While the late Steve Jobs was long the face of Apple Inc. and credited with leading its iPod and iPhone inventions that grew it into the billion dollar business today, the original products the company made came from another Steve.
That”™s Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple. Wozniak was at Manhattanville College Tuesday night to speak about his career and the current state of the tech industry as part of the college”™s Castle Conversation series.
Wozniak”™s impact on the industry, and even the people packing the roomy Reid Castle in Purchase, was succinctly noted in the introduction given by Manoush Zomorodi, the event”™s host and the host and managing editor of the WNYC show Note to Self.
“That thing you were tapping on all day, you have Steve Wozniak to thank for that,” Zomorodi said.
Wozniak started his story, naturally, at the beginning. His days as a teenager, where he said shyness drove him to focus intensely on studying computers outside of class.
“By the end of high school I had taught myself how to design computers and I practiced over and over,” Wozniak said. “We talk about putting 10,000 hours into something to get very skilled and confident at it”¦ I knew I would always have a job, I wouldn”™t even need college.”
But ultimately he did go to school. As a student for a year at the University of Colorado Boulder, he got an A+ in the grad-level intro to computing class and wrote so many programs that he said he ran the class five times over budget.
Out of money, he returned home to Northern California to study at DeAnza Community College in Cupertino, and then a year at University of California at Berkeley in 1971. He dropped out to save up money for a final year of school, but ultimately didn”™t complete college until 1986 at UC Berkeley, by which point he was a multimillionaire from launching Apple.
In between, he worked for several years at Hewlett-Packard, where he was an engineer designing the hottest product at the time ”” the scientific calculator. It was a job he said he never wanted to leave.
“I wanted to be an engineer for life,” Wozniak said. “I love engineering.”
He said he actually tried to sell the device he was working on his spare time, which would later be known as the Apple I, to HP, but was turned down five times.
“They would have built a boring machine for engineers to use, because that”™s who Hewlett-Packard was in 1975,” Wozniak said. “The idea that a machine could be inspiring, colorful, have games, it just wasn”™t the Hewlett-Packard mentality.”
Of course ultimately he would leave HP to join up with Jobs in founding Apple and launch a personal computing revolution. He described the dynamic between the two ”” often portrayed as Jobs having the vision and marketing prowess and Wozniak the unmatched technical know-how.
He said Jobs wanted to be “like a Shakespeare, like Isaac Newtown, people who really changed lives and moved things forward,” Wozniak said. “Me? I just wanted to be in a laboratory.”
It was in the early part of this relationship that Wozniak developed the Apple II computer. The computer had the color and games he described while comparing his vision against HP”™s.
“It was a device that would change the world,” Wozniak said.
He left Apple in 1985, and has since been inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame and founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights group. He also wrote a New York Times bestseller, his autobiography, “iWoz: From Computer Greek to Cult Icon.”
Wozniak was asked his thoughts on technology”™s impact on personal privacy by an audience member.
“I get a little bit saddened that we lost part of our privacy and ownership of things,” Wozniak said, citing user agreements such as Facebook”™s, which he said forces people to give up the ownership of their photos and other content.
Zomorodi asked Wozniak if the business world was now a place that better accommodates people like him, who can design and create new things. While forward-thinking executives and CEOs once dominated the business landscape, “the geeks have inherited the Earth,” Zomorodi said.
But Wozniak questioned if the world wasn”™t always that way.
“Didn”™t we always have geeks?” Wozniak said. “Copernicus, Aristotle, all the way back in history.”
But he added the message these so-called geeks receive may have shifted for the better.
“Start something, create something, and you can have success,” Wozniak said.
I met him when I bought a Mac the week it was introduced at a trade show. Always the humble overachiever, he was idealistic and confident the Mac could make people friendly towards computing. Looks like he was right!