Seamus Byrne22 August 2008, 11:43 AM
On the final morning of IDF, Steve Wozniak talked on stage about starting Apple, leaving Hewlett Packard, and his feelings about Apple leaving IBM for Intel.
Why did the partnership work so well when you started Apple?
A lot of times you become what you want to be in life. And I wanted to be an engineer. I did not want to ever run a company or move up in the management chain. I wanted to be an engineer for life at a big engineering company. Hewlett Packard.
Steve, he had these dreams of being one of the great people that has companies and makes products that change the world. And to be one of the Shakespeares, the Einsteins, that get well known. So every time I designed something great, from when we were very young, he’d say let’s sell it. It was always his idea to sell it. The Apple computer was actually the fourth time he did that. Took one of my designs, sold it, made a little money.
Steve said let’s build a PC board, then let’s build computers, and we formed this little partnership called Apple but first I had strong ethics. I would not sell something for money without my employer getting the first cut at it. And I tried to pitch it to HP and I was turned down for the first of five times.
I got really scared when we got a $50,000 order. I went back to HP’s legal department and had them circulate my description to every division because I was never going to leave Hewlett Packard for life. We built the tools that engineers used, and engineers were respected in the company so it was where I wanted to be forever.
So at some point you had to make that decision to leave Hewlett Packard. That must have been hard.
It was extremely difficult. I had the Apple II design. We knew it was going to sell real huge but we needed a lot of money, and after going through a lot of avenues we found an angel that was going to put in the money. But he said I had to leave Hewlett Packard. I said “Wait a minute, in just one year moonlighting I’ve developed two computers, I’ve written a BASIC language, I’ve done all the software needs, I’d put in stuff nobody ever imagined in low-cost computers — colour and graphics and pixels.” He said “Nope, you’ve got to leave Hewlett Packard and decide by Tuesday.”
On Tuesday I went to his cabana with Steve Jobs and I said that I’d thought it over and I was going to be myself. I wanted to be a Hewlett Packard engineer forever and design computers for fun. And I could always design computers at home for fun so I don’t need a company. So I’m not going to start Apple.
So Steve Jobs got all my friends and relatives to start calling me. “Take the money! Take the money! Do this! Start this company!” And one friend convinced me. He said you can take the money and be an engineer and you don’t have to run the company. You can be an engineer for life and just use the company to make money off and get rich.
I was just afraid to run a company. I just couldn’t be political and step on people’s toes. I like to be objective and make the right decisions for the right reasons and do my calculations. So that day I left Hewlett Packard. Once I’d realised and had one other person say it was okay to start a company and you didn’t have to be more than an engineer. So I’m proud I’ve been at the bottom of the org chart of Apple since it started.
Over the years we’ve watched a lot of things. We’ve watched Steve Jobs go, we’ve watched Steve Jobs come back. How do you view this?
I always felt very positive on Apple, and I felt Steve’s leaving was a little bit of disloyalty. And when he came back I wasn’t totally satisfied. But after this amount of time I’m very, very glad he’s in there because he’s still got a lot of our original values. I mean we wanted to build good products and not just schlocking anything in the world. We didn’t want to be some sales outfit, we want to really change the world by making things so special you’ve got to have it. And I’ve seen that happen over and over and over.
You know, when he first came back in the iMac was introduced. Well that was already in the works at Apple. We’d already hired the designer, Jonathan Ives. But over time, products like the iPod and the iPhone — you just can’t say more than that. So I’m very, very glad and impressed and happy.
Steve’s got that one mind that basically controls the products to keep them that good. It’s real easy in a large company to have all sorts of junky things slip in that shouldn’t. Especially in computers.
What was your reaction when you heard Intel chips were going to go into Apple?
My reaction was good, because I believed what I heard on stage, with Steve Jobs announcing that the low power roadmap of Intel really fit our needs for chips in the laptops. Any computer architect knows that power is really the limiting factor. You’ve got to design things for low power to get more performance and more speed and we love our laptops these days. So that was the right decision.
There were a lot of people who were upset, because IBM had groups that were really out there, doing some incredible research and developing great products. And they wanted it to be the Apple Macintosh versus Intel.
But they got swayed by the Sony game machine. That was their big buyer now and they weren’t going to do what we wanted as much. Intel worked with us better. So I’m very happy.
And we were at a point where the chip didn’t matter. The original NeXT software was developed on Intel platforms anyway. The code was often developed on an Intel platform but we ran it on the IBM PowerPC.
Were you employee number one? Or two or three?
I got employee number one. I didn’t ask for it!
Do you still have your ID card?
Sometimes I go into an Apple store and I say yeah, I’m an employee. I get a discount. So they say “What’s your number?” [Grins]
So you take the discount, do you?
Sure! But I never use my higher discounts. I get 15% if I go to a certain store or 10% other places. And I get 25% once a year but I never bother with doing it on the inside computer systems. And I don’t ever ask for products for free. I just don’t believe in that and don’t want to do that.
Seamus Byrne attended Intel Developer Forum San Francisco as a guest of Intel.