Woz at Intel Developer Forum

Steve Wozniak may be the second most famous co-founder of Apple, but his influence among engineers is second to none. At this week’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, Wozniak sat down with Moira Gunn, host of TechNation, for an informal discussion about his life and his passion: engineering.

Woz is truly “an engineer’s engineer.” His father taught him basic electronics at an early age, and by the time he was in high school he knew he wanted to be an engineer for life. He started learning about computers from manuals, like the PDP-8 Handbook, and would sneak into the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) lab on weekends to peruse the books and magazines on computers in their library. His goal was to understand the design of computers and figure out how he could build his own, which he eventually did, creating a company and an industry in the process.

Woz was a shy kid growing up and a bit of a loner. He never once raised his hand or spoke to the audience at the famous Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s. But he did something even more important: he shared his designs. Woz published the schematics and source code with the Apple I computer and made it easy for others to learn from his design. The Apple II was an open system that made it possible for others to design plug-in expansion cards to add new capabilities.

The Apple II+ was my first personal computer back in 1982 and it’s impact on the industry was profound. The Apple II with Visicalc became the first “killer app” sending microcomputers out from beyond the hobbyists into the mainstream of small business owners. The Apple II spawned an entire industry with third party books, magazines, software and hardware peripherals. Apple paved the way for PCs long before IBM, HP and others entered the market.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Apple because of the care that they put into engineering their products. There are elements of Woz’s designs, whether it’s building the “Integrated Woz Machine” disk controller with only 7 chips, or the way he developed a graphics system with interlaced memory, that are so clever that they border on beauty. He tackled problems in unconventional ways by thinking about how things be designed rather than how others were doing it. And these weren’t hacks; they were engineering elegance, thought through with obsessive detail. No doubt some of the thousands of engineers who came to see Woz speak at IDF had that same feeling. And I hope that others will be inspired not only to do good work, but to build products that will change the world.

Thank you Woz for all that you have done.

Update: AppleWin is available for those who want to relive the glory of the Apple II experience via emulator on Windows.