iWoz | Steve Wozniak | Talks at Google

Hi, my name is Andy Herzfeld. I was one of the original Macintosh designers, worked at Apple about 25 years ago and it's my great pleasure today to be able to introduce Steve Wozniak, who's been my hero since before I ever met him. By virtue of his single handedly designing the Apple ii. The Apple II is probably older than the average Google employee. It's a little hard to get across how stunning the Apple II design was when it kicked off the personal computer industry almost 30 years ago. And the Apple II changed my view.

Of what it is to be an.

Engineer by virtue of the incredible creativity that was displayed in its design. I used to think engineering was about learning the rules and applying them. When I saw the Apple ii, I realized it was about learning the rules and breaking them. The Apple II had all the creativity of a great work of art and it really inspired myself and I'm sure countless others to want to participate in the personal computer industry. The other great thing about the Apple II really not only was the amazing genius of the design, but it was really a labor of love and it really taught me how products can can have a soul. Because the Apple II was Woz's lifelong dream to have a computer. And the love I think shone out from the product and attracted a great user base. And then when I got to work at Apple and I got to know Woz, I found he was also an incredible role model for what I wanted to be. Because not only was his work full of engineering genius, he also had impeccable integrity. Always sticking up for the underdog, for the individual engineer, and is generous to a fault, always treats everyone, no matter what their position is, kindly. And Woz also has an incredible sense of humor. I also learned as much about pulling pranks from Woz as I did about engineering. So without further ado, here's Steve Wozniak.

