THE WOZ INTERVIEW!

Please note that duplication of this document in any form is expressly prohibited. If you need copies, or if you need reprints, or you'd like to publish this interview, contact Auri Rahimzadeh at (317) 578-8806, or email auri@woz.org. You may also write to 114 Meadow Lane, Fishers, Indiana, 46038-1145 USA. You may print this interview out for educational purposes as long as it is not republished, edited, or changed in any way and not used for profit either directly or indirectly. The PowerGS Woz Interview is Copyright (c) 1995 Auri Rahimzadeh. All rights reserved.

Main Interview Questions

Let's start with how you got started with computers. You dad was an engineer at Lockheed, which I'm sure influenced you in some way. How did you get interested in them?

My father helped me develop an early interest in electronics. When I was 7 we lived in Granada Hills and my parents gave me a crystal radio kit. My dad and I built it and it actually worked.
When I was 8 we moved to Sunnyvale. In fourth grade my parents gave me an electronics kit along the lines of switches, lights and buzzers. I went through it quickly and learned a lot. I built an electrolyte tester for the science fair (two battery carbon rods, connected to AC and a light bulb and then dipped in the test solutions).
In fifth grade I built a large atom display with lights for each possible electron in each possible shell and orbit position. I learned a lot about the periodic table as well as hooking up a hundred multi-pole switches and neon lamps for the project. I read a book that year in which a ham radio operator overturned things on kidnappers by knowing enough to rewire their TV and broadcast to his friends. I went to school the next day and told a friend I was going to become a ham radio operator and found out from him that a neighbor of ours was teaching a course. I learned a lot including morse code and got my license (along with my father) in sixth grade. We built our own transmitter and reciever (Hallicrafters). I got a lot of soldering experience.
In sixth grade my father taught me how transistors work, leading into logic circuits. I learned how to fashion OR gates from resistors or diodes, AND gates from diodes, and invertors from transistors. . Although they were still expensive, my dad got local transistor companies (Fairchild) to donate "cosmetic defects" of hundreds of diodes and transistors to me. My dad taught me how gates could make decisions based on inputs. He said how you could combine all the inputs of a tic-tac-toe game (which squares had "X", which had "O" and which were empty) and gates could decide the best response. Unfortunately I didn't come up with a great simplification (along the lines I used for my 6th graders last year) and it took hundreds of gates laid out on a 3' by 4' piece of plywood with components soldered to nails. I tried hard but couldn't get the "tic-tac-toe computer" into the 6th grade science fair.
In eighth grade my dad showed me a book of computer reports which were all interesting to me. I learned Boolean Algebra basics there. The book had logic diagrams of a binary adder (1 bit with carry in and out) and of a binary subtractor. We came up with the idea of building one. I stared at the two circuits long enough to see that they were quite similar, and I added logic of my own to make one circuit add or subtract based on a logic signal from a switch. The first adder/subtractor bit which I soldered together, using about 20 transistors and various diodes and resistors, didn't work perfectly. I used a meter and determined from my electronics background that my diode-transistor NOR gate needed a resistor before the base of the common-emmitter transistor to avoid drawing down the driving voltages. The fix worked and before lone I had a 10-bit adder/subtractor with binary inputs on toggle switches and outputs on lights. I had done such a job that, although I was only in eighth grade, I was awarded the Air Force electronics award covering up to 12th grade! As a result, they gave me my first airplane flight.
Because my father was involved with the earliest IC's in regard to his lockheed work, I went to trade shows when only 10 years old and saw the first chips with 2 transistors on one chip of silicon (germanium), and the promise of 6 to 10 transistors on a chip in the near future. Over the years, my father had manuals around the house that caught my attention, with the early IC's. During high school I discovered minicomputer manuals and started putting chips together to make computer designs. I was totally self taught in this regard, designing alone in my room.

You were the head of the electronics club at your Homestead High, right?

