Keynote with Steve Wozniak

Mark: So we've got a bit of a Q&A really, a fireside chat with Steve today. So yeah, thanks Steve for joining us, really a pleasure to meet you. And I'm sure everyone's really excited to have you with us today. Amazing career that you've had, and we're really looking forward to some of your thoughts of you sharing your experience and things with us. So we've got a few questions that we'd like to ask you and I guess a good one just to kick things off is, when you were younger, where did that kind of creativity and what fostered that in you and that in kind of technology as well, where did that start?

Steve: Well, it's very hard to say if you're born with a creative instinct, I mean, we all are, you know, but your little accidents in life, the friends you have, what privileges they're allowed, how your parents treat you, how your school, little things you encounter in movies and books, you know, lead some people into wanting to be very academically skilled and very good at it, become engineers. But some of us really just say, I'm curious, I wonder if we could go build this thing, you know, read about those, the adventurers and other people that have done it. And so some of us turn out to be more of what I call, well, inventors. And I was lucky, I grew up in a place, Silicon Valley was just a fruit orchard, absolutely nothing else, as far as you can see, trees, and little neighborhoods were going in to support Lockheed Martin, who was key, we had a big space race going on in the late 60s, trying to beat Russia up into space, and you had to make electronics smaller and smaller and lighter and lighter to be affordable for the rockets, so Lockheed Martin was really the key as to why Silicon technology and chips grew up in that area. But a lot of the kids in my neighborhood, one little neighborhood surrounded by trees on every side, you'd have to ride your bicycle through a fruit orchard or cherry orchard to get to elementary school, but a lot of these kids had engineers as parents. So I'd say half the kids in my neighborhood were what I call electronic kids. And the friendship, the thing that they like what you like, you've got a little like, what if somebody did this, what if we, maybe it's just for a prank, maybe it's just something real that you could use. We were all kind of, what could you build, what are the techniques to buy little parts down at Sunnyvale Electronics, we'd ride our bikes down there, little parts of putting them together in a certain way to make lights flash or tones. One time we ran a phone line that a telephone repairman gave us, ran it down the fence, we're crawling the fence, stapling this wire in all the way down, and so we went down many houses and across the street, strung it. So this was just our nature, this was our fun. When we created something that was our own, it didn't come from our parents, it was like, oh, it just made us feel so happy about it. So we had this little electronic kid group, so I wasn't alone, wasn't like the only one doing it. And it was just, I don't know, it was just amazing, adventurous, you could show it off, and you did other things that other children your age, let's say that we're, you know, eight years old on up to maybe, you know, 15, somewhere in that range. Other kids in school aren't doing these things. They don't know how, they don't know how it works. You had to read some electronic magazines or get an engineer parent to kind of show you the formulas to make things work. So we were very proud of it, because it was like our own stuff as young kids. Now some people, you know, and as I said, a lot of people don't grow up having the adventure of actually making things. We study them, we know what they are, we write reports for school, but science fairs were a big outlet too. When you went to a science fair, it wasn't school stuff, you were directed to do this chapter. It was, come up with a project, you know, that will actually kind of explore life or science or something and teach us something in the word in your project. And that was another big outlet. And now I myself, I had these electronic friends, but it turns out that I was the only one that was like a real academic star. You know, I would win the math awards in my middle school and my high school, and, you know, and I was in all the highest scientific classes, always getting A's. And so I was like that, combined with this little knowledge of electronic parts and sort of how they work and you string them together and make other things. And by the age of 10, I had a ham radio license, had to study how signals can go back and forth at certain frequencies and then emit radio waves. And also how to use a Morse code key and tap out signals, building huge projects with hundreds of parts. You know, I was only 10 years old and for Christmas, I got a kit of 100 parts that was a transmitter for ham radio. And another kit that was 100 parts for a big old receiver. I had to bolt in every little piece in there, follow the instructions, solder things together, put vacuum tubes in and those strings on dials that would change the frequency. I mean, this was an adventurous time. But my other friends, they weren't like the type that could wind up being designing things, they'd come up with an idea that didn't exist and then design their own things. All they could do is copy something they read about in a book. So that was a big start too, towards being, I don't know, being an inventor, creative. It was so fun. I was also very shy. From about 10 years old on, when I did a lot of things, very shy. I was doing stuff nobody else at school did. I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. And this was my way of socializing. Some people might say you socialize because you talk to other people, you find out what they do and like. I had this little narrow, narrow, narrow, tiny group of electronic kids, kind of were my friends and didn't need to impress anybody. So I wasn't socialized. But when I developed something and maybe it made some lights flash, maybe it made some weird tones, I could take it to school and other people would look at it and that was my way of communicating. So it was, I had all the right motivations. And the people that turn out like this. I was reading books, you know, these little books when you're young, you get a series, a new one comes out every month. I was reading books about Tom Swift Jr., young engineer, owned a company with his father. And when there was some big tragedy in the world, something threatening our existence, he'd go into the laboratory for a couple of weeks and build a type of submarine or a rocket ship. He would build something to escape it. And this was the thing that drove me inside. Oh my gosh, you wind up reading these things, enjoying them. And internally you say, I want to be a person like that someday. So you know, we always read about inventors that really invented great things. And to me, it was also the fun that you have. So it was really fun, especially you build something that the teachers didn't understand. You could play pranks. You know, I remember building a little high pitched, high pitched noisemaker with 27 batteries so it would last for months. And planting it in our homeroom behind the TV, real high pitch, you could barely hear it, but that also keeps you from telling where it was coming from for sure. And a teacher would just tell the class, it's okay, the TV's having a problem. So I kind of, you know, it's that kind of, kind of joking thing. That's motivational.

Dinesh: Do you have any of those toys still hanging around that you bring out for nostalgia or anything?

