A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.
Also, my father was an engineer and he helped to guide me into some science fair projects that were electronics, so my love grew.
And all of a sudden - well, for a few years I had gotten out of computers because I worked at Hewlett Packard designing calculators, which is a different kind of computer.
And Apple had such great financial success I really didn't need to be there.
And I wouldn't go back to the engineering.
And in designing computers, which had become the love of my life, it was like solving puzzles. I tried to get better and better and better.
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
Any project you worked on had value. Today, if you work on 10 different things, one of them might have value.
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
Atari is a very sad story.
But anything new you get for your computer, it's horrible to go through a five minute installation. Because you know there's a 50% chance that you're going to wind up spending five hours and you may not even get it working.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.
Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right.
Eventually I found out that the New York Times had tight friendship ties with Microsoft and that one of Microsoft's key people had an editorial column in the Times. They were trying to use me.
Every dream I've ever had in life has come true ten times over.
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
For a decade it's been a PowerBook because I like to be free and flexible and have it all with me in my hands. A certain size computer - go right back to the Apple II - is just the size I want.
For myself personally, there was a point where all of a sudden I wasn't the sole engineer that was critical for everything. That was a difference for me.
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
However, I only applied to one college, the University of Colorado, and I think MIT was the perfect school for me. Maybe that was a mistake.
I am also very observant of things that the Macintosh stood for originally - user interface and the ways computers should work for us and not against us.
I believe that once you understand the people, you find out that all these things you've been taught your whole life about something to fear really isn't there.
I don't participate in taking strong sides on issues. I also don't like it because it leads to arguments between people.
I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
I had designed so many computers in my life that I knew what exceptional things I had done and could do. I had even built a small computer five years before, around 1970.
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
I think computers are obviously getting thinner and smaller. The screens on laptops have gotten larger and larger.
I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.
I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly.
I was helping people build their own computers. I would pass out schematics. I went over to friends' houses and sat there, hour after hour, soldering the wires together to make their computers.
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.
I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things.
I'd like to always be an Apple employee - just a real small paycheck and a badge.
I'm surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
In the end, I hope there's a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.
In those days, there was no idea there was going to be a huge computer market; that they were going to enter everyone's lives so pervasively as they have.
It was at the time that my other hero, my father, was teaching me the values of education - why children have to learn to make this a better world than the parents had made and why school is so important to your life.
It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.
It's just not right that so many things don't work when they should. I don't think that will change for a long time.
Microsoft has billions of dollars in cash, and a small little chunk could be invested in Apple for a while.
My 4th and 5th grade teacher was a real inspiration to me - just that she seemed to care about students so much.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.
My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.
Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.
Obviously, prices of displays are still dropping. Maybe they will replace televisions.
So it's like all these influences came together and out came a product that I knew would be easy to use the way I liked to use a computer at my job at Hewlett Packard, which was to solve engineering problems, and occasionally to solve a puzzle, and also to play games.
So we didn't really take a big financial risk or something like that, we just said, hey, this is a neat thing; let's be part of this new, developing industry.
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.
Sometimes there's a new product and I get onto some of the issues real quickly.
Speed, it's hard to say where we need more at the moment. I've always noticed it in the past and now for the first time in my life I'm just not pressed to be seeking speed.
Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that.
Steve said he had an idea for a name - Apple Computer. He doesn't always let on where ideas come from, or how they come into his head. That was constantly true all the time. We both tried to think of names that were more suggestive or technological words for the name of the company.
Sure, just to have a company, I'll gamble a few bucks on that. And really, we didn't take a risk - I didn't give up my job; Steve just lived at home with his parents; we didn't change our lifestyle.
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
The communities, the schools that I went to, I've always been strongly supportive of.
The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.
The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn't have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.
The older I get the more I like to take it easy.
The way I did it, every job was A+.
Then I continued throughout the years, building more sophisticated computer projects, eventually designing complete computers and building them through high school and college.
These things were kind of strange because I'm a normal person who believes in the very middle road and just having a normal life and doing what normal people do.
They just better not act like I wasn't a top engineer. That would upset me.
We went to Commodore in the early days and showed them our Apple II before it was out and offered to sell it to them for maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars - I don't know what Steve was talking.
We were the computer to have in your home.
Well, you can always say that the speeds and the hard disk capacity are going to go up.
What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
When we had the Apple II we were looking for a way to shop it because it was worth selling thousands a month but we didn't have enough money to build thousands.
When we went to the Soviet Union, we weren't allowed to travel freely. We had to be in a certain city on a certain date and we had to get permission from the government to go to a different city. That was such a strange way of life.
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that's one of the biggest honors of my life.
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