Yes, for two years. I won the electronics award for my school both years. I was very lucky that we had such a good course because of a great teacher. When we moved to Sunnyvale in 1958, the part of Sunnyvale right up against Cupertino (the district of the schools I attended), everything was orchards. The first year I took a bus to 3rd grade in Los Altos. The next year my elementary school (Cupertino district) was brand new and I had to ride a bike through orchards to reach it. While I lived there even my high school had been built brand new. The newness of almost everything except Sunnyvale Electronics made the area quite special. Our electronics teacher, John McCollum, had acquired a lot of brand new electronics test equipment, power supplies and signal generators. He talked the school into purchasing KITS for each station and had the first few years' students learn while assembling them. He had good industry connections and that kept a storeroom well stocked. We barely got into transistors in 1967. But we learned to calculate, design, understand, build, adjust and repair lots of equipment up through TVs. I have never seen such a good teacher, who wrote all his own teaching materials, since. I wish I could be that good of a teacher.

What company did you work for before you started Apple?

I went to college for two years. Although I had several 800 scores on my entrance exams and SATs I chose the University of Colorado because I was impressed by its beauty on a visit during Thanksgiving of my senior year. It was the first time I was in real snow also. The only other school I even applied to was Cal Tech, only because my dad had gone there, but I would only go to CU Boulder. Although a few seniors from my high school were accepted by Cal Tech and went there, I was rejected because of a personal interview. I was very immature and I told the interviewer I wanted to be an engineer and design things that work like radios and TV's. I didn't express scientific ideals, only technical ones, and I didn't fit the Cal Tech mode. My counselor gave me a bad review also because I had done a lot of pranks at the school even though they had only officially caught me for one of them (when the cop tricked me with a lie). So altough I had higher test scores than the others I didn't get accepted by Cal Tech.

My year at CU was the greatest year of my life up to then. Everything from skiing to computer pranks (I was put on probation for "Computer Abuse") to washing dishes in the girl's dorm to being on my own to friends to concerts to car rides home to pissing off the continental divide at 2AM in a blizzard and wondering if the piss would reach the Pacific or Atlantic, etc.
My second college year was at the local Community College, based on my parents' ability to pay tuition for the second most expensive University in the country for out of state students. I continued designing computers, visiting the SLAC (Stanford Linear Accellerator Center) every weekend to just look for open doors and wander around, examining computers without permission and reading mags and manuals in the library there.
I went to work at a company named Tenet in Cupertino after that year, with my friend Allen Baum. We had heard about a rep for Data General and I wanted to visit them and tell them about my Nova computer designs which were so superior to their own, but we walked into the wrong door and saw, in a showcase, a mid-sized computer being developed. So I wound up programming there for a year, even winding up on unemployment when they went under. That gave me money for a car and my next year at Berkeley.
After the year at Berkeley ("Berkeley Blue" was my phone phreak name) I had totalled my car, falling asleep on hwy 17 in Oakland, so I needed money for my 4th college year. I applied for a technician job at Electroglas, a company building IC wafer probers (for IC manufacturers to test IC's before dicing them off a wafer). I loved that job because I did the day's work standing. They knew that I could design and that I was quite smart. But after just 6 months a better opportunity presented itself.
A college student doesn't have $3000 floating around ($400 in 1972 dollars). That was the price ($390) of the HP-35 calculator, the first scientific calculator. Yet as an engineering student I knew it would change the world. I had scraped the money together to buy one. My friend Allen Baum worked with the calculator people at HP during the summers (he was now at MIT) and got me in for interviews and a quick job offer. After going to HP I studied their designs, understood them and improved them and was made a full engineer very quickly. I became known as a clever circuit designer while there but not many of my projects made it out the door. I made very good friendships with my co-workers, a great group of people, mostly engineers, who mean more to me now than all my Apple contacts!
While working at HP electronics was still my hobby so I took on a lot of small side jobs for friends. I started the first dial-a-joke in the Bay Area about 1973 (before you could legally use your own answering machine), designed early arcade machines in conjunction with Atari, designed home pinball games, etc. I spotted my blue box friend John Draper using a terminal to call the Arpanet and play games on computers around the country. So I designed my own terminal, knowing enough about TV to use my home TV and a keyboard I saw advertised for $60 ($300 today) with only upper case. Then I designed my own modem. When the Homebrew Computer Club started I designed my own computers, the Apple I and Apple II. I tried to get into microcomputers 3 times at HP, unsuccessfully.

