"So we just created everything out of nothing. No knowledge of how it's done or anything."

September 4, 2002 9:26 AM

"So we just created everything out of nothing. No knowledge of how it's done or anything." And with that, Steve Wozniak invented the future.
posted by joemaller (7 comments total)

This is just full of brilliant quotes:

"There was a time in high school when I said, 'I'm going to own a computer someday even if I can't afford to live in a house. I'll give that up. I'm going to have a computer.'"

"So how did we get a great processor? ...it was only $20 bucks was the answer."

"And I had already built a terminal that had a keyboard and a display on my home TV because that was free. I could only do things that were free. And the keyboard, for $60, was the most expensive part of all the Apples ever bought."

"I grew up competing with myself for the lowest chip count in my designs."

"I was just saving chips right and left, every way I could think of because that was my thing in life--it's more impressive when you show off, if you've done fewer chips."

"Now when I was down at Atari, the idea popped in my head that there's no math behind it, there's no science behind it, it's not discussed in books, but if you spun a shift register at a certain rate, what comes out of it is kind of like color data that comes to a TV set for color. I remembered that idea."
posted by joemaller at 9:37 AM on September 4, 2002

Props to joe. A good read.
posted by Tacodog at 10:09 AM on September 4, 2002

What a fascinating read about a guy who Just Wanted to Make Cool Stuff. His memory gets a little fuzzy when he's talking about the competition, and it would have been nice if whoever transcribed the interview had known some easy stuff like the spelling of "Shugart," but beyond that mere pedantry it's an amazing view into Steve's wide-eyed engineer innocence. Stuff like:

'And I had never been to Las Vegas, which is one of those places in the world that is a place you want to get to some time in your life.... So I kind of felt that I sort of had the company on a hook. They'll need me to show this floppy disk, and I'll get to go. I guess I could have gone on my own if I just said, "I would like to go, anyway."'

Umm, yeah, Woz, you own half the freaking company and invented the product, maybe you could go if you really really wanted to.
posted by majick at 11:09 AM on September 4, 2002

truly, the Woz is our king.
posted by clango at 11:31 AM on September 4, 2002

Woz hasn't made the switch to X? Bet that won't show up in any Apple ad soon....
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 2:23 PM on September 4, 2002

The hard core Mac types are the ones that have been most reluctant to switch. Now that Jaguar is out, I simply can't understand why someone would choose 9.2 over 10.2.

Of course, I also can't understand why more people don't use Macs instead of PCs, so I obviously don't have the pulse of the people.
posted by jragon at 2:49 PM on September 4, 2002

This interview is more than three months old, having been taped for a cruise that set sail on 27 May. It's entirely possible he has switched to OSX in the meantime.
posted by hilker at 3:04 PM on September 4, 2002