Steve: I have tons of pranks I played and way too many, way too many to tell, way too many to tell, but I'll go back to, let's see, school days I did, I got caught doing pranks like that in middle school. So by high school, I learned a formula. You know, I had a brain. I don't want to get caught. Don't tell your friends what you did. You know, you think I did this little thing, tell your friend, they tell another. Pretty soon all the teachers and everybody knows, oh, Steve Wozniak did that. So no, I was just outside the net. But I remember once I put in, in our high school, they had announcements, the start of every day, what's going on in school. I learned the formula for getting them in. You submit it to the vice principal and he okays it and it goes in. And they don't really read it carefully. So I had one in there once that said that at a certain time in a certain room, Stanford's head janitor was going to speak on higher custodial education. So the kids in the classes would laugh and the teachers would tell them, no, no, no, this is something, this is really stuff, this is important, they make good money. Something like that. So I enjoyed just doing these things that, I don't know, that I guess other people didn't do my whole life. I still do a lot of that today. I know I love to carry with me, I just do unusual things. So I first started, a long time ago I started finding out you could order $2 bills and they would always come in serial number order. One, two, three, four. And little checkbooks, so I gummed them into a checkbook. Okay, that was my first start. And then, through a son of mine who was like four or five years old, I found, oh my gosh, they make sheets of money. And I wound up making, getting sheets of $2 bills, and four $2 bills, and then gumming them into a big pad, it's all serial number order. And when you order them from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on 14th Street in Washington, DC, you have to spend a little more than $2 for each bill. I've spent around three. But it's fun, you got a whole pad and you can tear off a few and pay for something and people are looking at you, what the heck is this? Because it's unusual. I like following unusual things in life that other people don't know about, and I like following unusual people that do strange things, that are pranksters themselves maybe. And that came through in college with the blue boxes. But so these little $2 bill pads, it's really funny because if you look at the serial number on each of the four bills, starts the same and it ends the same. My gosh, is that legal? And what I tell people is, look, a printer in my town, Los Gatos, California, made these pads of $2 bills. He made the pads for me. I didn't say he printed them. I just said he was a printer. I said he gets the supplies from a higher quality printer, US government. And therefore, they meet the specs of the US government. And if you meet the specs of the US government, by law, it's legal tender. And everything I've said is really true. I said I'm not sure if it's the right president on the bills, and the serial numbers are suspicious. And they look and they say, whoa, they're all the same on one sheet. They change in the middle is the reason, the numbers on the serial numbers. So I have a lot of people absolutely certain that they've got some counterfeit money and keep it, their security, better hide it. And I just love playing with these unusual little things that nobody else has. I don't know if anybody else has ever done things like this, but it's where I go. I don't have a- We met on Zoom last week. And when I joined, I was having problems with my audio. And then Steve pulls up some cue cards. Oh. Yeah, well, I think of things everywhere I go. So yeah, you're doing Zoom conferences a lot during COVID. So I just made a bunch of little cards that sit on my desk and I can hold it up. A card says hi, a card says bye, a card says maybe, a card says yes. I just hold them up and I pretend I can't talk. Well, sometimes when you go on those Zoom conferences, they couldn't hear you. So those cards have been handy too.

Mark: Yeah, and then your dog started barking at the screen.

Steve: I know, I know, but I just always think, are there little things in the world that you could do something you otherwise couldn't to get through something in life? That's funny, like my business cards, my name cards I call them. My gosh, I found out you could make them out of metal somehow. I was looking into plastic ones. Metal, this was long ago. Now a lot of people have metal business cards and you'll see them. But back then you didn't and I was alone and printed all my information on it and punched some holes. Cost a lot, but I just, I don't know, it's memorable. People remember you if you do that. I know when I'm going into hotels and things like that, if you tip a driver or you tip a bellman with a sheet of $2 bills, the next time you're back, they remember you. And it's kind of like one of those things I do is my mask. I get so many compliments on my mask. I love to wear it. And you'll see. So it is I, Steve Wozniak. Only my mouth doesn't move when I talk. And then you come back again, you haven't been there in months, and they say, I remember you.

Mark: Cool, so we're actually going to come back to some of your practical jokes in a minute, maybe tell us some more about those at the time at Apple. But before we do that, I mean, tell us a bit about your love for engineering and what motivated that, what provoked that?

Steve: Because I was good in math, third grade. One incident I always go back to in my head. You don't know if these are really the causes of the way you are, but I remember we had kind of just moved to the US and I must have been, I don't know, seven or eight years old. And we were going to have multiplication flashcards the next day in school. So my mother actually bought some and in the kitchen, she was holding up multiplication flashcards. And I was going through trying to memorize, you know, without the multiplying, multiplication table. So we went to school and the next day I had all the answers and the teacher said, whoa, the first time they ever saw a boy beat the girls. It's something, I said, I'm a mathematician. That's my thing in life. So I always studied math. It was very important to me. But you know what, I didn't just say, I'm going to study it like most students. I remember in high school that if we were told to answer all of the odd problems up to number 37 at the end of a chapter, you know, not the full thing. I would do every single question all the way up to 50, every one of them. Because if you love something, you know, and you're good at it, I mean, it just drives me, I don't know. And I didn't mind the fact that nobody else did it. I didn't have anyone tell that I did it. I just did it because I felt like it. So, and I was, so I was, you know, top math student and that led to all the sciences and things like that.

Dinesh: The story a lot of us here kind of feel close to that you get something that you're good at and then you just run with it.