What gave you the idea for the Apple I? I know you believe that simpler is better.

I already had a very low chip count terminal of my own design. I had designed it around the cheapest chips in surplus markets (like the back pages of Pop Elec magazine), some PMOS serial shift registers. So I interfaced it to the $20 6502 microprocessor, with appropriate dynamic Rams. The interface chip was the 6520 PIA, I think. I knew that a computer normally starts up running a bootstrap program to read in a larger program but I didn't have any media with larger programs. Our calculators at HP started up running a program that looked for a keypress and then responded. We had 256 x 4 bit bipolar PROMS in our lab (256 byte PROMS or EROMS didn't exist yet). So I wrote a tiny 256 byte program I called a "Monitor" program (god knows why that name, probably something I'd heard in a class or read in a manual once). All this program could do was input data from the keyboard, typed in hex, into memory, output to the screen the contents of a range of memory, or run a program at a given address. That and RESET was all I had. I couldn't afford tools like assemblers for the 6502.
About the time I got it done and was showing it off, BASIC was becoming the popular language among early microcomputer users. Bill Gates was associated with the BASIC for the 8080. Although I'd never programmed in BASIC, I found that there was none for the 6502 yet. So I decided that I could show off (I was shy so the only way I could get noticed was by doing something great) by writing the first BASIC for the 6502. I studied a manual covering HP BASIC (we had a computer in the office, although it was shared with 80 engineers) and developed my syntax diagram and interpreter strategy. I'd never learned these things in courses, just from trying to write my own Fortran compilers my second college year. This BASIC took much more time and effort than the Apple I computer but was great. Two points about it: strings were handled the HP way, which I considered a more logical and simple syntax for handling strings than the DEC/Altair (Gates) syntax, and I decided to just keep the integer syntax. Floating point math was nothing hard for me, I just wanted to be done showing off my BASIC that much sooner. The main things I wanted to do only needed, in fact wanted, integers: playing games, designing logic circuits, solving puzzles, converting programs from one form to another, etc.
The Apple I was simple enough that I passed out schematics on a single sheet of paper and helped a couple of people wire their own. Jobs then suggested selling a PC board for $40 to make it easier for them.

If simpler is better is your motto, do you think there is a limitation to
keeping things simple... is it okay to at least get a little complicated?

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

How much was Jobs involved with the first Apple computer? How did he help you market the computer that you didn't at first think would succeed?

Steve was interested in the computer I was designing and building but he really wasn't a member of the computer club. He asked a lot of questions but wasn't involved in it's electrical design at all. He looked for ways to market it, first the PC board for $40, later the assembled PC board for $500. He looked into manufacturing needs and wooden and metal cases. He picked up some good contacts as well. He handled all the manufacturing including obtaining components.

What was it like building the boards and starting Apple in a garage? What was the first Apple headquarters, post garage <grin>, like? Where was it located?

Our Apple I PC boards were manufactured at a company in Santa Clara. We had supplied them our design, the layout done by a friend of Steve's from Atari. After about 50 boards were made, our components came out of a closet there, starting the 30 day clock ticking on payment. Assemblers put all the components in the boards (sockets for all the chips however) and the boards were wave soldered there, all for $13 in 1976. We drove down and picked up about 20 boards at a time and drove them back to the garage which had a single workbench. We paid Steve's sister or other friends $1 per board to insert the ICs. Then we tested them. I had to fix virtually all the ones that failed. Then we drove them to the local computer store, the only local store, the Byte Shop of Palo Alto, and were paid in cash. The store got our PC board in a box. They also supplied 2 transformers and a keyboard with each board. The purchaser had to wire the video output into a TV.
The Apple II was designed in just a couple of months as we started selling Apple Is. We sold about 150 Apple I's over about 9 months and Steve found a local office in Cupertino and negociated a good price, based on not using the whole space initially. This move was planned before we financed the Apple II with Mike Markkula's arrival.