Nice to be here. It's so great to see someone who's actually excited about technology and aspects related to technology. I want to see if this works away from I don't have to stand there. And again, it's so great to see all that. But now I say I are a writer. Now I are a writer who what's the story behind the book? It's like something I never wanted to do. There's so many interesting things in the world to do, but there's stories that I want other people who loved engineers and loved what engineering was about to read and to feel good and get rewarded. I've always wanted to write A book. But I never had time. So a couple of times book companies gave me money, and I returned the money and said, I don't have time. This time I had a co writer. So she kind of forced the discipline on me. I had to keep meeting her up in San Francisco to talk into tape recorders, and then she would edit all the stuff. And. And I started feeling guilty, like she's doing all this work editing. So I told her, oh, I would give her a bigger percentage of the book. And then later on, you know, when it comes time, you know, a handshake, something out of your mouth was what my dad taught me. That should count, you know. So of course I signed over a bigger amount of the book. And now here I am in what's called a book tour. The book's been released. I'm going all over the world day after day after day. Event, event, event, event, event, event. For the publicist, this is the first time in my life I ever gave somebody the ability to. To put things onto my online calendar. It's a Google calendar, and my book publicist has that right. And I'll come home at night and I'll spot eight new things on the calendar for tomorrow that I didn't expect. So it's just been nonstop for a long, long time. I still don't get free for a month. It's quite a harrowing experience. Well, I started out here in the valley, and it was called Santa Clara Valley. It was full of trees and orchards. I had a great father who was an engineer, and I loved watching what he worked on and what engineering work was all about. You know what? He didn't direct us children into being engineers like himself. I turned out that way, but my siblings didn't. It's like when I got interested in electronics and building things. He would pull out a blackboard and explain everything from how atoms work and how silicon structures work and the crystals and things flow and how transistors work, where the electrons flow and where they don't flow. He would explain those things as I needed to. Well, as I was young, a lot of the kids moving into the orchards were going out and housing developments were going in. Over in Sunnyvale, my father worked at Lockheed. Lockheed, the only company that could afford chips. The military could afford chips. No other company or person really could in the early days back then. Well, that's because Lockheed was building missiles and missiles had every fraction of a gram counted. Well, I had a transistor radio in about sixth grade, and it was the most prized possession of my life. And when my dad started telling me about chips that were going to have six transistors on one chip, I said, wow, they're going to make better transistor radios. And he said, well, not really. Sort of by the wayside. What's left over after the military and big business is done getting the chips made, that's what the consumers get in their products. And it always bothered me. I kind of wanted the average joe with the average appliances in their home to be the driving force for the state of art of technology. It was really kind of an early goal in my life. One day I was browsing the hallway and I spotted a journal that only engineers would have. We weren't around. We never thought we'd see a computer or touch one in our lives back in those days. And this journal had articles about ones and zeros. I said, wow, this is an easy arithmetic to learn. And boolean algebra. Wow, this is easy to learn how to change ands into ors and draw some little symbols. It was fun. It talked about crts, where the actual pixels on the crt could be refreshed, and therefore it was a dynamic memory. And I found these articles so interesting. It just became my life. I just knew this is what I want to do in life. Early encounters by accident really gave me that direction. Reading Tom swift books about a young engineer who owned his own company with his father, and when there was a world crisis, he'd go into the laboratory and hook things up and build a submarine, a spacecraft, a plasma field, whatever it took to resolve the conflict. And wow, that was my hero in books. Read about a ham radio operator hero, you know, And I thought, wow, what an incredible thing when you can reach out and touch people far away, Reach to another state, reach to another country with ham radio. At the end of the book, it said, you can get a license at any age. And I thought, whoa, whoa, I can walk away from the mic. It says, somebody's helping me. So anyway, I was ham radio operator. You can't get a driver's license when you're in sixth grade, But I got my ham radio license, and that was so fun. My mom said, have a sense of humor. My dad was helping me with electronics. I started building science fair projects, and one of the first ones was a logic device. I had learned logic in that journal. My dad got hundreds of transistors and diodes donated to us as cosmetic rejects. This was in a day when you couldn't go to an electronic store and buy transistors. All you could Buy was tubes. That was where you went down to the grocery store and plugged in all the tubes from your TV set to find out which one went bad. And everyone in the family did it. They had these testers even in grocery stores. Well, we were in the transistors. And I learned how to build dates out of transistors from my dad. And tic tac toe is a game of logic. You cannot lose tic tac toe if you have the right set of rules. Isn't that correct? Sure it is. But actually, I found out in later life, tic tac toe is a game of psychology. And you can beat people with psychology hard explain. But almost everybody who says you can't beat me, I almost always beat them. Not always, but pretty close. Well, anyway, I built this every, you know, you have a set of rules. If there's an X here and an O here and X here. I played every possible game of tic tac toe and came up with a set of rules. And for each rule, it's a logic gate. If there's an X here and an X there, you put your X there. You put your O there to block it. And I pounded nails into a 3 by 4 foot piece of plywood, saw transistors and diodes and resistors onto all the nails that were filling up this three by four piece of plywood. It was a huge project for a sixth grader. By eighth grade, I built another one with hundreds of transistors that could actually add binary numbers, the ones and zeros you'd toggle on switches and the result would be in life and had an add subtract switch. And I had progressed along the lines of learning elementary electronics. Up to learning gates and logic, up to learning, you know, how to build, how to combine gates into something useful like an adder, how to take an adder and a subtractor and make them both into one. Had been right on this great progression to learn how to design computers, but never knew it. I never thought I'd do that sort of thing. Well, in sixth grade I told my dad, I'm going to be an engineer like you when I grow up. That was my decision. So secondarily I'm going to be a fifth grade teacher because I just really appreciated what the teachers were doing for us and everything. My dad told me how they were giving us a life and a future and everything like that. And I said, well, do the teachers earn more than engineers? And he said, no, that was a disappointment to me. I said, well, does my elementary School teacher earn more than the high school teacher? Well, no. Well, that was a learning. But anyway, some of these things are like goals. They stick in with you. Things that you want for your whole life. In high school, the thing is to build. I didn't know what a computer was. I was on a search to find out what a computer was, and there were no books that I knew of back then. And I was too shy to go research or ask for books or look for them. What is a computer? I knew that I was getting close in building little devices that could add numbers and the like, but I didn't really know what a full computer was. And one day I went to a science fair. This guy had a real stepping motor. You could step a physical arrow and it would go click, click, click, click, Click, click, click. 20 positions, and it could back up, zip, click, click, click, click, click, click, zip, and back up. And at every position of that arrow, you could dial in a code for a simple operation. I finally realized, oh, my gosh, a computer does one thing after another after another, and it can go back and repeat itself until some conditions met. And that was a great learning step. In high school, I was so advanced in electronics that my electronics teacher said, steve, you can go down to Sylvania Corporation in Sunnyvale once a week and program a computer. And we didn't have computers in our high school, Homestead High School in Cupertino. And this was incredible. I get to touch a computer. It's like I get to be one of those special people in the world. Whenever I built a little electronic noise maker or something, I felt like I'm doing something. Most of the kids in the school would have no idea what it is. I'm special in a way. I get to actually program a computer. I got a FORTRAN manual, and one of my first programs was the Knights Tour, where a knight has to hit every square on the chessboard, and all it did was flash flicker the lights and nothing came out. It didn't come up with a solution. So I learned about loops, how programs get into loops and they get hung up and they freeze. And the next week I came back and printed my chess boards and I found out it was actually working. It was, you know, jump the night around when you get stuck back up and then try a different move and backtrack and try a different backtracking algorithm. I figured out that it was going to get a solution in 10 to the 25th year. So what that taught me, at least at a later point in life looking back, is that A lot of the solutions don't come from a computer that can do a million things a second, you know, a million times faster than the fastest human a computer can count. Even with that great power, you still need the human intelligence to have approaches to solve a lot of the problems that are a little bit difficult or extremely difficult. While I was down there programming the computer, I saw a manual called the Small