Tweakfest07: Steve Wozniak on innovation and the new Homebrew club

"Now every computer in the world is a Macintosh, so we won". Yesterday night in Zurich I  went to see Steve Wozniak -- who founded Apple Computers with Steve Jobs -- give the opening keynote at Tweakfest, an interesting tech conference/festival taking place for the second time. The conference hall was full of groupies, of two kinds: those who are too young to have touched more than the last two-three iteration of the Macintosh, but can't live without their iPod and can't wait to get their hands on the iPhone; and those -- the grey hair peppering the room -- whose lives were forever changed in the second half of the 80s and early 90s by the machines of Woz and Jobs.

Woz' topic was innovation, and how best to talk about it than to tell his own story, that of the kid fascinated by electronics who ended up basically inventing the personal computer -- and changing the world. "Almost always when we create new things -- it's a bit like humor: you tell a story, and then there is a punch line, and that makes people think: oh, there was another path. That's how innovation works".

Innovation, he says, starts with inspiration and exploration. Woz tells about the heroes we have when we are young. His was Tom Swift Jr, the main character of a series of novels who was a resourceful young inventor. Woz talks about building his first ham radio; about growing up in Silicon Valley when vacuum tubes were being replaced by transistors, and later transistors crammed into microprocessors; about the role of the military as the client for most of this stuff; about attending science fairs with his father.

Innovation, he adds, is enhanced in your life by your own intellect. As Einstein once said, "chance favors the prepared mind". His was prepared to stumble upon computers, first the idea of them (in a journal) then the science of them (when he started building "computers" to play tic-tac-toe). He tells about deciding to become an engineer; about having a great high school teacher that, having realized that he knew already all the electronics that the school had, arranged for him to be "hired" by a company to program a computer once a week; about realizing that "even the fastest computer can't solve the complicated problems of the world: it can help and support, but it takes a mind to tackle the problems and find solutions".

Innovation, his third point, is driven by goals. "In high school, my goals were to be good at what I did, and to own a computer". Wozniak learned computer design by diving into manuals and "copying" the designs of existing machines, such as DEC's PDP8 or IBM's and "trying to redesign them using fewer parts" -- "that was always my approach: can I do this with fewer parts and a simpler design?". He tells of going with a friend during weekends into the library of Stanford's Linear Accelerator, "where we figured there would be tech books".

Innovation, he adds, is also enriched by the enjoyment of things in life. "When I had my ham radio, that made me a special kid, I could reach out to other States, I could show off my tech skills to other kids, which helped me overcome my shyness". He talks about attending his first computing class in college; of crashing the class' budget by  programming and printing out the output of that effort. He tells of pranks: "I created this device that jammed television sets, and when somebody put their hand on it I would make it go well, and when they pulled their hand away it went bad, etc. So people started watching TV with their hand on it: I started playing with people's bodies".  He remembers that a friend duplicated the key to the university's computer rooom "and it pained me so much to see a computer not used at night" that they would go in at night and program that IBM 360. He tells of working for one year, mid way through college, for a company programming a computer, and getting finally access to parts to build his own.

And then somebody told him about "this other guy" that went to the same school, Steve Jobs, "he also likes electronics and is into pranks". So they met. And they were different. Jobs was into the counterculture movement, went around barefoot, "I was not, I didn't want to use any illicit substances, I told my parents all I did". But they hit it off. Jobs, he says, used to do clay-mations: "getting a piece of clay, and taking a picture, then moving it a bit and taking another picture, and doing a movie this way a frame at a time" (so the history of Pixar goes further back than what is usually acknowledged). Woz tells about building, while at Berkeley, devices to hijack the phone system and make free long-distance phone calls.

In 1971, Hewlett-Packard released the first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP 35, "and they hired me to design calculators -- then the hottest products in the world". HP was run by engineers, building products for other engineers. "I believe so much in engineers, because they work with numbers, with things that work or don't work: there is no interpretation". He talks about HP with enormous enthusiasm, saying several times that "I wanted to spend my life as an HP engineer". Then a couple of years later Texas Instruments came up with their version of the scientific calculator, and it was simpler to use and better, "but we laughed at it: what a toy". Learning: "In tech, when you've established your own way to see things, it's difficult to see and admit that something is clearly better or more user-friendly".

