Steve Wozniak gets a lot of attention because he represents Silicon Valley in much the same way Horatio Alger`s heroes stood for the laissez-faire capitalism that shaped America in the late 19th Century.
Growing up, Wozniak loved rock and roll, but instead of hanging posters of rock stars in his bedroom he hung up pictures of Data General mini-computers. Instead of reading J.D. Salinger, he read technical manuals.
”In high school, I could never afford to get near a computer,” Wozniak said. ”I`d sit down with a mini-computer manual and I`d redesign it. I`d get books on better chips that had just come out, and I`d redesign my favorite computers for them. If a computer used 20 chips, I`d try to use 10. If another system used 10, I`d try to use 4. It was an intellectual exercise, something I did because it was neat. I did it over and over until I just sort of developed a technique for looking at things in a new way.”
Wozniak was president of the Electronics Club at Homestead High School in nearby Sunnyvale and scored 800 on his math SAT, but he later dropped out of three colleges.
”I didn`t really drop out,” he said. ”I already knew everything they were teaching in computer classes. Suddenly, ROMs and microprocessors had become very inexpensive. I realized that, for the first time in my life, I could afford a computer. I took a year off to work on it. My one year turned into 10.”
THAT`S HOW Apple Computer was born. Wozniak and his friend Steve Jobs cleaned out the Jobses` garage and set out to build themselves a computer.
”I didn`t start out to bring the computer home,” Wozniak said. ”I wanted a little computer for myself, and I designed the perfect computer because I designed it for me. If we hadn`t done it, somebody else would have. I feel lucky I was in the right place at the right time.”
There was more to it than luck.
”He`s really brilliant. The disk controller he did is extremely elegant,” said Lee Felsenstein, the designer of the Osborne I and one of the founders of the Homebrew Computer Club, where Wozniak displayed his original designs. ”Woz carried off the whole thing all by himself. I`m a great advocate of one person doing a complete design. You can`t do what Woz did if you operate under a bureaucratic structure. His achievements are extremely commendable.”
Wozniak smiled when he heard the praise. He`s used to hearing great things about himself. What pleases him is that it comes from one of the few engineers around who may be as gifted as he is.
”Designing a computer is the hardest work you could ever do in your life,” Wozniak said. ”It`s so difficult, you`ve got to concentrate on so many hundreds of little things and how they interplay with each other. You`ve got to keep so many really tiny details in your head, it`s like solving the hardest puzzle there ever was.
”It`s very rare that individuals go out and build something that is so incredibly great,” Wozniak continued. ”Usually it`s done by corporations. Corporations invest the money, the time, the manpower. They end up owning the product, and you never hear of the people who developed it. One reason why the Apple myth is so strong is that we did it on our own.”
WOZNIAK`S achievements represent a triumph for what`s become known as the ”hacker ethic.” There is something fundamentally anarchistic about hackers. At the beginning of the Homebrew meetings, Felsenstein would get up and say, ”There`s no such thing as the Homebrew Computer Club,” and everybody would cheer. Hackers believe that no information should be kept secret. That`s why Wozniak passed out Xeroxes of his design for the Apple at Homebrew meetings.
Wozniak`s major victory over the system was designing the first personal computer. For this feat, Jobs and Wozniak have become as rich as the men who built the Southern Pacific Railroad. ”I have such extreme wealth, it`s hard to relate to,” Wozniak said. ”People think of wealth in terms of people who are like millionaires rather than a 100-millionaire.”
”Is that what you are?” he was asked. ”A 100-millionaire?”
”Well, something close to it.”
At the Apple offices, Wozniak has a small cubicle in the Apple IIe division, just like any other engineer. Wozniak`s going back to work at Apple as an engineer is a little like Henry Ford`s taking a job on the assembly line, but the Woz wanted to do it because ”I could be a great engineer here.”
Turns out he isn`t a great engineer. In fact, he`s done so little work, he gave himself a pay cut. ”The most I can do is listen to ideas,” he said. ”I can`t take the time to start connecting chips, write code or figure out clever solutions.”
THERE ARE several reasons why Wozniak can`t get any work done at Apple. The first is that Wozniak is surprisingly ambivalent about the company he helped found.