Computer Handbook. It describes an early minicomputer called the PDP8. In the late 1960s, a whole ton of companies, Hewlett Packard, Varian, Digital Equipment Digital, were coming out with these things called minicomputers. The typical minicomputer looks like today's network switching equipment. You know, big metal box, bigger than network switchers usually are today. Big metal box that would sit in a rack and it had all the switches and lights and you could toggle things, and if you were not, didn't understand what it was and what every switch on it meant, you wouldn't dare approach it. You wouldn't know what to do. And that was the typical minicomputer. Well, I sat down with this manual that described the minicomputer, the PDP8. It described the architecture, just as you can describe the architecture of a house or a building. How many rooms there are, how many doors, how big are they? And then if you know all the parts that are available, the lumber and the metal and the glass and all the fittings, you know, you can actually build a house out of the parts. Well, for computers, the parts, the lumber are the chips. So I got some early chip manuals, and this was back in the day where they would put one and gate on a chip that sold for $50. That's like $500 today for one and gate. That's why normal mortals couldn't afford them. I could never buy a chip, but I got these manuals from my dad and. And I sat down in my room, closed the door, shut out the world, and just sat down, trying to see how can I combine little gates that do logic and little registers that hold things temporarily to do this computer, be this computer. And I didn't solve it. But maybe a few weeks later I went back and tried again on a weekend when I had some time, and went back again and tried to design it and finally got it designed. And then some better chips came out. Two gates on a chip or two adders on a chip instead of one. And I said, wow, I could do my design even better now. And I went back and redesigned the same computer, all on paper. All with a pencil, no hope of ever getting the parts to build it. Now I got into this mode of, wow, what other computers are there? I want to get the other computer manuals and design some of them. So what I would do is there was no technical library around, but I figured they have a technical library at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. So my friend Alan Baum and I would drive down on Sundays when nobody would be around, and we'd drive in and we'd try to find that we found the main building. And wherever real smart people work, there are generally doors unlocked. So we always, always, never once did we go there on a Sunday. And sometimes we'd have to climb a stair up to the second floor, and we'd always find a door open and we could get into the library and I could read computer books and computer magazines, and I could fill out little cards to order manuals of the computers, the mini computers to be sent to my house. So I'd get the variant 620i description manual, and I would sit down with the latest chips and design it on paper. And I'm just doing this as a hobby. You don't have anything people can measure you by. I can't show it to my friends at school. I can't even boast that I'm designing computers. Extrinsic rewards are the ones that people can see. They can see how many yachts you have, what your title is at a company and what your salary is. These are things people can actually see in you. And the other rewards are the ones that you just feel. I did something I wanted to do. I solved a crossword puzzle. I worked so hard and so hard and so hard. Well, maybe it's sudoku. And I solved it. And I just feel good about that. That's my thing to do. And that's what this computer design stuff was. So I sat down, I kept trying to design them over and over, weekend after weekend after weekend, and all you can do is compete against yourself. I couldn't say, I designed it. I'm done. No, I want to design it again. I don't have any new computers. Let me try the same one with some better chips, or let me try to sell. And I came up with this idea of always being efficient, always trying to not waste anything. If you had, you know, three gates used out of four in one package and three out of another, that left you two gates left over. And maybe they would make up another gate and save a chip. And I would just do all this kind of thinking of figuring out what chips could be used for things they weren't designed for, to never have waste and always save parts. And I judged myself on how many chips I used. If I designed a computer with 80 chips and then I'd go in on a weekend, I would try as hard as I could, working intensely, Maybe even for two weeks to try to design it in 78 chips, come up with new ideas. So I came up with all this catalog of ideas in my head that I know could never be in a book. They just weren't standard chips were kind of oddball things. You know, some chips were analog, some chips were clocked. I mean, it was so strange. As I got very good at that, I knew I was very good at it because my designs were turning out to be half as many chips as the manufacturers. The Data General Nova computer was introduced. This was a strange computer. I looked at the manual and by the way, it shipped with posters that you could put on your wall, which I did, posters of the computer that would mount in a rack with all the switches and lights and looks like an airplane cockpit. But they had another poster they shipped in some of the manuals. And that was a poster of the same machine with 16 switches and all these buttons and lights. And it was sculpted and round and sitting on a glass table like it would be in a museum or a house. And it just impressed me that, whoa, you never thought you'd see a computer looking like that. Well, the architecture of this computer was different than all the others. All the other mini computers I tried to design would have a bunch of instructions about adding subtracting numbers to memory, numbers from memory, shifting bits around this and that, 50 instructions. This one had one instruction, one 16 bit instruction. And two of the bits implied which argument was argument number one and two implied which register was number two. Three bits would say, do you add? Do you subtract? Do you? Or do you and do you exclusive or do you blah, blah, blah, invert? And then another bit would be for setting carries, like carries and borrows and other bits for do you shift the result. And the funny thing is you could make most of the standard computer instructions out of this one little thing that had pieces. Well, when I went down to design it, I had an instruction register with 16 bits. And I ran two wires for those two bits down to a selector chip and two wires. I didn't have to design anything. I just ran wires straight to the right chips that were made to do the job. It's like this computer had been designed for the chips that were made. My design of that minicomputer wound up being half as many chips as all the other ones I had ever designed. And it was just as good a computer. And, boy, did I appreciate that, that if you think, think and think and design something the right way, you can have so many fewer parts and do the same job. That was real benefit. So I told my dad, someday I'm going to have a 4K Nova computer with teletype and all. And he said, well, that'll cost as much as a house. And I was stunned. I had never thought about money. And I said, well, I'm going to live in an apartment I was going to have. I don't care. You can't tell me I'm not going to have this computer. Why 4k. 4k bytes was the minimum you needed to run a programming language. A computer wasn't really useful. It was just theory. It had to really be usable and programmable and solve some problems, run some games, whatever you want to do. So that was my goal in life. I went off to college my first year, and in 1968, there were very few colleges that had any computer classes for underclassmen. So I had to take a graduate course. And it taught all about computers and the registers inside the architecture stuff I knew pretty much and taught about operating systems and languages. And we got to program in Portrans. I thought, wow, I can run programs. You know, I go down to the university computer, the supercomputer, the CDC 6400, and I submit programs on punch cards and come back later and get my printouts. And I thought, what do you program, Steve? I thought, wow, I've got this table of Handbook of Chemistry and Physics full of tables of numbers. That's what computers calculate. They calculate numbers. So I wrote programs that would calculate powers of 2, inverse powers of 2, Fibonacci numbers. I had seven programs. I would get them to run three times a day, printing 60 pages each time so I wouldn't be kicked off by the university time limit. And I was piling up yards and yards of computer outputs in my dorm room. My roommate was getting a little pissed, and they stopped running my programs one day. And I went to see the professor, and he turns on a tape recorder. This is like, serious stuff. Are you out to get me? He says, I mean, it's like I was doing something bad. And then it turns out he says, you aren't doing our class stuff. I said, what's Fortran? He says, this is not our Fortran. These aren't Our programs. So this was such an expensive college. Out of state students, second most expensive in the country. My parents had told me already they could only afford to send me their one year. So what I did was, well, anyway, he called the computer department, he said, this bill, Steve Wozniak has run our class five times over budget. He should pay it. Mr. Wozniak should pay it. Oh, that scared me. It was more than tuition, which was really high price. So I didn't even try to go back to that school the next year. Oh, but I did have a fun time while I was there. University of Colorado had a fun time with electronics. I went down to Radio Shack and bought the highest speed transistor they had and hooked up a few little capacitors and wound a coil myself and made a little device that would jam TVs somewhat. And I took it over to the girls dorm where they had a color TV. Not many color TVs around the campus, down the basement, and a lot of people are sitting around watching tv. And I turned it on and fuzzed up the TV picture a little bit. And a friend of mine hit the tv. Whack, whack. And I made it go good. And then over time, I generally made it so you had to hit it harder and harder. And different people would get stationed every night to sit by the TV set. And when it went bad, it was their job to tune the fine tuning or whack the TV or go around back, find some control that