Steve: Yeah. It's kind of why we're probably all in tech. But academics and grades, you know, I don't really respect that highly. Of course I did then, but follow your heart, your feelings. Like what do you want to be in life? What do you want to learn? How do you want to do something? Well, I had again in my time in college. I had 800s on all the math and sciences and I had, I could, I taught myself when you couldn't get a book on designing computers anywhere. No books on computers. In bookstores. No magazines. Nothing about computers. Accidentally stumbled on little things and taught myself on paper. Worked hard the first time for like close to a year. And figured out how to design chips into computers. Chip manuals. I told you the little chips of the day. That aren't anything like today's chips. They're paper with where you'd hook up wires. And I taught myself how to design any computer in two days. You'd say, whoa, could go to MIT, someplace like that. And I flew with some friends for the first time ever out of California. And we flew to Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. Look at a campus, because one of my friends, his father had gone there. And it snowed. And I had never seen snow in my life. You know, and we opened up the curtains. Yeah, it did snow. And we walk, go outside and we're throwing snowballs in our underwear. This is something you just don't encounter in life. That was the only school I would apply to. And my parents let me follow my heart. They only afford out of state tuition there for one year, but still, it was so amazing, two of my kids wound up going there and got my first honorary degree there. I mean, University of Colorado Boulder. But it was very different then. You watch things change, and of course in technology we see this and they start out, something just so great, inspirational, and you realize what it could be. And that campus then was a mile from town, three quarters of a mile. You had to walk to get to town. It was just on its own. And there were only half as many buildings as today. So it means a lot of green paths for, you know, your intramural sports and things like that. Beautiful. So it kind of got crowded, filled in, the city grew all around it. It's not the same as it was then, but you fall in love with certain things. You know, not to mention, you know, the snow and skiing and all that. Big part of my life, but I followed my heart. And I said, my parents let me, you know, they didn't say, here's where you have to go to school, here's what you have to do, here's what you should study, here's the grades you should get. So I decided with my own kids I'd be the same. And I didn't put my values onto them, or what I think they should do, or what school they should go to. Let them decide for themselves. And if they have an interest in life, help them go in that direction. You know, give them support and help. Like my father, boy, some of my science fair projects got very sophisticated. I look back at them, I can't believe a young kid as young as I was, was building some of these projects with hundreds of parts and switches and relays and signals that changed how the other signals work. And my father would pull out a little blackboard sometimes and explain. Here's how the electrons go through a transistor and make it amplify. And the founder of the transistor had moved to this place called Silicon Valley. So we were ahead of the rest of the country in the industry that was gonna grow to today. You hear about Moore's Law and this digital world we have now. And it's all based on the fact that you could make one transistor by a certain method back in 1950-ish. And now you could make 60 billion for the same price on a chip that's in your iPhone. 60 billion transistors. Our life's based on the transistor. The inventor of the transistor started Silicon Valley with the company. And that's why Silicon Valley was where all this knowledge about, I don't know, chips and electronics and stuff that makes the digital world. That's sort of where it was located. And for those reasons, Silicon Valley is the big center. The other is, some people made money there. And those who made money became venture capitalists. And they started reinvesting it in other people's ideas to start companies. You can make a huge amount of money. And they'd invest in a company that had a great product out in Boston. But they'd wind up flying, the venture capitalists would have to fly there to Boston and back four times a year, you know, to board meetings. And they started saying, okay, you got this great new idea. You're in Pittsburgh. You've got to start your company in Silicon Valley. So it's close to us. Yeah, sort of the campus thinking.

Mark: So taking it back to your college years, just thinking, you mentioned going to Colorado. Was that where you first met Steve? Mm-mm. No, that was later on?

Steve: No. Oh, no, no. I went to Colorado, and Introduction to Computers was a graduate level course. And I had this instinct that I was meant for computers, but I'd go to the scientific bookstore in Palo Alto called Kepler's. Not one book on computers. How are computers designed? And I went to Colorado and took Introduction to Computers, a graduate level course, and I was a freshman. And I got an A+. But I wrote every program I could think of writing. Every program that calculated the numbers like Fibonacci numbers and two and things that were in the books they sold to scientists and engineers. And they stopped running my programs. And it turns out, I didn't realize, I thought you're in a class, you get to run programs. I used my own student number, and it turns out there was a budget. They expected a certain amount of the supercomputer time at the campus to be used, and our class ran five times over budget to student. That was scary. It's like $50,000, and you're a college student. They might try to collect it from you if you go back, so I didn't try to go back. But, you know, that was, no, computers were my thing in life that year. The next year, I had, because of my parents and, you know, it's impressive to me that I could only have one year in Colorado. I went to a local college, you know, and every institution in my life that helped me develop my brain and get to where I got is so important. I went back to all of them and helped them out with projects, build stadiums, whatever, but for this local community college, De Anza College, where Apple introduces a lot of its major products, at least in the old days. And I went there, I gave them my personal Apple I, my personal Apple II, my personal Apple III, my personal Lisa, my personal Macintosh, my personal copies of accessories I built, like the hard disk, the floppy disk. And they have it on display there. That's very important to me, you know, you'd say, well, it's just a little college, well, fine, they're part of my life. And the next year, no, I did very well, did very well there. And it's interesting, the quantum physics teacher that I had said he knew the name Wozniak, that had gone back at Cal Tech, he knew this guy Wozniak. Gary Wozniak, it said that they had to go watch him play football, he was an incredible football player. It was a year that Cal Tech didn't lose a single game, Cal Tech didn't give up a single point the entire year. The Rams even approached my father about possibly, he was like the star quarterback, approached my father about, you know, a, I don't know, a professional football license and all. And this teacher, quantum physics teacher said, you always wanted to see Mr. Jerry Wozniak. I said, yeah, it's my father. It was during your college years that you met Steve Jobs. Not yet. You were introduced through a mutual friend, is that right? No, now I'm done with two years of college, and I'm ready to go to a four year college, Berkeley. And the trouble is, I wanted to work for one year. I got a job on programming, because I walked into the wrong door by accident somewhere, oh my gosh, they're building a brand new computer. I applied for a job and got a job. So I programmed for the next year. And it was called Tenet, T-E-N-E-T. They had a medium sized computer, you know, and they had the computer and the operating system and the languages, and they were developing software, and I was writing test software. And so I'm working there for one year to earn the money for my four year college, so I won't have to burden my parents with money. And also, it let me buy a car. I had enough money to buy a car. And so I worked for that year, and before I went back to Berkeley. But during that year, one of the execs came and he said, I heard that you used to design computers. Yeah, on paper, with a pencil. They said, did you ever build one? Said no, I could never afford a chip for $50, that's like $500, for a little dinky chip that's like throwing a light switch. And they said, well, we can get you the chips. We have connections with the chip companies, get you the chips if you design one. I went home that night, I designed a computer of my own design, not one that already existed. Because I designed them over and over and over in high school to get really good at using very few parts. And I signed the computer, he got me the chips, I built this computer up. And one of the electronic kids in our neighborhood was three houses down, Bill Fernandes. And so I said, hey, let's build it in your garage. He said he would solder it and all that. We were building my computer, we called it the cream soda computer. Because we'd work on it for a few hours one day and then we'd ride our bikes down to the grocery store and we'd buy cream soda. We both liked it. Cream soda computer. And then Bill said to me, just before we finished it, he said, there's this other guy in our high school that you should meet, Steve Jobs. And it's odd that Bill Fernandes comes up in so many, many important places in Apple and in my own life. But he introduced me to Steve Jobs, he said he likes pranks and electronics. And Steve wasn't that much of a prankster and creator.