What sparked the Apple I? What similarities did it have with the Apple II?

The Apple I was suggested by a poster I had in my bedroom around 1969 of the Nova minicomputer in a desktop version. A few months earlier, a small hobbiest computer kit, the "Sphere", had a built-on [numeric, I believe] keypad and a video display built in. The other hobby computers were rectangular boxes with binary switches and lights along the lines of one I'd built in 1970, of my own design. The vision I came up with, before video terminals were common, was that of a built in keyboard and your home TV for output. Affordable, useful, fun, simple.
The Apple I wasn't a complete microcomputer design. I took an existing video terminal design and tacked on the micro, Ram, timing, etc. Developments for the Apple I, like the casette interface and BASIC interpreter carried over to the Apple II however. The Apple I was text only, no graphics. I had used cheap serial shift registers thinking that outputting 30 chars per second was, after all, 3 times faster than a slow teletype!
Because of ideas I had late nights in the Atari lab, I designed all the Apple I timing around a 14.31818 MHz crystal, an even multiple of the color subcarrier frequency for NTSC. I had an idea of adding color graphics with a few chips later on. But after we were selling the Apple I I looked into adding color. The more I thought about the more it occurred to me how I could have designed it in from the start with many fewer chips, and also how designing a terminal in as "screen memory" from the start would save chips. The design that came out was the Apple II.
The Apple II, the first small computer with BASIC in ROM (thanks to Synertek of Cupertino introducing the first 2K byte ROMS).
The Apple II, the first small computer with a plastic case.
The Apple II, the first small computer with a switching power supply, efficient and low power and low heat. No fan!
The Apple II, the first small computer with the Intel style dynamic RAMs, the only one of 3 initial styles which would expand from 4K's to 16Ks and beyond.
The Apple II, the first small computer with 48K capacity on the main board. Back then others were typically 4K, or less.
The Apple II, the first small computer with color graphics for easy low-res games.
The Apple II, the first small computer with built-in speaker port for sound.
The Apple II, the first small computer with paddles for games.
The Apple II, the first small computer with commands in BASIC for paddles, buttons, sounds, graphics.
The Apple II, the second small computer with standard video output (for home TV's which were free). The Apple I was first.
The Apple II, the first small computer with hi-res color graphics.
The Apple II, the first small computer with shared RAM for CPU and video on the main board.
The Apple II, the first small computer with so few chips for a complete system.
The Apple II, the third small computer (I believe) with the TV-terminal approach, looking somewhat like a typewriter. The SOL computer, a big short term success from Processor Technology in Berkeley, was between the Apple I and Apple II. It grew out of our club and I feel that it's design approach was influenced by the Apple I and Apple II which were regularly shown at the club before introduction.

How did you come up with the Apple logo?

We figured the Apple II was so good we could sell 1000 a month. But You can't build 1000 at a cost of $250 each unless you have $250,000. We spoke to venture capitalists through Steve Jobs's connections at Atari but we didn't speak their language. We got steered to Mike Markkula who was young and successfully retired from Intel. He had wanted to get into a "home" computer and thought we had a great chance to win. So he joined us as an equal partner and contributed $250,000. I think $80,000 was for equity and the rest a loan.
We hired an agency to promote us, the Regis McKenna agency. They pointed out the reasons that Apple was a bad name but we held our grounds based on a new type of computer in different environments (homes) than ever before. They talked about a logo and we wanted to show off one of the most important differences between our's and other computers, that of COLOR. We decided it was very important to have a multi-color logo. The Apple with a bite out of it was a good idea. I think they designed the colors in rainbow order, but Steve rearranged it to put heavier colors at the bottom.

What was the sole purpose for the Apple II?

Although I object to the question, if there was a sole purpose it was to build a great machine for me to use at home and work despite the fact that everyone around me considered a computer to be something quite different. You could argue that the Apple II product had the sole purpose of launching the company or making a lot of money to go on with other projects.

How do you use the Apple II? Do you still use it on occaision?