would fix it. And I got to a point one time where a guy had his hand on the middle of the screen and a foot up in the air on a chair, he was standing up and I made the set go good. There were three people trying to fix the tv. I made it go good and they said, okay, it's good. And everybody relaxed and it went bad. And they said, move your bodies back. By then I had trained everybody to know that they were puppets. You have to move your body to a certain place and the TV works. Kind of like psychology research, but I wasn't in psychology yet. And this guy put his hand back on the set and it worked. And then he put his hand off and it didn't work. And it's on the set. Then he put his foot down on the floor and it didn't work. And he put his foot up in the air and it worked. He turned to the audience and he said, it's a grounding effect. And I always enjoyed having a little bit of fun with electronics because other people who didn't? No electronics wouldn't think somebody in the room was really manipulating them this way. Second year we had at the end of college, a friend of mine had duplicated the key to the computer room, the 360 Model 40. And we'd go in at midnight, unlock the door and go in and I'd run punch card programs through till 2, 3, 4 in the morning. And then we'd tidy up and go home and leave no evidence we'd been there. It was just like I had to program anything I could anytime I'd get near a computer, you know, run some programs. And that was my fun in life. After that year, I didn't have enough money yet to go to a four year college. So I went and I worked for a year programming a computer they were building in Sunnyvale. Great computer. It got developed, it had an operating system, it had languages, it had applications. They sold two of them to the state of California to run the DMV for the next 20 years. When the DMV finally switched over with hundreds of millions of dollars of contract to Tandem Computers I think it was, or roam, they switched over and it was a huge disaster. And nothing worked and, and there were lawsuits galore. But these two computers were great computer. But the company went bankrupt. And it was hard to understand that in a recession there might not be an ability to keep the financiers interested in refinancing the company. It was so strange to see a product that got built, A computer got built, it got made, everything was successful and it got sold and it was a good machine and yet the company went out of business. That really taught me something socially. After that year of working though, I had enough money and I went to Berkeley for my third, third year of college. And this was great. I had just the greatest schedule. I would take four grad courses and they were all in the same room of Corey hall. So I would sit in the same seat for every one of the four courses. And two of them were right after each other on Monday, Wednesday, and two of them right after each other on Tuesday, Thursday. I always had my seat and none of my classes started before noon. That was just the greatest, greatest year and all that. But during that year, oh, before that year, actually just before the school year started, I built a little computer of my own. I was working for the one company and I told them I used to design all these mini computers when I was in high school, but I could never get the parts to build them. And an executive said, what if I get you the parts. I have connections with cygnetics. I said, oh wow, I'll design a computer and I can build it. So I designed one that night and he got me all the parts and I actually wound up building it for a couple of weeks. We were soldering together down the street at a friend's house and the friend said, you've got to meet Steve Jobs because he's got a lot of things in common with you. He went to the same school, he likes electronics, he knows electronics and he likes pranks. So Steve came over and we started sharing our prank stories and telling what we'd done in electronics and hooking chips up and all that sort of stuff. And we hit it off in a lot of other areas. Just the sort of music we like and serious attitudes about the world and political philosophies and the like. So we became best friends for seven years and Steve now the types of people we were. I've been brought up by my engineer father who kind of scared me about being on the extremes of anything. I kind of always wanted to be in the middle, have my feet on the floor. I'll have a job someday, I'll have money. And when you're smart in electronics, you really don't have to worry too much about having a job. But I'll have money, I'll have a home, I'll just be kind of a stable, normal person. And Steve, I was influenced a lot by the counterculture thinking of those days. Like those were the real brightest people. But I didn't want to go and follow the their ways of living because I didn't want to be a follower. I didn't want to do things just because other people were doing it. But I kind of appreciated their thinking. Well, Steve was more of a true hippie and so he lived the minimal with the eating the seeds and no shoes and all that. And it's so amazing because he spoke about those, he always spoke about those few special people in history, the Shakespeare's, the Einsteins and Isaac Newtons. And he always read, really wanted to be one of those people that somehow could see things that other people couldn't see. He also liked that he talked about how he made the Claymation movies back in high school, which really relates to Pixar in a later day. It's so odd how many things early on in your life you can pinpoint and they kind of show up later. Well, Steve was, he was a little bit more like. We didn't really talk about drugs that much because that was more his area, not mine. So we had differences anyway. But we love technology. We love pulling a few pranks now and then. And we pulled some great ones. Even if they didn't come off, they were great. Well, I went off to my third year of college at Berkeley, and the day before that, I discovered about a little device that you could put tones into an ordinary telephone. Some people could even whistle them. And you could make your phone network of the world, dial calls anywhere you wanted, go via satellite, country to country to country, around the world to the next phone over. I mean, all these incredible things that who would ever believe it exists? Well, eventually I just started telling the lore of all this phone freaking that's going on. 1971, 1972, Steve Jobs. And I didn't think, well, the article was sort of claimed. It was fiction. It was an interesting story. But we went down to Slack that Sunday, went into the library and found, did some research, and we found out, oh, my God, these frequencies in the articles match this telephone company book. This thing's real. So this thing that seemed unreal was really real. The people were real. The words they were using were real. They were strange characters like Captain Crunch, who discovered that a little whistle in Cap' n Crunch cereal could blow a note that would seize a phone line. So eventually, Steve and I were making. And I made blue box. And then Steve said, let's sell it. That was the first time he said, sell something. Well, the blue boxes could call anywhere in the world. So it was almost reaching out, like ham radio. Now, I had this deal with myself by then that you had to be honest with your parents. And I figured that would keep me from doing really bad things in life. So we told our parents, we both told our parents what we were doing with these blue boxes and how incredible it was. And the parents didn't like it, but all they said was, don't use our phones. So, yeah, we had quite a year. We had quite a year. It was a very fun time. After that year, there was the night I met Captain Crunch. I'll tell that story. He came to the dorm. I had been telling everybody about this guy, Captain Crunch, the big phone freak who drove around with racks of computer equipment in his van. He'd plug into a pay phone and redirect all the phone networks of the country and set up networks of phone freaks around the world. And that was my image of him. And he came to the door one night at Berkeley. I met him before the FBI did. Lucked out, lucked out. He comes to the door And I open it up, and here's this guy with scraggly hair. He's missing teeth, and he's looking all unshaven and all. And I said, are you? I am he. Captain Crunch. So that was quite a night. He took us out to Kip's Pizza Parlor and told us all these codes for dialing the world with our blue box. And that night, Steve Jobs and I had, around midnight, had to drive home to Steve's home in Los Altos. And then I had to drive my car back up to Berkeley. As we're driving Los Altos, Steve's car broke down. So the two of us said, well, there's a gas station. We walked to the gas station. The payphone, should we try the blue box? He taught us how to make a blue box call on a payphone. So we tried the blue box. And all of a sudden, Steve hangs up the phone and he's all nervous. The operator came on the line, whoa, this was scary. All right. So he tried it again with the blue box. Told the operator, it's a data call. The button, the light's going to flash. Ignore it. And he hangs up real quick. And the operator came on the line right then a cop car pulls up. The cop walks past us, shines his flashlight in the bushes. While he wasn't looking, Steve managed to shakingly pass me the blue box. When the cop patted me down, he probably thought we were doing drugs because we had long hair then. And he found the blue box. The cop said, what's this? I pushed two buttons. Beep, beep. I said, it's an electronic music synthesizer. The move synthesizer was brand new. The first music synthesizer of all time. It's electronic music synthesizer. He says, what's the orange button for? Steve said, that's for calibration. Second cop comes over, he takes the blue box. You know, we know we're in trouble. And what's this? Electronic music synthesizer? Steve says, the orange button for calibration. So the cops said, what's the deal? Our car broke down. Let's go out and look. So we get in the back of the cop car. This cop turns around, hands me the blue box and says, a guy named Moog beat you to it. You couldn't make up that story that night. Drove home. Then driving back to Berkeley, I fell asleep on 17 in Oakland. Totaled my car, which was no fun. Walked to the dorm room and told my roommate, well, I had a joke. Good thing I didn't pay the $25 parking fee this quarter. After that year of school. I didn't have a car, and I didn't really have the money for another year of college. So I went to work for another year to earn the money