We started talking on the sidewalk about pranks we'd done, trying to impress the other about our thinking. And all he'd done is come with a group of people that, there was a tunnel under the school, and you could find some wires. I went and checked it out myself later. You get these wires for the phone systems that you could cut in, listen in on the principal or something. My idea would have been swap the principal and the vice principal's line so they went to the other number. Anyway, so I thought that was okay, and I told him a bunch of my pranks, which I had many more, much better. And talked about, started talking about interest in life, and he was more into the counterculture movement of the days. I was so well educated, my key to the future was my education, my brain developing, I was going to always have a job as an electronics person, as an engineer. And Steve just didn't have any academic background. We went to the same high school, but he didn't have the same teachers I had. Okay, and I was in the high level of the school, so he was academically probably not that good. I don't ask people personal questions about their life, but he didn't really have that great academic background or anything. But he started talking right away about reading a book he'd read, and these important people in the world, the Shakespeare's, that really take us to a new place and change the world forever. And other, a lot of people just don't matter, he talked, I didn't like that talk. Now, I was unsocial, I didn't make any friends, I was a total geek. I could never, ever talk to a person, especially ever to a girl or something. But Steve understood my value, and that made instantly, oh my God, my best friend in the world, somebody who actually understands me, and we can talk. Now, he was in the counterculture movement, eating seeds out of a little bag, walking around barefoot a lot. That's fine, I appreciated that movement, I wasn't really in it, apart, but I was around it. And so we met, I remember we met right on the sidewalk outside of Bill Fernandez's garage, where we were wiring up my cream soda computer. And Steve was very interested in where the world is going philosophically, religiously, Eastern religions, and how your mind works, and isn't in this big conflict thing, and I admired a lot of that. And so I took Steve to my house, he was 16 years old, he didn't have any albums. I took him to my house, and I showed him all the Bob Dylan albums. I had all the albums up to Bob Dylan's greatest hits, and the liner notes, and the weird words, and the lyrics to songs, the strange words in some of them, like Desolation Row. And this became a big part of both of our lives, and we would drive long distances to get Dylan memorabilia, and go to concerts and things like that. So, and so that's what it was like, and he admired the fact that I actually designed and built a computer, the cream soda computer, and could do these kind of things. So, and that was the start of it. Was there any particular moment, like a light bulb moment, that you knew that you were gonna start this journey with Steve and- Absolutely not. The light bulb movement for me was back in, when I was about ten years old, discovering ones and zeros, and how to add them, and make projects for science fairs, and I knew that I had a good, good head. It's one of the reasons I didn't wanna use any drugs. I knew that my engineering head was gonna take me places in life. So, there wasn't a moment, I just kept developing things. As a matter of fact, in high school, I told my father, I would design on paper how to build all the computers that were coming out from Varian Corporation, from IBM, from Hewlett Packard, from digital equipment, from Data General. I told my father, I'm gonna own a 4K Data General Nova computer someday. And he looked at me, he said, it costs as much as a house. And I said, I'll live in an apartment. I had an internal goal, it's in your core. You know what those things are. Those are things you're gonna do and be in your life. I was gonna have my own computer, even more important than a house. Why 4K? You needed 4K of memory to have a computer programming language, where you could type in programs to solve problems or play games like chess. You had to be able to type a program in. So, I was gonna build that computer, and I just got closer and closer to it, solving the problems of being able to afford it. Eventually, I had a job at Hewlett Packard, and I was designing the hottest product in the world. The hottest consumer product. The first handheld scientific calculators, where you could calculate a number. Instead of a slide, take a slide rule and you could estimate, that's about 5.35. But this thing came out, it's 5.349827. You know, all those numbers would come out of this calculator, and it was handheld, and it cost $400, which is probably $4,000 today. Within five years, every single engineer and scientist in the world had to go that way instead of the $10 slide rule. It was, so I was designing those things, and one of the first things that happened to me during that time. I would do free designs for other people. Like a guy came from Hollywood, and he wanted to build the first system in the world that would let you watch a movie in your hotel room. And I got to design it. I charged him five cents. This went back to when I charged people to type their term papers from midnight till six in the morning, I charged five cents. You do something you love, that's what you do, you have to show it. And then other people would come with this TV timing codes and home pinball games they were doing. I got to design all these things for other people. And one day I went into a bowling alley with a girlfriend, and there was a game called Pong. Pong, and sitting there, a little black and white TV and paddles. Two people can play, and it cost 25 cents to play this game. It only cost 10 cents to play all the pinball flipper machines. And whoa, played it, and I said, my gosh, a television can be an output device. Back when I was designing computers, thinking input and output is so much more expensive than the processor. How am I ever gonna get an output device? And I thought about using an oscilloscope where you could put voltages in to pull the beam up to somewhere and then turn the beam on and drag it over here. And you get a little line on your TV and da-da-da-da, if you built a little device that did that over and over. Maybe it could show a lot of numbers on your screen. But here it was, a television. I said, I had been trained as an analog television engineer already. The analog television system is very strange in a lot of ways, especially when you get to color. Strange mathematics, differential calculus to do the designs, but I was trained that way. But I sat there and so anyway, my first thing was, I said I'm gonna build a pong game. And I built it out of 28 little $1 chips. 