I don't use the Apple II too often now. I did use it a lot up until 1989 for several different tasks related to the remote control my company, CL9, designed (data terminal to the device, assembler, data base, etc.) During that time I started switching my calendar, word processing, address list and office email functions to a Mac.
I think about the Apple II quite often in the sense of "plug'n play". You could plug in a printer card and the printer worked. The driver program was in a prom on the card. Today that would mean buying a device like a printer that has it's driver in EPROM which can be updated later and which loads itself into an attached computer (or any computers on the network if the printer is). The software installation step becomes invisible to the user.

What is your idea of the ultimate computer? I heard that you would think of making a new computer, but it would have to be a new, simple, design with color graphics. Does this tie in to your idea?

The ultimate computer doesn't need newer hardware tecnology. It should be truly plug'n play as above. Almost anything the NEW user wants to do should find reasonable suggestions on the screen of what to try. For example, the Apple Guide "list of questions" is not misleading like many menuitems are. If every question can't be answered in advance, a question constructor should be constructable with on-screen phrases of general nature. As the user selects phrases, a sentence of what will be done or what will be answered is constructed and the user can tell in English (or...) if it's what he or she wanted.
Software should never need installation beyond a basic application. Resources and system files should be invisible and disappear when you trash the last application using them. Software that does things like AOL should skip any setup steps. After all, the computer can dial a number which returns it's own area code an prefix, the appropriate locality connection document can be created for the user, the modem type can be determined automatically rather than the user typing it in, the connection port can be determined, etc. The advanced users can still create their own different setups.

What programs did you write for the Apple II?

How did you get the funding for the II? Did the Apple I sell _that_ well?

I believe both answers are above.

In the early 80s you crashed a plane (which I take means you're a pilot, which I'd like to know more about) and suffered amnesia. I know you got your memory back, but was that tough for you, and what was it like?

The plane crash wasn't as tough for me as installing a computer program is for anyone. That's totally true. Indirectly it was a blessing. Let me explain.
As you experience sensations, they get coded temporarily as "short term memories". After being retained with proper attention for perhaps 15 seconds they can be chemically (?) assembled into more permanent "long term memories". If interrrupted they will not be remembered long term. Other types of memory with other permanance effects exist (where did I park my car: labile memory)
Most people think of amnesia as forgetting the past, or becoming unable to access those memories. But another common type of amnesia, especially after car crash and plane crash traumas leaving detectable lesions often in the hippocampus area of the brain, Anterograde amnesio, if I remember correctly, works by inhibiting the formation of long term memories. So when someone has this kind of amnesia and has a conversation, a minute later they won't remember having it. I had this kind. Because the doctors, friends, relatives, and even a psychologist weren't aware of this type of occurance they all thought that for the next 5 weeks I was a little out of it but didn't know I couldn't form memories. After all, I knew where I was and how to do everything. I had all my old memories.
One day (March 1981) I went down to visit the Mac people, my first memory to be saved since the crash 5 weeks earlier. I guess my fiancee suggested it. All I remember was Burrell Smith, the original Mac hardware designer, or someone else, mentioning a plane crash. I thought "Oh, this must be part of a dream I seem to be having, so I could turn around on Burrell and walk away and get to the real point of the dream". But I stayed and played along with the "dream." That evening I saw "Ordinary people in Scotts Valley and although I remember nothing of the movie, it's amazing that I remember going. Up 'til then I have no memories since the crash. After the movie, in bed, I asked my fiancee Candi if I had a plane crash or if it was a dream. I asked seriously, but who could take it so? As if I didn't know. So she said [sarcastically] that it was a dream. I didn't challenge that but for a few hours something had been knawing at me about a plane crash possibility. In bed I felt my entire body for clues but found none (I didn't know that I'd been missing a tooth for 5 weeks). Finally I put my mind to a logical solution. I remembered everything, tons of details, the day of the crash up to putting my hand on the throttle for takeoff. But my memory stopped right there. I had lost the memory of pushing it forward. Then I solved it. If I had indeed landed in Santa Catalina, on the way to San Diego to design a wedding ring, I would have remembered the landing! The instant I logically figured this out, my memory went into normal operation. I could feel both states in my head so clearly for the next 10 minutes as I got up so excited about figuring it out. I found hundreds of cards right by the bed, that were new to me although they must have been there, unanswered, for weeks. I was so excited when I saw the post crash psychologist that he said I was manic-depressive. When I pointed out that I never in my life had strong emotional displays, either up or down, and was perfectly happy, he said that's because manic-depressive disorder occurs at age 30 (my age). What a quack! Although this type of amnesia is taught in psychology he wasn't aware of it!

