Until the weather turned, it was very good to sit in the garden reading a book wittily entitled iWoz, by a great and generous-hearted man, Steve Wozniak co-founder of Apple.
Wozniak’s good nature is shown in a story from his pre-Apple days when he and his best friend, Steve Jobs, undertook a contract for Atari.
Jobs paid Wozniak $350 telling him that Atari were paying $700 for the project. Later Wozniak found out Atari had paid Jobs several thousand dollars for the project.
“I was hurt. . . but you know people are different”, writes Wozniak, “anyway on the long run of money - Steve and I ended up getting very comfortable money-wise from our work founding Apple just a few years later – it certainly didn’t add up to much.”
Few would be so forgiving. But, in this case, virtue had a huge reward.
Wozniak did all his engineering up to the 1980 Apple IPO before he’d completed a college degree. That didn’t stop him doing amazing stuff.
While developing the Apple I, he recalls: “That day, Sunday June 29 1975 was pivotal. It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
He gives a revealing account of management’s unfathomable ways. Wozniak had asked his bosses at HP if they wanted to manufacture the Apple II which he had brought into the HP labs and demo-ed to them. They said No.
Later HP announced a project to build a very similar product to the Apple II. Wozniak asked to be assigned to the project. The bosses said No.
“I wanted to work on a computer at HP so bad I would have done anything”, writes Wozniak, “I would even be a measly printer interface engineer”. But HP wouldn’t have him on the project.
Wozniak liked HP so much he wouldn’t resign even after he and Jobs had started Apple. Eventually he started getting calls from his family and friends telling him to resign. He assumes Jobs put them up to it.
When he did go, HP made no effort to keep Wozniak, taking him round to HR that same day to let him go.
Interestingly, whereas the account of his career up to the time he got $100m from the Apple IPO, fizzes with the happiness he found in creatively engineering great products using the minimum of chips, the account of things after the IPO lacks the same joie de vivre.
iWoz is such a nice book, it’s like being in the company of someone you value, and it’s a regret when you finish the book, and he’s gone.
It’s good to know that the city of San Jose has named a street after him called ‘Woz Way’.
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