was the largest selling computer in the world, we didn’t advertise it once. Everybody else who was making products for it was advertising for it. All of our ads were for the Apple III, which never sold in that timeframe. Because we were trying to make the Apple III the big business machine instead of IBM.

Woz’ advice to enterprising hackers:

First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you’re doing. Don’t mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.

Lack of tools: find a way to do it. If you say, “I have to have a tool,” and you are a prima donna, “I have to have a certain development system”—if you can’t figure out a way to test something and get it working, I don’t think you’re the right type of person to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to keep adjusting to… everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat you to the punch.

It’s better to be young because you can spend a lot more nights, very very late. Because you have to get things done, and there’s almost no other way to get around that. When the times come, they are critical.