for my fourth year of college. So you can call that dropping out. I don't call it dropping out at all. I just took a year off to earn the money. As it happens, the hottest technology product of the day Was The Hewlett Packard HP35 scientific calculator, the very first calculator that had 12 transcendental functions on the keyboard that engineers like to use. Logarithms and exponentials, cosines and sines. And it was what we lived with. I was the slide rule whiz. But all of a sudden, slide rules were going to disappear. I bought one of those calculators. It was so important to me. And then the company, hewlett packard, where they designed them, heard about my technical prowess, how I could design about anything, and they brought me in for an interview. They interviewed me and gave me a job as an engineer Designing the hottest product of its day, Even though I only had three years of college. So this was just so lucky. When you luck into something like that, yeah, it's a lucky thing. So now I'm working at u. S hackard for three years, and I loved that company because I had decided that engineers were the best people in the world. They were the people who would think logically and concretely and analytically about things and add up the numbers and come to a result that's correct or it isn't correct. That's what you did with all your calculations. And I like that kind of person. It kind of represented honesty, which was my big thing in life. That was the highest moral goal. Well, this company had been started by engineers hewlett and packard. It was full of engineers throughout the management structure. And because we were only making products in those days for engineers, Things like oscilloscopes, signal generators, we were making the products that engineers used to design equipment. We were all part of the market. So the ideas for new products would not only come from above in that company, but they would come from us engineers at the very bottom of the org chart. And it was just a place you could feel comfortable. And I said, I don't want to move up an org chart. I don't want to go to management. I want to design things and write computer code for the rest of my life. I want to be an engineer for life. And here's a company I can do that at. Well, when I got home, from work designing calculators every day. I still had interest in electronics and the projects and the gadgets that were going on. And I walked into a bowling alley one day and there's a pong machine, the first real mass successful video game. A little TV set with a ball bouncing back and forth and a couple of knobs to play paddles. And I thought, you can make a game out of a tv. Because before that we had pinball games with all the moving levers and whackers, and they weren't as sophisticated as today's pinball games, but here was one on a TV set and it cost 20, 25 cents to play, where a normal pinball game only cost 10 cents. I thought, whoa. And then the second thing is, I told my fiance, I said I could build one of those because I could never afford to buy anything, had no money, but I could always manage to build things. Hewlett Packard had a great policy that the chips in the storeroom were. An engineer could have chips out of the storeroom for any design of their own if their supervisor approved. David Packard was just adamant that the storerooms wouldn't be locked. And all this so I could get the chips I needed to build anything I could design. And I sat there and looked at that Pong game. I said, I'll just design all the logic you have to. It's hardware. It's not software. In those days, it's all hardware. You had to hook little gates that could go one and zero, up and down, all together in a sequence that at the right time, pulses on a wire, made a ball on the TV screen or a paddle on the TV screen. I built a little pond with about 28 chips. Well, around this time, Steve Jobs went up to Portland, Oregon, to go to college at Reed College. College, because he liked those very high people up in the world that were the few that were changing the world, the few important people. And there was a physicist up there or a chemist who had won a Nobel Prize. That's why I went up there. I drove him up to Reed College and we sat down there and he showed me his list of classes. He says, look what they're making me take. All this stuff I don't want to take. I want to take courses. I'm in college. I want to take courses on Shakespeare and calligraphy and all. And so he sat there in a tent with his girlfriend for the first week of college and. And didn't go to any classes. And I thought, how do you do that? You can't do that. Steve, he somehow he can talk his way into a lot of things. He's very persuasive. So he could talk the university into letting him stay for two years without paying dorm fees, without paying tuition. But somehow hanging around and going to classes when he felt like the classes that he felt like and not really being a testable student. Well, he also, he came back after a while and got a job at Atari fixing up games that they had designed in Grass Valley. He would add things like sound to them and be kind of like a final adjustment and test them out and all that. He brought me into Atari and Atari saw my Pawn game and said, wow. By the way, on this Pong game I built, I used two little proms that added up to 256 bytes of raw memory. And I used two of those so that whenever you missed the ball, it would spell four letter words like darn or heck on the screen. I took it into Atari and they said, we want to hire you. They wanted to hire me right away. And I said, nope, there's no way I'll ever leave Hewlett Packard. That's my security for life. That's my company. It's an engineer's company. And I just believe in engineers so much. Well, Steve came to me one day and he said, nolan Bushnell Vitari wants a one player pawn game. It was to be called Breakout. And he says, could you design it? I thought, wow, man, I get to design a game that people are going to play in arcades. That's one of the biggest, greatest industries that's happening now. And this is back when the games were still hardware. And Steve said, well, there's a hitch. You have to do it in four days. Normally you would design something like that in six months. And I said, four days? It can't be done. How do you do anything in four days? I said, I'll try. This is the impossible. I sat down four days a night, no sleep for either one of us. We both got mononucleosis as a result. But we actually delivered a working Breakout game to Atari. And while I was there, my head was in this state of half awake and half asleep. While Steve was breadboarding my designs, I'd go out to the factory floor and play the first racing game ever, grand track 10. I got so good at it that later on, when I lived in Scotts Valley, they had a pizza parlor that gave away a free pizza. If you got 36 points or more, I could do that easy. So after my second free pizza, they took the machine out. But while I was there with my head half awake and half asleep, a lot of creative ideas come. And that's when I saw a ball on one of these Atari games out on the factory floor. And they only used black and white TV sets because color was too expensive back then. This little ball was changing color as it went across the screen because they put some transparent Mylar overlays of different colors on the television screen. And it would just go from red to blue to purple to yellow. Da, da, da, da. It was just so beautiful. And then somehow this idea popped in my head. What if I take some ones and zeros that I'm familiar with and put them in a little shift register and rotate them around so they repeat and repeat, and it comes out 1100. It goes up and it goes down, and it goes up and it goes down. And if I cycle it at exactly the right rate, it goes up and down at the rate of American colored tv. And it will sort of be like color signal, but not exactly. It didn't come from all the normal phase considerations and analog and differential calculus that defines all the phase shifters and adders and the huge amount of circuitry to generate color for a television set. It was just one little dollar chip spinning around. And if I shift those ones and zeros over, it's a little later in time. So instead of red, it's blue, and I shift them over again, it's green. And what if I put more ones in? It's a little higher up, which is like a lighter color in American television. What if I put more zeros in? It's a little lower, like a darker color. I Wonder, out of those 16. I wonder if it would ever work. I filed that idea away. Well, the next step was. Well, shortly thereafter, Steve and I went over and visited a friend, Captain Crunch, from the old blue box claim. I think he'd only been arrested twice by this time. And although I portrayed myself, I have never been a computer hacker. I've never gone in, tried to take computers down or discover their codes or take them over. But, you know, three times in my life, I looked over someone's shoulder and spotted their password. So I looked over Cap' n Crunch's shoulder one night and, well, this is a little later in time. So Captain Crunch is typing on a teletype machine. You know those old mechanical machines that you see in movies where they, like hackers, where they go click, click, click, click, click, like letters are being typed. Those were teletypes. And he's typing away and he says, I'm talking to a computer in Boston. I'm playing chess with a computer in Boston. And then he brought up this list of computers. Berkeley, Stanford, ucla, Santa Barbara, Illinois. Whoa. He could pick different computers and bounce around. This is like ham radio. It's like blue boxes. It's reaching out further in the world. This was the arpanet, forerunner of today's Internet. And I was just stunned by that. And just like the pong game, I said, I have to have that. And instantly popped in my head. I'll just make my TV set have little dots, little pixels on the TV set that spell out letters. And so then I. So I designed this little terminal. I could now type on my own keyboard, go through a modem, which I built, call a number at Stanford. I'm on the arpanet, and I could type to a computer in Boston. It would receive my words. And when the computer typed words back at slow modem speeds, we're talking 110 baud. We're talking 10 characters a second. That's so everything was text based. The computer would talk back and it would appear on my TV set. So anyway, I thought, wow, I got to build one of those. And I built it, and it worked well. Then a friend said, there's a club starting up. It turned out to be the Homebrew Computer Club. The Homebrew Computer Club. An audience about this size would