28 little $1 chips. I built my own little pong. And I even put two of the chips would put up a four letter word if you missed the ball, like heck or darn. And I took it and showed it off to my friends at work, and that was kind of impressive, and it played onto a TV set. How did you get signal into a TV set back in those days? A lot of you don't know. You had to unscrew the back of the TV and pull off the back. Then you had to look at a manual, because everything was open source showing the design. Then you'd look for the right kind of parts inside by some labels and see a signal on your oscilloscope. You'd say, I know that signal, that is the video. And then you could run your own wire if you created video all the right way with signals telling it when to stop going horizontally, when to stop going vertically and start. You put your signals in the right way and there's paddles and balls on a screen playing a game. So that was my first time to find the output device that costs $0. You already owned a TV, right? So it costs $0. And that was a huge step. And the next thing I thought of was, well, a thing came about called the ARPANET. Today it's the Internet. The Internet has how many billions of computers on it? The ARPANET, when it started, had reached six far away computers in the United States. MIT, University of Utah, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford Research Institute, some other place. Only reached six of them. But I saw a guy type on a big teletype, a friend of mine. I'm playing chess with a computer in Boston, across the country. What? I had to build this. I had to be a part of this new change in the world. I always wanted to see, where's it going? How can I be a part of it? And so I built my own little device with these chips, a few more than 20, 28 $1 chips, but not much more. And I could type with a keyboard that I bought for $60, like $600 today. Cheapest keyboard you can find, you know, and it was partly cheap because it only did uppercase, not lowercase. But I bought it and hooked it in. I could type and then a modem that I built connected to my phone line. And the phone line can carry signals. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, as tones. And I could then log on to the ARPANET. And I could bounce around from computer to computer, log into any computer as a guest, and see some files, and play some games, and all that. My gosh, that was another step, because that took me into the keyboard. You know, and then some people started talking about, we're gonna have computers. And it was based on a magazine article. This was the Homebrew Computer Club. Based on a magazine article showing this kit of parts you could buy for just $400. Okay? And my gosh, a processor alone from Intel cost $400 in single quantity. And this big old front panel, and it had switches for ones and zeros, and lights for ones and zeros, and da, da, da, and 256 bytes of memory. 256 bytes. So, wait a minute, I said, this is basically equivalent to my cream soda computer, had these switches and lights for ones and zeros. And you could punch in some ones and zeros, and punch a button and go into memory somewhere. And you put different ones and zeros, punch a button, it goes into the next memory. And that was what they were getting so interested in, but I'd done that five years before. That was the week I met Steve Jobs. And since then, I've been moving in very, much more sophisticated projects. And I was working on these handheld calculators, where if you press a five, a five pops up in a display. That's the human world. Not like you toggle the switches to 00101, and push a button, it goes into some memory. No, no, no. The real world that people use things. So, I said, I can take my little terminal that talks to computers far across the country on the ARPANET, why don't I put on the brains a microprocessor. And the right kind of memory, which by then, I worked at Hewlett Packard, I knew that dynamic memory was much lower cost than what's called static memory. And yet, in the Intel data sheets for a microprocessor, they could only show a microprocessor with lines called address one, address two, address three, connecting to a chip that had address one, address two, address three, with a wire. They couldn't show the fact you had to build all this refresh circuitry for dynamic memories. Refresh circuitry that got in and took every single location in a chip, in a memory chip, and refreshed it every two thousandth of a second, or it would be forgotten. And that extra step was engineering step that, my gosh, all these little hackers kind of falling in love with the idea of making a computer, following the Intel data sheets, couldn't use dynamic memory. And dynamic memory is one fourth the cost, basically. One fourth the parts inside. Four times more dense of the memory, and, you know, to get to 4K, but it's like I want it. So, I used the right kind of memory, and I designed in all this refreshing stuff that would pause it, what's coming out on the screen, pause it for a little while, and get in and refresh some of the chips, every single line on the TV horizontally. Oh, my gosh. So, I had the formula, and I just took it down, and people looked over my shoulder, and they saw that this little computer, you know, you could type in, and it was on a video display, that the number of chips on it, they were mostly just to put words of video on the screen. The chips were...this was totally makeable, affordable, so much cheaper than all the other approaches of following the old computer way. So, let's build this thing with switches and lights and a big bus and design extra parts that plug in that can connect to a teletype that costs as much as two cars. They just looked over my shoulder. Every computer before that one, and Steve Jobs wasn't around. He didn't know it existed. And I was showing it off at the club. I said, these people are the ones who are talking about changing the world with all of us owning our own computers, a revolution. So, I made Xerox copies, some Xerox copies, and I gave them out to everyone at the club, and I even helped some people build that computer. I got an email just a couple of days ago from one of the guys that was there, and I helped him build this computer. And Steve Jobs still didn't know it existed. And every computer before that one had a big front panel that looked like those ugly things you see in TV shows, you know, the old day computers full of switches and lights, and nobody knows how to use them except the geek that operates it. And every computer after mine, this one that was going to become the Apple One, every computer after that had a keyboard and a video display. It was obviously the right, affordable, designable way to go. So, I would show that off, and I helped other people build it. That was a big thing in my life. There's a movie that shows Steve Jobs finding me in a basement working on a computer, and he hauls me down to a club to show it to the world. What the heck? I'd been to the club every day since it started. And Steve had never been there once. So, but every time he came into town, about once a year, he'd find my latest invention, turn it into money for us both, including the Pong game.

