iWoz

by Steve Wozniak

Leaving Apple,Moving to Cloud Nine

  After the US Festivals and graduating from Berkeley, I went back to Apple to work as an engineer again. I didn’t want to manage people or be an executive or anything like that. I wanted just to be there and design new circuits and come up with clever ideas and apply them.

  But once I got there, it was weird, because I was already in the media mainstream and had so much other stuff to do. A ton of stuff. I was being called by a lot of people—the press, computer groups I had to speak to—and I was working on these philanthropic projects like the San Jose Ballet and a local computer museum. I was sort of splattered all over the world and in all these countries and in all these different areas—beyond just working on circuits.

  So I could get the engineering sort of started and come up with an architecture idea. For instance, it could be something that might speed up the processor five times, but the other engineers had to do most of the actual designing of the chips and the connections and the laying out of the printed circuit boards. So truly I felt it wasn’t critical for me to be there, even though I loved Apple still.

  I was working in the Apple II division. This was after the Apple III project was closed down, so the engineers from that depart

  ment became Apple II engineers. A lot of them just gravitated around me. It was fun. And there were some cool people with some cool projects starting up in my building at the time. For instance, just as I got there, on the next floor down from me, they were finishing up the Apple II C computer. This was the small Apple II—a really small one—as small as today’s laptops except you had to plug it into a wall. I thought it was just a beautiful computer, my favorite one to this day. I really think it was one of the best projects ever done at Apple.

  Well, one of the engineers on that project was this guy Joe Ennis. Joe was the kind of guy I love, the kind who’s so enthusiastic and passionate about the products he’s working on and where they can go and what he could do with them. He had long hair; he was kind of hippie-looking even though it was already 1985. And he had these ideas—all sorts of great ideas about extending the Apple II into areas far beyond anything even the Macintosh people were talking about.

  Like he thought you could have an Apple II programmed to be a complete telephone switchboard. (Today, telephone switchboards are just computer cards you plug into a computer.) He imagined you could store voices digitally—that was so ahead of his time—and he thought you could route them out to other channels digitally. He just had idea after idea after idea about the future of computers. I thought his brain and his ideas were just wonderful.

  • o •

  Now, for a while I’d had this really nice home up in the Santa Cruz Mountains with all this really high-end audio and video equipment. By that time TV sets all had remote controls, and VCRs did, too. I also got into laser discs, so I had a remote control for that, too. Then there was this expensive hi-fi system I had from Bang & Olufsen. It also had a remote. That was rare at a time when no other stereos came with remotes.

  I was also, at the time, considering getting a satellite TV. This was so rare; you couldn’t even buy them in stores. I lucked into mine through a friend, Chuck Colby, who was building custom dishes for people. But, man, there it was. Another remote control.

  So typically I would turn on the TV with one remote control and maybe I’d turn on the hi-fi with another (because I had the speakers routed to the TV), and then I would turn on the satellite and then I’d press a few buttons for the channel I wanted on the satellite and I think I had to turn on my VCR to pass a signal through it—all the signals passed through it to get to the TV the way I had it hooked up. I’m pushing all these buttons on different remote controls and it was just obvious to me.

  Here I am, sitting in bed, operating all of this equipment with all of these different remote controls. It was crazy. I wanted one remote control with one button that was programmable to deal with all of the devices. I didn’t want a button that turned on a TV and another button that turned on the VCR and another button that turned on the satellite and another button that selected the satellite channels and another button that entered that number.

  I wanted one remote. Just one. And I wanted that one main button to be able to do multiple things. I wanted to push it and have it go zip, zip, zip, zip, zip and have all the infrared signals come out of one remote control that turned everything on to the status I wanted.

  If I wanted to watch a laser disc, it’d turn on the TV, then select input 3 on the TV, and turn on the laser disc player and start playing, for example.

  So it was real clear to me that a single remote control solution was necessary. And I knew I was able to see it before most people, because most people in the U.S. at the time didn’t have as many different remote controls as I did. Most people would look at me and say, “What do you mean? I only need two remote controls, one for the VCR and one for the TV.”

  But I realized that soon people would need more remote con trols and it would become a problem, like it had already become for me.

  I started talking to a few people about this idea and I got excited because I realized how easy it would be to build. This would actually be an easy project. A little microprocessor can look at the codes coming in, store the data, and then output the same codes when you press the buttons.

  And I like to be first, as you know. And I thought, I’m the once to do it. And I really did become the first person in the world to do what is now known as a universal remote control.

  • o •

  Let me go a bit deeper and explain exactly what it was that the4 remote, as I designed it, was doing.

  As I said, it was very important for me to make sure this remote didn’t have to have one button corresponding to each button on each corresponding remote control. In that case, I would’ve had a million buttons—all the ones on the TV remote control, plus all the ones on the VCR remote, plus the ones for the satellite TV remote, and so on.

