Apple co-founder recounts love of computers

Aiko Wakao

TOKYO: Apple Inc. co-founder Steven Wozniak was barely 10-years-old when he discovered the love of his life.

In a hall closet at his home in California's Santa Clara Valley, he didn't find a secret entrance into a fantasy world or a box full of candies, but a journal for engineers that described machines that people in the late 1950s had rarely heard of -- computers.

"I decided I was going to love this stuff for life," Wozniak said in a speech at a forum in Tokyo on Monday hosted by financial firm CLSA Japan.

A few decades later, Wozniak created the bestselling Apple II -- among the first computers that came in colour, plastic and with sound -- which became a de facto standard for schools all over America.

Fans call Wozniak, "Woz" or the "Wizard of Woz," for helping bringing about a revolution in the industry that saw the advent of easy-to-use and affordable computers.

"It became a game: How can I make a computer with the fewest number of parts?" he said.

Today, Apple is among the most successful of consumer electronics giants with a market value of $77 billion and hit gadgets such as iPod music players and iBook computers.

Although he stopped working full-time for Apple in the mid-1980s, Wozniak is still on the company's payroll and sometimes represents Apple at events.

Last year he wrote a book, "iWoz," in which he tells the engineer's side of the company's story.

While chief executive Steve Jobs has become the face of Apple, Wozniak says he did most of the designing alone when the duo first started their company in 1976.

Before Apple, Wozniak designed mini-computers and developed scientific calculators for Hewlett-Packard.

"Every time I built something, Steve would say, 'Let's sell it,'" Wozniak, 56, said. "I was very shy. And Steve was always so good at talking."

Love of pranks

At the heart of what later became Silicon Valley, Wozniak grew up playing with friends whose parents also built missiles and space rockets like his father.

He said he and his "electronic kids of the neighbourhood" loved connecting their houses with wires and buzzers.

Designing computer games and studying chip circuits were his early obsessions with his intelligence and curiosity about engineering way ahead of his schoolmates, as was his humour.

"In high-school, I designed a metronome for musicians that goes tick-tick-tick, and I put it in a friend's locker, where it sounded like a bomb," Wozniak said. "I also arranged it that when he opened the locker, the ticking sound sped up!"

Love for electronic and pranks was perhaps the biggest thing the two Steves had in common, who were introduced through an acquaintance and quickly became best friends.

"I was sort of the middle man, with my feet solid on the ground, but Jobs was more floating, like the hippies of California. He wouldn't wear shoes, and would eat seeds.

"But I didn't want to be a follower and wanted to choose my own ways."

Wozniak stressed the importance of freedom to pursue one's curiosity in encouraging entrepreneurship.

"Young children must open up drawers to touch and feel the shape of things. We're born with that curiosity and that desire to explore," Wozniak said. "When you're young you should be encouraged to explore."