meet every two weeks, every second Wednesday at Slack. It was the most important day of my life. They were talking about these small computers. Now that microprocessors were here. They were inexpensive enough. You could actually build a machine that people could afford. And we were going to change life. The little guy was going to have as much that knew how to program a computer, was going to have as much power as his entire company and be able to calculate answers quicker than the company could. And other people would be able to post notices on bulletin boards, electronic bulletin boards, and 100 people could read them at once and organize that way. And they had all these social ramifications how it was going to make us a master of our lives and let us use the 90% of our brain that's unused. And, oh, I just reveled. And I thought, wow, I've got to be a part of this. I have to be a part of this revolution and design it. The big companies were saying we were a little tiny thing that was going to go away. And I sat down and said, look, I already have a terminal that talks to a computer in Boston. What if I Put the computer right here, a microprocessor, some ram, and how do I avoid building a front panel? Five years before, I had built a front panel that had all these switches and lights on a little computer. When I met Steve Jobs, I said, how do I avoid that? Well, you know what? Why don't I do what our calculators do at Hewlett Packard? The calculator starts up and it runs a little program, is a key being pressed. These calculators only had about a k byte of software in them, maybe 2k bytes or 1k 14bit words, and it would say it's a key being pressed. You press the five button and it runs a program and puts a five in the display. I said, I'll just write a program that reads. A human keyboard. I found a human keyboard. I already had a human keyboard on my terminal. So I didn't design a computer from the ground up. I added a little microprocessor and some dynamic ram. When all the other little hobby computers were coming out with static ram, I added them to my terminal. And I now had a keyboard and a TV screen that could be its own computer. I could type ones and zeros into memory. I could examine the ones and zeros on my TV set, and I could tell it to run programs. And that was a great start. Oddly enough, every computer before that one, oh, it wasn't designed to be a company, by the way. I handed out the schematics, I handed out the listings. I said, it's yours. Build your own. You can build your own computer now. I just to want, wanted to be a part of showing the world how to get there, what they could get to. And the whole club was all about giving. Steve Jobs came by and he said, there's a lot of people interested in what you have at the club. Why don't we build a component, a PC board for 20 bucks and sell it for $40? Steve had worked in surplus stores. So I said, I don't know, we're going to have to put up a thousand bucks, a few hundred bucks each, and I don't know if we'll get our money back. And he says, maybe we don't get our money back, but for once the two of us have a company of our own. Who could ever turn that down? So we decided to start Apple. But I said, first of all, I think I owe everything I designed to Hewlett Packard. So I went to Hewlett Packard and lined up my boss and his boss and the boss boss and all these people and I pleaded with them. I tried so hard to get them to build a computer that could actually talk, run basic programs on your home tv, but your home TV being RCA and the computer being Hewlett Packard, didn't sit well. And they had some other complaints, and Hewlett Packard couldn't do it. It was my first of five turndowns. So Steve and I went into business with Apple Computer. We had a third partner who had 10%. And then Steve called me up one day and said, guess what? I got an order for $50,000. Okay? That was twice my annual salary. We were second. We invested a few hundred bucks each, $50,000 order, and we had no money. He had no savings account, I had no savings account. We couldn't do anything. So what we did was we got 30 days credit on the parts built, the computers dropped, drove him down to a store, and got paid cash in 10 days. So we went into business as Apple Computer, and our third partner sold out for a few hundred bucks because he realized if we didn't get paid, Steve had no money and I had no money. And they'd collect it from him and get his gold nuggets from between his mattresses or whatever. So Ron Wayne sold out in about three months after we came up with the Apple one. Oh, I sat there and said, you know what? A computer's not a computer unless it can do something useful. It has to have a programming language. Now, I designed the Apple one around the dynamic RAM that gave you 4K of RAM in 8 chips, very low chip count. And I said, I've got to have a language. Bill Gates had written a basic, and his BASIC was kind of famous for running on those intel chip hobby computers. And I thought, wow, nobody has a basic. For my microprocessor, I could write the first one. And, boy, I put myself into writing and writing and writing. It was much harder. Much more hours I put into that than designing a computer. And I had never taken a course in writing a language. I had never, never read a book on it. But I had a little bit of guidance from some Xerox sheets a friend of mine used to send me from mit. So I was able to finally work out different stacks for what I called nouns and verbs, operators and operands, and actually put together a really great working basic. And I'd go down to the Homebrew Computer Club and show it off. Then one day I said to Steve, and I had this. This computer had color on the screen. You could type a 5 into a certain location of memory, and A red square would pop up on your screen. You could type a 7 into another location and a yellow square would pop up. And I said, my gosh, anyone instantly realizes you could write programs to have things moving around, to have animation, to have graphics. I mean, it was just a startling eureka moment that made you freeze. And Steve and I knew we had something hot going. Well, one day I said, can you write a game in basic, the language that simple kids could use? And I sat down and wrote Breakout in BASIC in half an hour. With enough variations, it would have taken me an entire lifetime to do in hardware. So I called Steve over, and I was just shaking. I said, the world's never going to be the same now that games are software. Well, by the way, after the second. We got the second $50,000 order, I went to Hewlett Packard's legal department and had them circulated to every HP department. I didn't want to be called doing something, you know, working at Hewlett Packard and doing something wrong on the side. And they approved. Paul Ely signed it off. So that was the second of five turn downs from Hewlett Packard. Well, anyway, Steve and I had this Apple II, but we needed money. We knew we could sell 1,000 of them and we needed $250,000, a lot of money back then. And where do we get it? We went to a company and they said, no, they'll do a cheaper computer instead. They'll take our idea and copy it. And by the way, every computer before the Apple, I had a front panel with those switches and lights that looks like an airplane cockpit. And every computer from the Apple one on, starting with the next small one, the processor technology solve it came out of people attending our club and then our Apple ii. Everyone from then on would have a human keyboard, a QWERTY keyboard. So the Apple I really hadn't made a big change in history, but the Apple II was that great product. We went to Atari and they had their hands full with their first home pong game. They couldn't do two things at once. And then we went to venture capitalists and they came to the garage and said, well, it's, you know, what do you think the market is? And I would say, a million. How do you know that? And I said, well, there's a million ham radio operators, and this is bigger than ham radio. This is a good answer, but it's not like business school stuff. Remember, Steve and I were in our young. We were in our young 20s. We had no business experience. We had no money either. We finally got turned on to an angel, Mike Markula. And he came in. He said he would invest $250,000, become an equal partner to us. But I had to leave Hewlett Packard. I said, why? In one year I worked at Hewlett Packard, and on the side I've designed two computers, cassette tape interfaces, I've done printer interfaces, I wrote a language, I did all these graphics programs. And he says, no, you got to leave Hewlett Packard. Decide by Tuesday. And on Tuesday, I went inside myself, and I don't like to be. I was so independent in my ways in the world. I wouldn't be pushed by influences such as even money. So I went in and I said, no, I'm not going to leave Hewlett Packard. I want to stay there as an engineer for life and design computers and write software just for myself on the side. And Steve Jobs went into a frenzy, and he got all my friends and relatives to start calling me one after another after another. Finally, my friend Alan Baum called and he said, look, you can be an engineer and become a manager and get rich, or you could be an engineer and stay an engineer and get rich. And it was that second thing I needed to hear, that it was okay to start a company and you didn't have to run it because I couldn't be political people's, people's livelihood, their income. I couldn't fire someone. I couldn't criticize people strongly. I was just the wrong kind of person. But I could be a great engineer. So that day I left Hewlett Packard and we started Apple. And the big success didn't come yet. We thought that we were going to be a billion dollar company in five years, selling little computers that stored programs on cassette tape drives and really didn't do very much. But along came a couple of things. We developed a floppy disk a year later, and the program VisiCalc came out. The first spreadsheet, the first Excel like program. And all of a sudden, small businessmen could look at a bunch of numbers on a screen month by month by month and change some of the financial numbers and see the projections. And in half a day's work, they've done more than they could do in the rest of their life. That's how productive a computer can be. Instantly, our sales shot up 10 times and we were huge success. And that's what took us all the way to the public stock offering and all that. I'm done with what I'm going to speak about today, because I'm way over time and, and I'd like to take some questions now. If anyone has questions. Thank you very much for patience. Go ahead.