  I wanted a single button on my control to sequentially emited many infrared codes corresponding to buttons on another remote control—or even countless other remote controls. I didn’t wan I to, as a consumer, have to press five buttons in a row just to turn things on and turn it to my favorite starting channel—in those days, The Movie Channel. I wanted to press one button one time to do all of that.

  That meant that the buttons on my control were like macros. One button could represent a whole sequence of things. (In Word, for instance, you could set up a macro on one key so you could just hit that key—say, CTRL+S—to check spelling on your document, accept all changes, and then save the document, again.)

  I realized that this is exactly like a program. I would have to write a little program for each button. So I came up with the idea not only to let the consumer decide what a button does but also to reprogram the button to redefine what another button does. I built a programming language into the remote, and I went a step Further, adding an ability, referred to by the prefix “meta,” that would allow a program on a particular button to write an entirely new program for that very button, for itself.

  It was a beautiful language, I was proud of it. As it turned out, it wasn’t the easiest way to do what the vast majority of users would want, but it would be very attractive to software geeks like me.

  • o •

  I was still at Apple when I got this idea. And I started telling people about it. People like Joe Ennis. As I said, I loved the way his brain worked. He was always interested in unusual uses for technology. And I told him about my remote control idea and we started talking about it all the time. He really got it.

  So I pitched real heavily to Joe the whole idea of, “Let’s leave Apple and start this company.”

  I never felt like I was turning my back on my own company. Never. By this point Apple was a large company, and it wasn’t and still isn’t the love in my life. The love in my life is starting small companies with small groups of friends. Bringing new ideas out and trying to build them.
By then the Apple idea wasn’t so new.

  At the time, I was heading up a new Apple II that was supposed to be better than anything, called the Apple II X. But shortly after we started, upper Apple management canned it.

  Looking back, that was probably a decent decision. After all, they were used to products that sold 20,000 a month, and a high-end product like the Apple II X, because it would be so expensive, probably wouldn’t sell more than 2,000 a month. So, like I said, they canned it.

  Another Apple II product was actually born out of the Apple II

  X: the Apple II GS. The joke was that it stood for Granny Smith, a type of apple, but it actually stood for graphics and sound. And that was a great project. With graphics—real graphics in 24-bit color that worked with computer monitors instead of TVs—and sound—real sound, not just chirps—suddenly you could do really interesting things. Like games and software for kids, who really would need that level of production to be engaged.

  I was so happy to see that we got a project that all of a sudden brought the Apple II into where it really needed to be. There were some morale problems in my group as a result of the people in the Apple II group feeling undervalued compared with the Macintosh group. (The Mac was in development.)

  And I was ready for something new.

  Very quickly after I started talking to Joe, and also to my assistant Laura Roebuck, I decided I was going to go ahead and do it—start a company to build the remote control. They both wanted to do it. And I was so lucky to get Laura—she’d just had a baby and wanted to work part-time, and Apple didn’t have part-time positions.

  Anyway, it was such a simple idea; I really didn’t need a bunch more engineers than Joe and me. (Things are different now, of course. A venture capitalist would make you hire twenty right away!) But this was in February of 1985.

  • o •

  The first thing I did was to call my boss’s boss, Wayne Rosing in the Apple II division, and tell him I was leaving to start a remote control company. You know, I had a job and had to tell someone, “I’m leaving. I’m leaving to start a company.”

  I didn’t call Steve or Mike Markkula or anyone on the board. I had a job in engineering, and I felt like I just had to tell someone I reported to so they would know.

  I sat them down and sketched out my idea and described it just like I’ve described it to you. I told them I was doing a remote

  control that would be a single remote control that would work with all of the consumer electronics someone had. It was going to be one remote with one button, very simple. It would not compete with anything Apple did.

  They gave me a release very quickly, saying they’d seen my design and there was nothing competitive about it. The letter also wished me well.

  I left within about a week, but I did stay on the payroll as an Apple employee. I am to this day. I just have the absolute lowest salary a full-time employee can have. I still represent Apple at computer clubs this way.

  Steve probably heard I was leaving the same day almost everyone in the world heard it—instantly—the day a piece came out in the Wall Street Journal. But the piece got it all wrong.

  The reporter called me the very day I was leaving, the day I was packing up, and said, “I understand you’re starting a new company?” So the rumor was out. I told him yeah, and he asked me what it was all about. And I told him.

  He asked me, “Are there any things that you aren’t happy about at Apple?” And I told him the truth. I told him yes, and then I stood up for the people I was working with who were offended by the lack of respect they received.

  At the time I was leaving, the people in the Apple II group were being treated as very unimportant by the rest of the company. This despite the fact that the Apple II was by far the largest-selling product in our company for ages, and would be for years to come. It had only just recently been overtaken as number one in the world by the IBM PC, which had connections in the business world that we didn’t have.

  If you worked in the Apple II division, you couldn’t get the money you needed or the parts you needed in the same way you could if you worked in, say, the new Macintosh division. I thought that wasn’t fair.