”I can`t join the corporate world,” he said. ”The one project here I could have worked on since the II was the Macintosh, and even that was too bureaucratic. I`d say Hewlett-Packard is a better company because it`s more open. H-P has a formal policy that engineers can have parts for free to design something if they have the approval of their supervisors. Apple thinks they`ve got to keep everything locked up.”
The second reason has as much to do with Wozniak as with Apple. Electronics has always been his way of writing ”Kilroy was here” on the wall, his way of proving that he is unique. In high school, he said, ”I was never a leader because I`m kind of shy, but in my own little community, yes, I was a leader. I`d achieve something on my own, do some incredibly neat little product, and I`d show a few people. Pretty soon, everybody would want to see it and they`d all come around. That`s how I attracted attention; that`s how I was the leader of my group.”
If inventing products is Wozniak`s way of getting attention, what is there to motivate him to do more work for Apple? His work created the company, gave thousands of people their jobs. He gets all the attention he can handle. What could he possibly do for an encore?
”I know there`ll never be another Apple II in my life,” he said.
WOZNIAK HAS no interest in power. He doesn`t want control over people`s lives; he wants intensity. He hungers for the total immersion, the complete concentration you must have to do creative work. That`s why he loves playing with his 2-year-old son, Jesse John, so much. When Jesse John is on a merry-go-round, the little boy`s whole being is wrapped up in the merry-go-round. Nothing else matters.
”I want to have 10 kids,” he said. ”I can`t get enough of them. The thrill I get playing with my kid is equal to the thrill I got designing computers. I don`t distinguish between the two.”
Even if Wozniak adored Apple and lusted after power, the way he lives these days, he still wouldn`t be able to get much work done. He has carried the hacker idea of ”openness” to an extreme. When he walks into his office, he drops a briefcase in his cubicle and walks to the reception desk, where a thick stack of pink phone messages waits for him.
Some are from people who want technical help on a project. (”They`re the kind of thing that would take a year`s man hours to work out. I`m not going to commit to that.”) Some are from people who want help starting a business.
(”They don`t realize I`m not the best one to talk to. I didn`t deal with the business side of things.”)
Others are from people who think they can spend Wozniak`s money better than he can. He is constantly getting banged for contributions to worthy causes. (”If I say, `I don`t want to hear this,` they say, `Oh, then you`re against world peace.` ”)
Instead of ignoring the calls like the ordinary multi-millionaire, Wozniak returns every one. His phone number is listed. Call it and chances are he will answer and take time to listen. He spends more time on the phone than a prom queen, some days as many as four or five hours.
”My whole philosophy of life is being open,” Wozniak said. ”I want to help people, but it`s gotten me so bogged down, I dread it.”
MOST NIGHTS, Wozniak is buried in his workroom, pounding away at an Apple II until 2 a.m. He spends his time figuring out how other engineers
”have solved problems in a neat way.” There is a big difference between checking out someone`s work and turning your own ideas into ”neat” products. Great engineers, like world-class mathematicians, tend to make their contributions when they are quite young, but Wozniak isn`t ready to accept that it may be all over for him. He talks about the ”really neat” ideas he has for software and the ”totally different” ideas for new hardware products he is thinking about.
”I`m thinking of going away to some place where I`m not known so I can get back to doing real work,” he said. ”Maybe I`ll leave the state, maybe the country. California has high state taxes.”
At other times, Wozniak takes a step back from himself and wonders if he will ever again do any work that makes a difference.
”To do creative work, you have to keep hundreds of details in your head, and there`s no way I can do that with all the things that are tying me down
–Apple, the press, random strangers,” Wozniak said. ”I haven`t done that kind of intense work for four or five years, and I miss it very much. I`ve had such strong external rewards–money, ownership of a company, position, a nice house, a satellite antenna–it`s difficult to want to spend you`re free time working intensely. Maybe it`s a little bit like burnout.”
Asked if he has any regrets, if there`s anything he`s sorry for, he looked puzzled, shrugged and said ”Nothing comes immediately to mind.” It`s as if he was born without the capacity to feel guilt.