What was the U.S. Festival? Will there ever be another?

An attempt to put on a big concert with the ideals and environment and feelings and fun of the Woodstock image. About a week after committing a large amount of money I read a book on Woodstock by one of the principals entitled "Babes in Babylon" or something. It was so horrifying that had I read it earlier the festivals would not have been attempted. It's amazing that we were able to pull those festivals off and great fun was had by virtually all. I run into more people that thank me for those festivals (1982 and 1983) than thank me for Apple. You had to be there to know how wonderful it turned out.

In 1988, you said in response to how long you thought the II would be around "Apple needs to stay motivated. The II will last if the company gives it the proper support -- adding new features and enhancements and keeping it up to date. Apple right now is in a very positive mode. I hope that will continue. But even if the Apple II died off today, it would last another ten years. People would keep it alive through their interest in the machine."
Today there are many companies dedicated to the II, such as Roger Wagner Publishing, Seven Hills Software, Quality Computers, etc. There is also a huge support group on GEnie that isn't shrinking -- it's growing, which is great for all of us II fans. There are new products coming out, like the Second Sight graphics board for the GS, the TurboIDE card, and much more! In light of this exciting news, do you still believe in "Apple II Forever"?

I think that the Apple II is good enough to bring positive results to many although I don't have enough time to be near it due to teaching the more modern Macs in the local schools. Too bad, if I change my curriculum to something I'd like myself at that age, the Apple II is a much better machine to learn on at first.

What became of Apple after the Mac was introduced? I know there was a lot of idea fights among employees, etc., was it forseeable? The Apple II's future, that is...

The world has no way of knowing what was going on in the company between 1989 and 1992. For 3 years the Apple II was the largest selling computer in the world yet the company had virtually no support for it. Virtually no engineering or marketing. Just reprinting the price list. The Apple IIe was designed by an engineer who couldn't be stopped by management and who was going to do it on his own time anyway. Everyone in the company had an Apple II only on their desk. This is the computer with extra chips forced in by marketing so that the 80-column mode and extra memory would be DISABLED when you booted it as an Apple II. In other words, it was a HANDICAPPED Apple II compared to the IBM PC. This was to make sure that the Apple III was king with no competition from the Apple II. Every ad from Apple during a 3 year period showed an Apple III. The Apple II, the largest selling computer, never appeared. It just made a ton of money for the company. The outside world was full of Apple II interest but when I visited the company everyone spoke Apple III. Although Apple eventually called the Apple III a $60M loss I claim it was more like $300M because virtually every salary in Apple was trying to make that computer a winner, to prove the executives who shaped it right. This includes Mike Markkula.

According to A+ the Apple IIGS was the computer that you always wanted to build. Is this true? What features were put into the GS that you wanted, which weren't?

In the time frame of the Apple II being forgotten, John Sculley joined the company. Right away he pinpointed the Apple III as being financially a problem and he resized it in the company. I rejoined the company in the Apple II division in 1983 because I figured I could contribute the most there. A hot Apple II, without 3rd party add ons, appealed to me. A lot of engineers and managers who had been into one product only, the Apple III, looked to me for some direction. But the Apple IIx project which I was working for, was not good enough like the GS was a year later.

How did the Amiga affect the GS?

It is just my personal observation that the GS seemed to be Apple's answer to the Amiga. It had great graphics and great sound, and a lot of potential. But it didn't seem that the GS had the developer support the Amiga had.

I don't know the Amiga well enough to comment much. I only hear, all the time, that the Amiga has a lot of custom hardware very advanced compared to the GS.