Dinesh: Are there any, you know, there are obviously two huge movies out about it. Are there any other points that you'd like to clarify that are not quite as accurate as reality from the movies?

Steve: My, my role was very, so important. Before we ever even shipped this Apple One that people credit as the start of Apple Computer, we had my Apple Two, which I designed all on my own also. And the Apple Two, why would someone buy a computer in 1975 or 76, why would they buy a computer for the home? Who does inventory figures and sales numbers and computer things in your home? Nobody, but they want games. There was a book called 101 Games in Basic. Oh my gosh, this is why people want to buy these computers for the games, even though it was rather expensive at the time. And my Apple Two computer was the first time ever that arcade games, the new industry, being brought to the world by, by Atari Corporation in Los Gatos, California, where I live now. They were bringing this to the world, but their games weren't colored. My Apple Two computer was the first time they were colored. And I had to do a very strange thing. I was designing breakout for Atari. I'm the one who designed it. If you ever play the game where you hit the ball against the bricks and they start disappearing, that was me. But and I was doing it in moonlighting while I worked at Hewlett Packard. But there, so anyway, while I was there, a game was hardware. That meant 100 chips. 100 chips that could count signals, make them go up and down, and you mix them all together, and you put the right signals into the TV from 1,000 wires, over 1,000 wires, skilled engineer can figure out what's on all those signals, put them together, test it out, and get it to work. It would generally take a half a year to a year to make a game prototype that way. But somehow Steve Jobs came to me and he said, Nolan Bushnell, the owner of Atari, wants a one player pong game. Oh my gosh, I would love to do that, to build a game that kids play in my life. Those were the things that were important to me. They were always inside heart things, not I can make money off of it. And I said I'd love to do it, and he said there's a hitch. You have to do it in four days. And I don't ask personal questions, but I'm sure that Steve Jobs needed to be paid some money and told him he could do it, but he couldn't design a game. He just couldn't. And I'm sure that he had a date that he had to get the money to buy into his share of a commune up in Oregon. But I know that, I'm saying I'm sure that now. I didn't know it then. I don't know for sure now. But four days and nights with no sleep, that's what I had to do. And I said it's the hottest designer ever. I still didn't think I'd get it done, but I did. And in those four days and nights, your mind wanders. And I was out on the factory floor while Steve would be wiring up my designs up on the factory floor playing the new games coming out. I got so good at Grand Track 10 that eventually a pizza parlor in the town I lived in, Scotts Valley, gave you a free pizza if you got over a certain score. Man, after the second time I got my free pizza, they took the game out. But no, I'd play those on the, you know, and my head came back one time, and I'm sitting on a workbench, Atari, and Steve's wiring up my design over there. Red board unit. Not the style I'd design and build. But I thought, color TV, wouldn't it be great if these games were color someday? They weren't. And I thought back to the analog, how a signal on a wire that's like a sine wave, it goes plus and minus, plus and minus, at the right speed is interpreted as color by a TV. And I could design those things. They had precision parts, precision feedback loops, differential calculus to design it. I could design that and take a long time. And then, into my head popped, what if I just took a digital number? Ones and zeros. Like zeros are down and ones are up on a wire. Zeros are down, ones are up. What if I put this on, it's like a staircase, but the electronics rounds these things off, signals off anyway. Oh my gosh, I realized if I took these four little digits, one, one, zero, zero, and fed it into the TV, it might think it's red at a certain place. And if I made it a little later in time, it might think it's blue, and a little later, yellow. Oh my gosh, I fed it four little ones and zeros on a wire for $0. Put a number in the computer on a wire for $0, and every TV in the world would think it was color. Totally violated the mathematics in all the books about how color television worked. And, but it worked, and that was the Apple II computer. The color, the color scheme worked, but also the Apple II computer was the first time ever that arcade games were software. You didn't have 100 chips. You didn't have 1,000 wires. You just sat down and wrote a program. A nine-year-old could write little programs in the basic language that I'd created for the computer myself. It's basic. Could make red dots move on a screen, and blue dots horizontally, vertically, and around. And you could write, a nine-year-old could write a decent game for those days in one day, rather than a skilled engineer taking, you know, usually half a year to a man year for a prototype. So this was, the Apple II was a huge, huge thing to start Apple with. And, you know, of course, I knew it. Even my engineer friend, Skillet Packard, turned me down for the personal computer five times. I wanted my company to build it. And I could describe it, what it would cost, and how it would work. And they turned me down, you know, for a good deal of Packard reasons, but they lost sleep over it. And so, eventually, Steve Jobs and I, we had to start our own company. The Apple II computer was so incredible. You know, engineers there told me it's the best product they'd ever seen in their life. It was the only successful computer of Apple, the only successful money-making product we had for the first 10 years of Apple. Every bit of our revenue came from that one product, the Apple II computer. It was that great. And it was all mine. Steve Jobs kept trying to make his own computers. The Apple III failed for bad marketing decisions, trying to push people away from the great Apple II. And Elisa failed because Steve Jobs didn't understand computer hardware and software. And he thought that this mouse stuff they had at Xerox PARC, I went with him there, that he thought that we could do it for just $1,000, you know, Wozniak magic or something. And, no, I'm an engineer. I knew what it would cost to build that kind of a machine with bitmap screen and menus created from it and mouses. Back in that age, it was going to cost a lot. And it cost $10,000 was the selling price, but that's like $20,000 today. And Steve Jobs was so upset, you know, because he didn't have personal computer pricing and he'd walk into meetings in the Elisa building. We hired the finest engineers, but largely academic-oriented engineers. How does a mind from a person, how does a human communicate with a computer? We hired the best ones from the East Coast, the best ones from the West Coast. And Steve Jobs would walk into a meeting they were having and call them all idiots. You just say you just don't even know what you're doing and you're worthless and walk out and they wouldn't know what to do. That was the chairman of the board that just did that. So they kicked him out of the Elisa building. That was when he came over and he took over our, I was with all my most creative friends trying to build this little low-cost machine, the Macintosh group. He came and took that over. But it turned into something very different than what we were working on. And I don't know. I had a plane crash. I had a plane crash and it was five weeks later before I came out of not forming any memories. And as soon as I came out of it, I called Steve up and I said, I said, you know, the Macintosh team is just the most creative people in Apple. Burl Smith, the hardware designer, wanted to be another Steve Wozniak and he'd learn to design things with as few parts as I do. And that's good. This is my last chance to go back for my final year of college and get a real degree. And so I did that. Went back to Berkeley. My name was very famous, so I went under a fake name. And my Berkeley diploma reads Rocky Raccoon Clark. That's who I was on a Berkeley computer. And I went back actually as a psychology major. I wanted to study the mind and computer. And I did get my degree that I worked for. You know, they say, well, honorary degrees are just as, you know, you really had to do the work to get an honorary degree, got lots of those. But in most cases, I only had to do work one time and I get ten honorary degrees. You know, so this was a real one. It was very important to me. Used to be the proudest day of my life, getting that degree. Now it's walking my daughter down the aisle. Something you want your entire life and it comes true. It's emotional.