Woz tells about creating a dial-a-joke service in San Francisco -- a little machine that lets you dial a number and hear a joke. "It was illegal then to own, purchase or use a phone or an answering machine: you had to lease one from the telecom company, and it was outrageously expensive".

About this time, Jobs went to college in Oregon -- "because they had a physics professor there who won a Nobel, and that's the kind of people he want to be around" -- then came back and got a job at Atari. "He told me they wanted to hire me; I said no, I will never leave HP". So Jobs asked him to design a game for Atari, and challenged him to design it in 4 days, and of course Woz delivered (but the legend says that Jobs kept most of the money paid by Atari). Back then, games were not software, they were hardware: mazes of transistors and wires and switches.

Shortly thereafter, Woz discovered computer networking, in the form of the Arpanet -- the precursor of the Internet -- through a friend "who was typing on a teletype machine and playing chess with a computer out in Boston". The Arpanet at the time reached about a dozen locations, mostly US universities. "I went home that night and tried to build my own and ended up designing a device that spelled out letters on the screen". That was done by typing on a keyboard; the orders travelled through the Arpanet to the computer in Boston; which in return talked back to Woz television screen, where the words would be displayed. The TV screen became a computer terminal, "and we sold some".

Attending gatherings of the Homebrew club, a group of computer hobbists, "where I never spoke but listened to others tell about rumors, novelties, etc", he discovered new machines such as the Altair. "We spoke of what we were doing as a revolution, that some day there would be a computer in every home, everybody would use them, and the guy who knew how to program a computer would take it into the office and be more powerful than the CEO". "But big companies didn't take us seriously, they were selling big machines to the military and to other big companies".

That's when his tinkering led him to the personal computer. He built a box with a cheap microprocessor, some dynamic RAM (4k), a small program "that watched to see what you were typing into the keyboard", and "I basically took out the Arpanet and put that box between the keyboard and the television screen". The personal computer was born.

Woz and Jobs shopped the idea around. HP turned them down. So they created a company of their own, investing a few hundred dollars. "We were the only ones building a complete personal computer". Orders started pouring in. Others were copying the idea. "So when we started working on another computer, we kept it a bit more secret". When the Apple II arrived on the market, "we figured that we could sell 1000 a month, but how do you build 1000 computers when you have no money -- and we really had none?". They shopped their ideas at HP, at Commodore, at Atari, they were turned down. Then an angel investor put in the money, asking however that Wozniak quit HP -- which he did after much hesitation.

From there, it was a rush. They started using cassette tapes to put programs in. Then they came up with the floppy disk. The Apple was an expandable computer, thanks to expansion cards. The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, "created a combination that was going to start the whole computer revolution: the combination of hardware and software to give solutions to what we need in life".

And then they went to visit Xerox PARC, probably the most famed computer research lab ever, "and they had windows and menus that pop up on the screen, and a mouse, and a cursor", and that visit seeded the next direction for Apple -- and for the whole computer industry.

When the first Macintosh (picture left) came out on 24 January 1984 -- accompanied by the famous "big brother" videoclip -- it was a sensation but businesses sneered, "they called it a toy" -- riminiscent of the HP-Texas Instruments calculator story -- "but it was clear that it was the computer for the rest of us".

The rest of the story, ups and downs and microsofts, is known. I was surprised by the fact that Wozniak spoke of Apple's current products still as "our products". He called himself several times "an artist".

I asked him where is today's Homebrew club, and he pointed to  the huge and growing (particularly in the US, particularly on the West Coast) do-it-yourself movement, the Make magazine and Maker Faire crowd: "people that are trying to build interesting things for fancy, for love".

Comments

[christian]

Thank you for the writeup, the little bit about the groupies was especially interesting.

christian (iPod-dependant)

[texas-computer-networking]

I appreciate the article. I bet Mr. Wozniak is an interesting guy to hear speak. His innovations in computing benefit us all.