Hi there, Steve.

I think you seem like an incredibly.

Kind man, so thank you for speaking to us.

I wanted to ask you if you.

Ever paid back the University of Colorado for the computer time.

Say it again. Did you ever pay back the University.

Of Colorado for the computer time?

I didn't pay them back, but I did sponsor scholarships there. There's a was, it's called a hacker scholarship actually.

You paid him back?

I have a son going there now. Yeah. I actually had eight hundreds on all my math and science SATs. But that was the only college I applied to because I flew out there and it snowed and I'd never been in snow in my life. And you've got to go with your. Hi. So you were there very early in the whole video games thing. Do you have any sort of general thoughts on where that is today and what that industry is like today? I was so much into video games up to a certain point, especially in the Apple II days because the Apple II was sort of the platform with the graphics and even high res and people were getting finer and finer quality in games and doing realistic looking games that you never thought were going to be possible. So I got to see a lot of that early point happen. But then I had my own kids and once they got to about fourth grade, they were just so good at me, better than me at any game there was. I couldn't keep up with them in games so I just relaxed back to the simple games, the Tetris style games. Yeah, thanks.

So when you got started, you know, you could take chips and do something that no one else could do and it would still. And chips were hard to get, so it was a hard thing to do. And then when I was growing up, you know, with the Apple ii, there were these home computers and they came with basic and you sat down, you had to write something and it was just really easy to write programs and do something no one else could do. Now you get a computer, it comes with Windows, it doesn't have a programming language, you've got this Internet thing. What do you think kids should do to kind of get into engineering these days?

I think about that a lot because we had so much fun being able to build little things, take them to school that made sounds and impressing the other people and it made us feel so good about ourselves and so few people. Kids do that sort of electronics now nowadays and make your own things and then it went into the software being so easy that anybody could sit down and write programs. I mean, when we came out with the Apple ii, it was such an open machine, and we put out every. I had learned from looking at other people's designs. I wanted that machine to be a teaching machine. Put out every schematic and code listing. We sent people extra packs if they needed, so they could figure out how to write their own programs in machine language, in basic, in combinations, in other emulators. We had just wanted it to be a training machine for the world, so many people could get into it. And thousands of companies sprung up making products. There were just thousands of them selling Apple II stuff. It's like 3,000 companies making iPod accessories today. It looks like a real big world, and it really drove things in its day. Yeah, I don't know where that is now. I guess it just keeps coming up in different forms. I can't give you an easy answer. I hope the Apple II robotics comes. I hope it comes soon. That's what I'm really hoping for, because a lot of prices of things have come down. And robotics involves hardware, it involves software, it involves strategy and programming and a lot of intelligence to do a decent robot that really is useful. I keep thinking, will a robot ever make a cup of coffee? Not. Not in our life, unless some young high schooler decides it's going to be his life goal. But, you know, I could go into your house and make a cup of coffee. You could go in my house and probably make a cup of coffee. But a robot. Lot of steps. Yeah.

Oh, over here.

