Jessica Livingston, a founding partner at Y Combinator, interviews Steve Wozniak for her new book, Founders At Work:
The Apple I, oddly enough was probably more important [than the Apple II], because it said that a computer of the future is going to have a keyboard and a video display and it’s going to look like a typewriter. It’s going to be roughly that size. And it’s funny, but every computer since the Apple I, including the Polymorphics technology Sol computer that came next (it was out of our club), had a keyboard and a video display. No computer had done this before that. No small computer was coming with a keyboard yet. The Apple I was the first and the Apple II was the third. Basically every computer since then had a keyboard and a video display. The world has never gone back from that day.
What kind of person goes on to develop the Apple I?
Livingston: You were designing all of these different types of computers during high school at home, for fun?Wozniak: Yes, because I could never build one. Not only that, but I would design one and design it over and over and over — each one of the computers — because new chips would come out. I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I’d done before because I’d come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. “I’ll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips.”
The reason I did that was because I had no money. I could never build one. Chips back then were… like I said, to buy a computer built, it was like a downpayment on a good house. So, because I could never build one, all I could do was design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up with ideas that nobody else would come up with.