  It boiled down to certain kinds of expenses, what kinds <>l components you were allowed to buy from other companies, how much money you were allocated to work on projects, despite having such a hugely successful computer in the world. Like I said, a lot of things were being trimmed way down.

  Also, there were limitations on the Apple II in terms of taking advantage of new advances in technology. We’d hear, “No, Apple II will stay the Apple II, and we’re not going to let it move into newer, more advanced areas.” Things like that.

  So I made some comments like this, and then the reporter asked, “So that’s the reason you’re leaving?”

  And I said, point-blank, “Oh no, that’s not the reason. I’m leaving because I want to do this remote control.”

  But the Wall Street Journal printed the article suggesting 1 was mad at Apple and that was the reason I was leaving. It was wrong, very wrong, because I went out of my way to tell the reporter not to get it confused. Maybe it was more interesting to shape the story the way they did. They just left out a couple of words, the words “That’s not why I’m leaving,” and that was the same as implying that that was the reason I was leaving.

  Oh my god. I have to think it was an accident, but let me tell you. It’s been picked up by every book and every bit of history ever since. It’s just wrong. I mean, they asked specifically, “Is that the reason you’re leaving?” And I went out of my way to say “No.” But it didn’t make it into print like that. Everyone in the world ended up thinking I left because I was mad at Apple or something.

  The only reason I left my day-to-day-job at Apple is that I was enthusiastic about the idea of doing this new neat project that had never been done before. I saw that remote controls were going to be more important in people’s lives as satellite TVs and other devices came in. Remember, there was no store you could go down to yet to buy a satellite TV. You had to be in a select group of people to know how to even buy a home-built receiver for that.

  If I hadn’t had the remote control idea, I would have stayed right where I was. But this was such a cool idea. And we got moving pretty quickly.

  • o •

  Our first thoughts were where to locate. I lived on Summit I toad in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Up there at the Summit were two restaurants, the Summit Inn and the Cloud 9.1 knew that the Cloud 9 was closing, so 1 suggested it as a site. How cool would that be?

  Joe Ennis picked up on the name Cloud 9, too. We had the lawyers who incorporated us check it out, and they found that Cloud 9 was taken. I can’t remember which of us came up with CL 9. It may have been that I saw it on a license plate, but it’s hard to remember. At any rate, we settled on CL 9, which was still a great name.

  Maybe two weeks after that, we got an office in this older part of Los Gatos, the town where I lived. It was right up against the Santa Cruz Mountains on the last little corner with a few shopping places. The space was small—maybe around 900 square feet—and it was right above a Swensen’s ice cream place. And that’s where Joe, Laura, and I moved ?n.

  It was great. It felt just like the early Apple days, so exciting. We were building something no one else had thought of yet. Who had ever thought of playing your remote control into a device that would learn its code? That had never happened. I mean, today it’s more obvious because we have universal remotes and things, but not back then.

  The first thing we did was to start meeting with representatives of components that might apply: infrared sensors; infrared transmitters; microprocessors. We started looking over the data sheets and the books and figuring out what microprocessor we’d use. We started making some choices and got together an idea that was more in our heads than on paper, but it wasn’t like a fin

  ished design you could actually breadboard and wire together and build something from. This process w
as exactly like what I did with the Apple II.

  There were a couple of areas that were tougher. One problem we had to tackle was how do you receive infrared signals in the remote? We didn’t have that much expertise in this area. I didn’t, and Joe wasn’t so sound on how you build a sensor for infrared. So we actually hired a consulting firm in Sunnyvale to help us basically read an infrared signal. If you placed your own remote control right next to our receiver, the signal coming out of yours was a very strong signal.

  In the same way that the closer you get to a lightbulb the brighter it is, so it is with a remote control. The consultants designed an intricate circuit with an awful lot of parts and filters. And I said, “If you’re close and it’s powerful, then why can’t you just detect it with a lot simpler circuitry?” Just go straight to a photo transistor. You know me. I like to do things with the simplest possible circuitry. You don’t need all these special amplifiers that need power all the time. Just go straight to the photo transistor, which is a transistor that senses light instead of electronic signals.

  And that idea actually worked out.

  They had to put in a couple of little parts and capacitors to filter it just right to avoid the signal bouncing around in a weird way. And they came up with a very good circuit that worked reliably. You could play your remote control into our little receiver device and it would capture the signal very accurately. It could determine how many microseconds the infrared signal was on and how many it was off.

  Then it could trace the signal and make a time recording of it, the signal from your remote control.

  • o •

  The time also came for us to come up with a plastics design for the remote. Very early, just after we moved into the second build

  ing on Alberto Way, we started going around to a few design companies to see if they would show us some samples, or some ideas we could look at.

  One of those companies was Frog Design, which had done the Macintosh. We called them up and they said, “Sure, we do third-party development for people other than Apple.”