IWoz: Computer Geek To Cult Icon: How I Invented The Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, And Had Fun Doing It Quotes
"Extreme honesty. Extreme ethics, really. That’s the biggest thing he taught me."
"I never lie, even to this day. Not even a little."
"What a great, great world he’s living in."
"As an engineer, you can change your world and change the way of life for lots and lots of people."
"It wasn’t as crowded back then, and boy, was it easy to get around."
"I was always being told I was the best runner, the top athlete in school, the best baseball player."
"He was a really successful football player at Caltech."
"The teachers recognized something different about me immediately."
"She’d be home when we came home from school, and she was always really pleasant and funny and interesting and gave us stuff to eat that was special to us."
"I was the only boy who could beat the girls at them."
"But I didn’t share this activity with my parents, friends, teachers, or anyone over the years. It was that private."
"I thought to myself: Hey, things are facts or things are lies."
"I was struggling in my head with the fact that I had been extremely smart in math and science and weaker in English and history."
"The way they spoke—I felt like I didn’t know their language anymore."
"I was like an entertainer. A puppeteer—with live puppets under my control."
"He had to have been an engineering student to have known a word like that back then."
"There’s a point where a joke crosses to a point where it is beyond funny—not funny anymore but scary—and this was it."
"Just the fact that I was able to take a computer class was amazing."
"I had no idea what he meant by that. I guess he felt threatened by the unrest happening in relation to the Vietnam War."
"I was just a mild, meek engineering student and would never be involved in anything politically subversive."
"I swore to myself I would put up my own life before letting something like the Vietnam War ever happen again to young kids."
"My very first one. It was an extraordinary milestone in that sense."
"I never liked alcohol. It made people act noisy and out of control."
"I was willing to change my beliefs if someone came along to show me something better."
"They were just about at this level—they had the same amount of memory and the same awkward front panel of lights and switches."
"I knew that I was bright and that my brain was going to take me places."
"I would’ve thought it was better not even to go into the voting booth."
"I had come to learn of Jesus, from my friend Randy Adair in college, that he always tried to find ways toward peace."
"I’d thought the government was here to protect us, but that turned out to be wrong."
"Your job is the most important thing you'll ever have and the worst thing to lose."
"I never agreed with the normal thinking, where a company is more competition driven, and the poorest, youngest or most recently hired workers are always the first to go."
"A company is like a family, a community, where we all take care of each other."
"Calculators were going to put slide rules out of business."
"The worst possible thing is to lose your job."
"I was going to build my own computer, a computer I could own and design to do any neat things I wanted to do with it for the rest of my life."
"Once you went through it, you could never go back."
"I felt so out of it—like, No, no, I am not of this world."
"I realized that all I needed was this Canadian processor or another processor like it and some memory chips. Then I’d have the computer I’d always wanted!"
"For once in our lives, we'll have a company."
"The only thing on my mind was, Wow, now that I’ve discovered what a microprocessor can do, there are so many places I can take it."
"I never truly thought we were going to make money with Apple. That was never in my mind."
"Every single thing I thought about on the computer was going to be valuable."
"The potential with the Apple I was blowing my mind."
"I imagined word-processing software replacing typewriters someday."
"We decided to price them at $666.66 each—a price I came up with because I liked repeating digits."
"The Basics on BASIC: BASIC stands for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code."
"I had no idea what other people did in their computer languages, but I felt it was obvious that you needed a noun stack."
"I realized I could do all those things for the rest of my life. I didn’t need my own company."
"The Apple II was the first computer to sell a million units!"
"I realized I had a lot of fun designing computers and showing them off at Homebrew."
"I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned."
"I decided I was going to offer to sell some stock really cheap to people who deserved it."
"I like to do things different. I valued the employees at Apple—as a community."
"I learned right away that in a company, you can have different ideas about what ads look like."
"I was much better keeping quiet and just focusing on my particular talent of engineering."
"But companies don’t always evolve the way you want them to."
"I knew this was going to be a challenge for me."
"In life, there is an 'us' and a 'them.' A 'we' and a 'they.' And sometimes they’re on the wrong side and we’re on the right side."
"If I’m going to do something, I always try to do it well."
"I felt like making it into something special. I never had the idea that it was going to make a lot of money, but I wanted it to be kind of special."
"So now I had a girlfriend and that was it. It was all really quick."
"Let’s get a ring for me, I said, that has the diamond on the inside so nobody can see it. I thought that would be more special than a normal ring."
"I realized that my brain had been working very strangely."
"The very next day, my father called to remind me that I was supposed to show up for an appointment with the psychologist I’d been seeing."
"I realized it had been ten years since my third year of college, and if I didn’t go back to finish up now, I probably never would."
"I liked being the first at things—I always have—so I approved this instantly."
"I remember his conversations with me; he would always point out all sides of an issue."
"But the world isn’t black and white. It’s gray scale. As an inventor, you have to see things in gray scale."
"Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads."
"And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee."
"If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone."
"When you’re working as your own boss, making decisions about what you’re going to build and how you’re going to go about it, making trade-offs as to features and qualities, it becomes a part of you."
"If you believe in your own power to reason, you can just relax. You don’t have to feel the pressure to set out and convince anyone."
"The engineer in me wants to use and test a product before judging it."
"The computer, your main computer, is where all the music can really be stored. The iPod is really a satellite."
"I’m proud now. I’m especially proud not just because Apple turned around, but because it turned around in a way so in line with our early values."
"The world needs inventors—great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it’s within your reach."