Why and when did you leave Apple? What was the company's staff's feeling about
your leaving?

I have never left the company. I keep a tiny residual salary to this day because that's where my loyalty should be forever. I want to be an "employee" on the company data base. I won't engineer, I'd rather be basically retired, due to my family.

I know you've always enjoyed teaching, at least from what I've read about you. Can you tell me about your teaching career, and how it started? How's it going for you?

I decided in 6th grade that I wanted to be an engineer, like my father, and then I wanted to be a 5th grade teacher like mine (Miss Skrak). This desire remained strong in me but I always thought that lack of time to get a certificate would stop me. Once I had kids in elementary school I got closer to the classes and found out ways I could be a volunteer and now I teach computers after school.

You really like Powerbooks, don't you? Someone told me once that they saw you
walk into a store and walked out a few minutes later with over $10,000 in
Powerbooks.

Three computers changed my life greatly for the positive. The Apple I, the Apple II, and the PowerBook 170. I took Alan Kay's concepts of a computer at school and a computer at home a step further for my 5th graders. This means a color computer. And a color printer at home too. Lots of fun and useful software throughout the year to keep interest up. Online services, and Remote Access accounts too. I've done it for years. One year was 145's, the next 160's, the next 165c's and this year 520c's. Powerbooks for the teachers too. Quite a bit of success with the teachers, like planting a seed and seeing results years later. I also set up all the local elementary schools up with Mac labs. A great reward, the middle school library is named after me.

What do the kids think about a computer legend teaching their class? I know you said "...if kids are going to have a hero in the computer world, they might as well have a good one." What makes the 5th through 8th range so attractive to you? Why not college level, I think I can understand why not high school hehehe.

I sense that the first years I taught it was a bigger deal that the founder of Apple was teaching. But everyone is getting used to my program.

Where do you teach?

I teach 5th graders in their classroom at the local public elementary school. I teach teachers at the local middle school. My advanced students from prior years are taught in my office which is set up with tons of network and live phone outlets, projectors, whiteboard, etc.

You told me in a previous discussion that you use HyperStudio a lot. Do you use it on the GS much? What do you think of it? I personally think it's the
most exciting program to use to develop software. Also, how do you think it could be bettered?

Although the local schools use and teach HyperStudio a lot, I've only used it a little and it's not a part of my curriculum. I've supplied it to various of my classes. In fact, a teacher that knew almost nothing about computers was in my class last year and this year she's teaching HyperStudio. As a computer purist I admire and love LOGO but I don't feel it's the right language to start students with. Simple unstructured languages like BASIC give them more freedom to explore ideas on their own, creating programs, before learning structure. HyperScript is much more readable and debuggable for a visually connected language. The LOGO creates the most beautiful programs but beginners need one easier to debug than LOGO where you get into word count problems.

What do you think of Hypermedia and where it's heading? What about HyperText? I think HyperMedia is the most amazing thing today which will change our world, and you can see that it is just by looking around today -- Interactive Television, CD-ROM everything, etc, so...

Sorry, no answer.

What do you think of Apple and where it's leading? What about the computer industry?

I think the Mac has infuriated people trying to keep up with the latest. The compatibility has been horrid. When Apple comes out with new software like System 7.5 or new hardware like PowerPC, the biggest disruptions I experience are with other Apple products, much more than with 3rd party products. For example an ARA server that won't run on System 7.5 on a PowerPC. Or the StyleWriter Pro won't work with QuickDraw GX.

Also, products like the StyleWriter Pro on a 520c or like the QuickTake 100 camera are nightmares to get working. Even worse if you know a little something and try to copy the files to a RAM disk. With the camera there were about 8 pieces installed in various places. I kept getting "You need these 6 extensions" messages so I got all 6 finally. Still got the message, so I made sure they were all enabled. Still got the message even though I had all 6. Tried the Control panel. Found out I had to have Foreign File Access, a CD-Rom file, enabled too. Finally, the camera application wouldn't work with it until I modified a lot of ports. Someday we'll get past this crap. Similar experiences in recent times with StyleWriter Pro, ARA Multiport server, AppleShare, PowerShare, QuickDraw GX, PowerTalk, etc. Almost anything SCSI.

