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Steve Wozniak talks about the first Apples and the flawed ‘genius’ of Steve Jobs

Steve Wozniak switched on his computer for the first time on Sunday, 29 June 1975.

“I didn’t realise it at the time but that day…was pivotal,” he recalls in a passage quoted on the cover of his autobiography.

“It was the first time in history that anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on screen right in front of them.”

This is a curious piece of hyperbole because people had typed straight onto screens before this – yet the moment was indeed pivotal. The machine that Wozniak had designed and built at the age of 24 came to be known as the Apple I and he had kickstarted the age of the personal computer.

Listen to our interview with Steve Wozniak

Computer terminals had previously timeshared mainframes using keyboards and monitors, but these were very expensive systems. Hobbyist machines such as the Altair were causing excitement among people like the young Bill Gates, but they lacked a monitor and keyboard.

“Every single computer [of this type] before the Apple I had what was called a front panel, with lots of switches, lights that flickered and push buttons. Every one since the Apple I has gone out with a keyboard,” Wozniak said in London, where he was promoting his book iWoz (£20, Headline Review).

The Apple I had no monitor because Wozniak built a gizmo that allowed it to use a TV – another first. It all amounted to the first practical, affordable, general-purpose computer

Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs are the Lennon and McCartney of computing. Like the two Beatles, they came from the same city and formed a company called Apple (which caused no few legal hassles). And with both pairs, it is hard to imagine where one of the two would have got without the other.

Jobs went to the same school as Wozniak but is four years younger. They were drawn together by an interest in technology and a taste for pranks and japes. Wozniak delights in recalling some of these in iWoz but they must have irritated people. He recalls, for example, how he built a device to interfere with the college TV.

Wozniak was an electronics prodigy. He passed his ham radio exam at the age of 11 and was building logic circuits at 13. But he admits that by himself he would never have started Apple. “I would never have wanted to be near big-time things, big money. All I wanted to be was an engineer par excellence…

“Steve had the futuristic vision. We were best friends. He understood the technology well but nobody could design like I could. So he kept being a push for… doing things that changed the world.”

Both joined the famous Homebrew Computer Club, which became the incubator for the Apple computers. Jobs was soon selling the Apple I and encouraged Wozniak to design and build the Apple II, the machine that was to be the making of the company they founded 30 years ago on 1 April 1976.

It had colour, relatively high-resolution graphics, and it came with a Basic programming interpreter written by Wozniak, who is possibly the first and last person to design and build a general-purpose computer from scratch complete with the software for it.

“I don’t know how it happened,” he recalled of both the first two machines. “Every step I took, I had never taken before. I’d never done microprocessors. I’d never done video. I’d never done keyboards. I’d never done colour. All these great changes. Basically I knew how to combine chips very efficiently to do things that almost nobody else could do at an affordable price.”

The software took more work than the hardware, because Wozniak had to work out all the 0s and 1s of the machine code on paper, and then type them laboriously into the computer. He could not afford a system that would automate the work.

Wozniak is quick to point out that it was somebody else’s software that made a phenomenal success of the Apple II. Tens of thousands of the computers were bought simply to run Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet.

The Apple II was Wozniac’s crowning achievement. He was part of the team that designed the Mac, with its graphical interface, but crashed a plane before it was launched and his life changed forever. He was in hospital for five weeks and on his release decided to go back to college to graduate – something he had not yet got around to doing.

He is insistent that he did not leave Apple, as if this would imply that he was disloyal, and he still has a token presence on the payroll. But he admits that he had difficulty adjusting as the company got more successful.

“For the first two or three years everything we did was so important and critical. But then it got to the point, after we went public, that we had lots of engineers. We had big projects. We had money to organise the projects. Apple was going to be successful without me being an essential part of it.”

He was wealthy by this time and blew millions of dollars on running music festivals. But he also spent years teaching mostly 11-year-olds. He has now set up a company called Acquicor with former Apple executives Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock, to acquire and nurture other companies they believe have a future.

He says he “loves where Apple is heading now” and speaks almost with adulation of Jobs, despite relating how the man who still works as Apple chief executive shafted him over one of their first design commissions.

“I was not doing it for the money,” he says in an echo of those idealistic days when California was a hippie Mecca. “I was doing it for the fun. The fact that someone lied to you… it was a small thing compared with a genius who is running Apple Computers and Pixar Animation, and is now with Disney and who brought us the Ipod.

“These are big things in the world that matter to people. How well he behaved on a personal level… there are far worse stories than I tell. We remain good friends.”

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