Dinesh: We've talked a lot about the past and the history, but I'd like to get your thoughts on some future tech. I know AI, things like chat GPT have been in the news a hell of a lot at the moment. And I'd love to hear sort of what your thoughts are on AI and machine learning and what it could present for us in the next 10, 20 years.

Steve: Yeah, I've been pretty much poo-pooing the idea that AI, I agree with the A. I don't agree with the I. It's not intelligence like a human has. Human, and this goes back to the first program I ever wrote when I was in high school and they arranged for me to go out. We didn't have computers in our school, but it was arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale. And I wrote the Knight's Tour of Chess, where a knight piece tries to bounce around, hit every square exactly once. And I would just bounce around, bounce around, bounce around. And when I got stuck and, and hadn't hit every square, I'd back up and try a different route. Back up and try a different route, backtracking algorithm it's called. And nothing came out of that computer for the longest time. I went and studied my program and studied it. And I realized I would find every single solution to the Knight's Tour, but it would take ten to the 27th years. In other words, the speed, the fact that a computer could do a million things a second, so much more than a human really didn't matter. It was a human coming up with a method to solve these problems. And, and so I've watched the development of computer technology. They started calling it AI, but in my, when I went back to college, I was a psychology major, we do not know how the brain's wired. You know, we're trying to make synapse chips and we have guesses of, of how it, how it's made to work, but we don't know, can't follow some wires like you can on a circuit. Follow some wires and say, here's where he has memorized the shape of a piece of corn or something. No, we can't do that. And I doubt we ever will. You know, and that's, that's what intelligence is partly. Our, our memories, our memories in the brain. There's one book on memories. All the highest end books, you know, the highest end psychology courses that actually identifies where a memory is in the brain or what it is. The best they can say is, it's everywhere, because you take any one part of the cortex out and the rat still remembers the maze. Well, I came up with 40 years ago, I came up with at least 40 years ago, yeah. I came up with a statement stronger than in any book. A correlation between two things. Your childhood autobiographical memories of things you did disappear between six and ten years old, and so do your teeth. So teeth and memories. I was making it as a joke to make people realize that there just isn't really well known what memories are and where they are. Well now, now, 2022, you Google teeth and memories, you're gonna be shocked what you find, and the test for Alzheimer's and saliva and gums and things like that. I don't know, there could be something to it, but it was really just pointing out, we know memories aren't in our teeth. And if that's a stronger statement than in any book, it means something. But artificial intelligence too, you know, can you actually recreate the brain? I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to create a brain. For real. Takes nine months. So today we hear everything, you know, oh, it has AI. I mean, okay, a computer tries something a billion times. You know, no human being could play a game a billion times and the computer will find the best ways. But only if human beings have described how the program works and what it has to look for, for solutions. And all that, so a computer doesn't say, oh, what should I do today? Or how can I program myself to play a game of checkers? The computer doesn't, doesn't go to that level in the brain, just follows our instructions to do something useful. And when it comes out and plays a game of chess better than a human, oh, it, it's like it's intelligence. That's what we call it, but it's not like intelligence, because it doesn't have the emotions and all that. The book Singularity came out from Ray Kurzweil, and it talked about a date, or probably about at that date, 2025 or something like that, where the amount of processing in a computer and the amount of memory in a computer was going to equal what the brain has. That kind of implies, oh my gosh, is a computer gonna be like a brain? You know, and I actually bought into that for a while, and for about three years. I was on stage, these computers are coming, they're gonna have consciousness, they're gonna have feelings, they're gonna be just like a human. And I said, well, what if there's a company Apple, and across the street a new company starts up, and they have no humans at all? These computers, other computers do things, other computers, right now are the ones that dig ores out of the earth to get minerals. What if it's all a computer world? What if that computer, what if that new company with no humans outperforms economically, economics always wins, outperforms Apple? And that's kind of a negative thought. We humans are gonna be left in the dust. And then Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates all came in saying sort of the same things. The biggest fear we have as humans is technology getting that advanced. And I said, I'm in good company. And then my son, a really brilliant son, convinced me I was wrong. No, we're just building new technology. It's just the high end of today's technologies that can help humans. You know, and we're never gonna let it overtake us anyway. And it doesn't really have the equivalent of feelings. Look at your face and know what your expression is from your eyes. I mean, we can program in a bunch of algorithms, but it's not gonna be like real things. No person is predictable. Look at self-driving cars. I hate that we have the name navigation here. That's one of the low ends of technology in my mind a lot of times. If you have a Tesla, navigation is so horrible, horrible, horrible. But it, you know, and it tells you to turn when it's too late or doesn't give you really good advice like a human would. And so you drive a Tesla and you can say, take me from here to there. And when it tries on its own, well, just steering in a lane, steer me. Just stay in the lane steering. It makes so many horrible mistakes. You have to grab control quickly, hit the brake. My God, the dumbest human or the drunkest human in a lot of people wouldn't have made that horrible mistake. This car's gonna merge on this side. Let's slow down a little so they don't merge right on us. No, the Tesla lets them merge right on you and squeals on the brakes and the phantom braking. You know, we'll be on an interstate at 75 miles an hour. My wife and I drive long road trips, multi-thousand mile road trips. We love driving. And you'll just be out there, nothing in front of you, nothing behind you, no cars, no bridges. And all of a sudden, it'll squeal on the brakes. Check the rear view mirror, make sure there's nobody behind you. You'll have to accelerate if there is. And let it slow down, and slow down to 25 miles per hour, and then somebody catches up and you have to speed. I mean, these are things, times it's tried to kill me, like there's a semi truck on my right and it jerks towards the right. I have to take control quick and it scares me. And this, you know, there's also, there's signs, there's speed limit signs. And the Tesla can sort of sometimes pick up a speed limit sign, if it's in the right place and the right color. But then they have signs that, LED one so they can change it. And Tesla hasn't been trained for any of the unusual things, or that people do. You know, you have a tire laying in the middle of the road in front of you. Oh yeah, it could kill you. And Tesla won't see those sort of things. So it's all these little human things, knowing how other humans are. Handwritten signs, for example. Tesla doesn't know words and what they mean. So we're not really, we talk like we've made a lot of progress, but we're not there like a human.