How's married life? You were divorced twice and now you're raising 6 kids. Tell me about your wife, ex-wife who was an olympic gold medalist, and your kids!

Jesse is quite the computer expert. He got into it in 4th grade and was even on an Apple billboard with me. He realized that parents should buy the best computers for the kids since the kids learn them faster. Jesse has been my best student in every area, particularly programming. I spend little time with him outide of class on computers. He answers questions for me about my problems with the computers more often than the result.

What do you do in your spare time?

Listen to modern rock, attend Golden State Warriors NBA games, attend many concerts of every type, family vacations to nice places like Disney World, play Tetris on GameBoy, play Defender, go through manuals on new computer programs...

Why cutting two dollar bills?

$2 bills are rare. I got lots years ago, then got brand new uncirculated ones in serial number order. Then, thanks to Jesse, found out that you can get $1 and $2 bills in sheets of 4, 16 or 32. So I buy sheets and cut them strangely like one bill and part of another. When I pull out a sheet to pay for something and act strangely, clerks sometimes refuse them or grab me. The cops have been called a couple of times. I usually say I bought them from a guy wearing a blue mumu for $1.35 each and I don't know how he does it but I'm sure they're legal.

I hear that your house is absolutely amazing -- with cave-like caverns, etc. Can you tell us about it? I'd love to get a picture if you have one! It sounds so neat!

One of my homes, which I had to move out of to fit my larger family after remarrying, has a cavern but it's a bad subject for me. Expensive, not that much fun, even for kids.

You were hounded by the media forever and asked by many people to donate to charity. I read that you're donated over $7 million dollars to charity. Do you donate to charities a lot?

Absolutely, in San Jose expecially. What I've done as a percentage of what I have is much greater than almost anyone else so early in their life. Stories about O.J.'s "Circle of Benevolence" don't impress me the least. The Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose is on 180 Woz Way.

Do you still think of yourself as the Father Of The Apple II?

Absolutely. I designed a great computer and wrote all the software for it.

I want to see how your views have changed since 1988, when you were interviewed
by Incider. You were asked "What advancements in technology do you think will have the greatest effect on the hardware and software of tomorrow?" you responded with microelectronics. Has you view changed at all with this ever growing world of technological breakthroughs? You predicted that if customers and developers were comfortable with it, that CD-ROM would take the 3.5" floppies face. You also said the floppy would only last another 10 years or so. CD-ROM's are amazing now that IBM and many other places are working on multi-layer CDs that can hold 6,8, maybe 10 times more than the conventional CD! What do you think? How do you think all of these breakthroughs will affect the II?

I have a Panasonic laptop with built-in CD-ROM (and no floppy if you want full battery). The digital video disks are virtually here and should be quite successful. The trouble is, a new media can't just be great. We have too much media confusion. I grew up with LP's, 45's and 78's for media (types of records). During my life: 8-track, 4-track, casette, Cartrivision VTR, BetaMax, VHS, VHS-C, Super VHS, Super VHS-C, BetaCam, 8mm, Hi-8, Photo CD, Mac CD-Rom, PC CD-Rom, NT1 tapes, MiniDisk, LaserDisk (2 sizes), Video CD, CD, Sega CD, 3DO CD, CDI, MPEG 1 CD for CDI, reel-to-reel audio tape (various sizes), Mavica floppy for cameras, 8" floppy, 5" floppy, 3 1/2 " floppy (DS, HD), removable HD, 5" MO, 3 1/2 " MO, etc. A person could have storage drawers for each of these types.

Also, do you think that there will one day be a day when everyone will own a computer? With the internet at all, I would think it is very feasbile.

??? Do you think there ever would have been a day when everyone had a typewriter?

And just a little off the wall, but something I've gotta know -- Do you rollerblade?

Very seldom, although I had a number of ice skating lessons and found that roller blades were very similar to ice skates, much more than roller skates.

If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Nothing.

--End of Main Interview--