Oh, hi.

Hi. There's a story that you produced a.

Number of chips on the Breakout game and then gave it to Atari, and they were unable to reproduce it on their assembly line.

I was curious if, you know, what.

They did wrong or why that didn't work out. Oh, no, no. My designs. Yeah. We had a deal where Steve Jobs said, no. Nolan Bushtown wanted a design with very few chips, and he knew that I designed things with the fewest chips. I was even known for using the fewest transistors on our chips. At Hewlett Packard, they would have friends in HP Labs that needed something done really efficiently. They'd always give me the call. So I designed. Steve said it was under 50 chips. We got paid a certain amount. If it was under 40 chips, we got paid more. It came up to about 45 chips, my first estimate. And it was tight little Wozniak design. And if you look at it and some parts of it are not easy apparent to understand because I saved chips and resources and yeah, Atari couldn't really understand it was their big problem. So they kind of had to redesign it. But I still designed the first one. Yeah, the story's in the Atari book on that.

All right. Hi, Steve. Good to see you again. So now that you've all grown up, you've built your computers and you've taught school and everything, what's next for you?

Say it again. Now that you're all grown up and.

You have to build your computer.

Oh, no, I'm still interested in technology. I had kids for a lot of years. I went and I taught elementary school. I went back and was that fifth grade teacher. And then I taught older kids and then I taught teachers in our school district because I felt you shouldn't give money if you have more money than you need for a lifetime. What you should give is your own self and your own time. And I did that for about seven years and kept the press out of it. Did a lot of philanthropy in San Jose. And then I had technology companies. I had a GPS company for a few years that we couldn't achieve our engineering goals really for a consumer product. And now I've got another. I'm in another company with some Apple CEO and a couple other Apple executives. And we just announced that we're acquiring a chip maker in Southern California named Jazz. So our company will be named Jazz and I'm all excited about it, but the acquisition's going to take like five to seven months. So that's the next step. Yeah, I'm ready to have some fun in that area. I think everything starts out at the low levels, the chips, the science, how atoms work. Yeah, thank you for coming. I guess, sort of off of that question, I was curious where you see sort of the long term ramifications of technology going, such as if we're going.

To integrate it into our own bodies.

And I mean, now that we have computers that can sort of process almost as much as we want doing applications and programming and things like that, we don't have the physical limitations as much where you see computers going. I don't really like to be the futurist and predict those things because I have a lot of hopes, internal hopes, but I. I don't really like to express them because I'm an engineer and I want to be analytical and I want to be accurate. I want to say things that really will be where things will go. And I have the reasons for knowing why they'll be going that direction. I Do see displays improving a lot. I see new chip technologies. I think the one that, you know, a few of those startling ones. Will they happen or not? You know, it's those things that might be impossible that occasionally come through that really change everything. The magnetic type memory that would put, you know, would put, you know, terabyte on a chip that size. And hard disks would go away forever. Boy, that would be a big change. But I don't really, you know, there's this whole convergence idea that all of our television and our computer, you know, are all falling out into one and it's still hard to predict where it goes. I would hope more. It's like a keyless car where you don't have to reach in your pocket and pull out a key, but if you carry your cell phone with you, it's got all of your subscriptions to television radio shows and whoever's house you go to, it just pops up on their displays. And there's also that whole idea of our applications put on the Internet. I really love what Google's doing now. I mean, I hope someday we'll get out there and, you know, and not have to worry about backups and updates and, you know, all the trouble you have with the applications on your own computer, loss of data and all that. We never got to that day because hard disk got cheaper and cheaper.

30 years ago you wrote the Apple Basic interpreter in 6502 with some language. When you write software nowadays, what programming language do you use?

I don't really write software nowadays because I was a sort of engineer. Even hardware. I can kind of have the time now to do some architecture guidance. That's what I did on our GPS product. We should build it this way to boost the frequency up to there. That sort of thinking. But I couldn't. I was such an artist as an engineer, making every line of code have to have a reason and thinking that there can't be a better way to do this function that I could think of easily. I would spend sometimes two weeks on one line of code trying to save it. Just like Hemingway was noted for trying to get a word exactly perfect in a sentence. And being that kind of artist really is a lot of stress on your head and you can't do it forever. It's easier to do that sort of stuff when you're young, up to a certain age, but just at a certain point you have kids and a family and other things to do. So when I program now, it's just in scripting languages on my Macintosh and A little bit of C, just normal standard C. So I spent more hours than I can remember playing lemonade stand off our tape recorder. And I was wondering if you had thought of other devices at the time and what went into the decision to go with the tape recorder? Well, the tape recorder was free for mass storage. How am I going to store my programs? I wrote a basic. And the way I wrote my basic, normally you type a program into a computer and it puts out the. Spits out the binary that'll run well. I couldn't afford the assembler to type my machine language programs into for the 65 or 2 microprocessor. So I wrote the whole BASIC and everything else on the Apple II by hand, on paper. And then I wrote down the ones and zeros that it equated to, and I typed them in on my keyboard, the ones and zeros. So I was so intimate with the program. It was a piece of me. Every bit of it was in my head. And I forget what the question was, but that relates to.

I designed the Apple II of robotics. And if you want to come see it for 30 seconds after, you can come across the way, it's in the other building.

If I didn't have another panel tonight, I want to schedule this book stuff. I don't know this book stuff. It'll be one event after another after another after another all day long. Sometimes your throat goes, oh, I've been drinking pots of tea, and I don't know why. I don't even know. I'm sure that whatever I obligated myself to do, I've done far more than that. And I'm thinking, why did I give Gina a higher percentage? No, I'm just joking. My co writer. Because I'm doing all the work now and you don't make much money on a book. That's not the purpose, but it's a story I do like getting around. Yeah.

So is it inevitable that companies which are fun for engineers stop being that after a while or go out of business?

Repeat that. I've got bad acoustics here.

Is it inevitable that companies which are great places to work for engineers stop being that way after a while?

Well, I think Hewlett Packard was a very unusual place when I was there. They also had the hot product in the world. So they were so successful that during the recession, every division of Hewlett Packard was losing money, except ours made the company profitable. We were so profitable. It's just when you're working in a place like that, the morale is very high. Everything felt good. And like I said, we were making products for engineers. So what I wanted to do in my life. Hewlett Packard's not the same now, and even the values aren't the same. But they're trying to get back to some of those early values in ways. Thanks. And I guess that will conclude it. I think we're going to have some kind of book signing thing. Thank you.