IT IS HARD to feel guilty about being rich if you give it away, and Wozniak`s generosity is legend. He bought his mother a Mercedes and helped his brother Mark open a computer store in Sunnyvale. When he and Alice Robertson, his first wife, divorced in 1980, she got 30 percent of his Apple stock, worth $42 million at the time. She and Wozniak are still friends, they talk on the phone and have lunch occasionally.
”Everything got done so that she felt good about it,” he said. ”There was no way I was going to come out of it feeling unfair. I`ve never once felt bad about the money I lost in the divorce. I don`t feel attached to my money in normal ways. A normal person with this much money is all wrapped up with investment advisers, accountants, tax shelters. I don`t have any of those. My goal is to be able to do my own taxes by `85 or `86. The simple life is best. All money does is provide alternatives.”
Wozniak said that money has changed him in only one way, it brought him
”up from nerdism.” Wozniak spent his youth hanging out in Denny`s, talking computers with the guys. Electronics was his refuge. It kept him from thinking about girls or the kids to whom he felt slightly inferior–athletes and class politicians who had social skills to handle any situation.
”Nerds are really a little bit scared to be out of their circle of technical friends,” he said. ”Nerds see all these brilliant leaders and political types in school and they think, `Those guys are way above us.` ”
Money has enabled Wozniak to bust out of the nerd subculture and be a player in a bigger world. ”I`ve got so much more self-confidence,” he said. ”I`ve got so much more to talk about because I`ve had the money to have experiences.” That, to a large degree, explains why he put on the U.S. Festivals. He wanted to make a mark in rock and roll. He wanted to prove the nerd was hip.
THESE DAYS, he gets his kicks giving to charities. Over the last few years, Wozniak has donated between $1 million and $3 million a year to charity. Of the 500 or so charitable causes that hit on him every year, he gives to no more than five. One of his recent contributions was $800,000 to the Children`s Discovery Museum in San Jose.
Wozniak doesn`t consider designing the original Apples the greatest thing that ever happened to him. He doesn`t think the U.S. Festivals are, either. The ”most critical, good experience” of his life was a plane crash. More precisely, it was the amnesia he suffered after the crash.
On Feb. 7, 1981, a high-performance Beechcraft Bonanza that Wozniak was piloting went down seconds after taking off from the Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley. Wozniak, his wife, Candi, and his brother-in-law, Johnson Clark, were found unconscious and bleeding from head wounds. Janet Valleau, Clark`s girlfriend, did not pass out but was badly shaken. The three passengers were treated and released at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. The pilot was admitted with a concussion.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigator`s report concluded that Wozniak caused the accident by trying to lift the plane off the runway too soon. He was fined $500 for operating a plane he was not certified to fly. Valleau has filed suit, alleging Wozniak`s ”reckless” piloting caused the crash. The suit is pending.
Wozniak spent a couple of weeks in the hospital and was unaware he had amnesia when he was released. He said he thought the crash was a dream. Whenever anyone mentioned it, ”I thought, `Well, I`m in the dream again. I`ll play the part and see where it goes.` ”
Wozniak did not lose memories of his past, as some amnesia victims do. He had a form of the disorder that prevented him from forming memories of events that happened after the crash. For five weeks, he went to parties, rode motorcycles and took trips, and forgot what he`d done as soon as it was over. He, of course, had no idea what was happening to his memory. Candi and his friends attributed his forgetfulness to the concussion he`d suffered in the crash, but were unaware of its extent.
ONE NIGHT, for no particular reason, he asked Candi, ”Hey, were we in a plane crash or something?” She thought he was joking and said no. The next morning, he asked again. Candi realized he really didn`t know what had happened and told him the story.
”From that day on, all my memories were fine,” Wozniak said. ”I had to hear all the stories about what I`d done during those five weeks. I was so excited to hear they`d smuggled milkshakes and pizza into the hospital and that I tried to climb out of the window once.”
Amnesia, he said, was his life`s greatest experience. ”It`s incredible to see how memory works. Especially the moment I came out of it. I still had the old state in my head and I could feel them both. Almost no one in the world will ever get to experience something like that. I`ve read books about it, but there`s no way to understand it till you`ve been through it. No one in the outside world could ever understand.”