Mark: Very skeptical then.

Steve: Pardon?

Mark: You're very skeptical then.

Steve: Oh, so I'm very, well, I'm very skeptical of, Tesla has lied and talked so much money out of my wife and I to get to another, the version. You know, $50,000, we can upgrade to the version with a camera that'll get us a, as Elon Musk said, it'll drive itself across the country by the end of 2016. And then we realized right away, couldn't even see a small kid in front of a car, couldn't do any of that. Come close to it. The next year, he said, we've got a new sensor, it's eight cameras. You know, they fired their sensor company, or the sensor company couldn't do what they wanted. Eight cameras, it'll drive itself across the country by the end of 2017. And we're still not even, no. And we had to, we paid money to upgrade those times. No, we're kind of, we don't believe a thing Tesla says and we won't buy another one. But other cars can come out and be just, be worse. Tesla tried to be like computers. You know, where they keep changing things on you and taking away settings you had, modifying them. Like you don't own your products. They decided we're going to make a car that way too. So, we're going to make a car that's a computer. And it's been, that's been a horrible experience. The user interface, big screen way off the road that you have to try to tap on. And there's, I want to listen to radio stations, right? Every radio I've ever had had buttons for your favorite stations. Or now on the steering wheel, you have a little, a little buttons that go up and down your, your six favorite stations. So I created six favorite stations on satellite XM radio. And big thumbnails, I can push a button, push a button for the coffee house station. And I don't like that one. I'm going to push another button. But as soon as you push one button, all those thumbnails disappear. And you have to push this little tiny button called favorites. I have counted. It took me 12 tries once from the passenger seat to get that button to work while you're driving this bumpy Tesla. That's the way it is. And one time, twice it took me 13 tries to get this one little button called favorite to bring back my thumbnails. I've reported this to Tesla service stations for five to seven years. And I've demonstrated it for them. And I said, you must have somebody here that does software. And they bring out one guy that I guess can replace the firmware. And I say, well, you should bump this up to Tesla. He says, well, Tesla doesn't talk to us. How this company was formed. And so that pisses me off. The good and the bad. But the bad of it, I'm for user interface. Things should make sense to the user. The user should be the most important person in the world. I had Mercedes's for years in the past. And they designed the whole car around me a user. I wanted it. There were sometimes real dials even. So I thought, well, we'll try another car. It'll have a better user interface in this digital age. I mean, they should kill the people who brought us to this digital age. We're just going to force them to live in it. We're just going to force them to live in it. And we bought this one called the Lucid, dream edition. And the luckiest thing was it got it. It was in a park by a valet at a hotel in California, and it got hit by a drunk driver the second day we owned it. Why is that lucky? Every other car I've ever had gets hit the first day. Don't ask me how I'm that unlucky. So anyway, we drove it to Colorado and we had to put it into a car repair for one week. And they gave us this little RAV4 gasoline car, all gasoline. And it took Apple CarPlay for navigation, you know. And it was the most wonderful week. I kept telling my wife to this day I would drive a RAV4 any day, gasoline, whatever. But that Lucid was a worse user interface and everything it sort of claimed to do, it wouldn't do. And it was run by Amazon Alexa. I don't want to be owned by other people. You could not see a navigation screen, two touchscreens, both navigation, but you couldn't see the song that's playing. You went to the song, you'd lose your navigation display. This wonderful, beautiful display over here is tacked on with some feet sitting on the dash. Wait a minute, a car company should be in control of the whole car. They should build it into the dash. And we gave the car back with two pages of everything that had gone wrong. Everything it couldn't do, it didn't work as it should have. It had this bad information and it was unusable. We gave it to Lucid and they sat on it for a week or two. And then my wife finally told them, give it back to us. He will just sell it on eBay for $10. And Lucid didn't want to do that. So they canceled the whole sale like it never happened. They wrote a check back to us, no sales, no selling. So we got off real easy on that one, but it was worse than a Tesla. And for user interface. And then we had, now we're going to try a Mercedes, electric Mercedes. It's we'll get it any day now. And, you know, do you trust them? You don't know until you have a product, whether it's good or bad. I like to buy a lot of the accessories and smartphones that come out just to say I have an opinion based upon how it worked for me.

Dinesh: I think we're running out of time. But one really quick question. What color is your Mercedes? The important one, obviously.

Steve: Pardon?

Dinesh: What color is your new Mercedes? The color of the car?

Steve: White, I think. White. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's white. Yeah, I never got white cars in my life, but my wife likes white cars. So now our cars are Teslas and everything's white.

Mark: Yes, I think we got to wrap up now. And I'm sure everyone could listen for hours of you talking. I wish we had hours. I know. We can cancel the conference and just listen to Steve all day. Well, thanks very much, Steve.

Steve: Thanks for having me.