They said they’d take anyone who walked in the door and talk to them, design for them. We told them what we wanted, and they did it up in a few models. A couple of them were a little too fancy-looking for my taste. I wanted the most normal-looking design, just totally straightforward, where every button is sort of square, a real symmetrical design.
I wanted it to look like an every person product, not something that looks like it’s from outer space, you know what I mean. And we liked some of the other products they came up with to fit that description.
But in the end, they dropped us.
It turned out Steve Jobs was over at Frog for some reason and saw a CL 9 prototype. From what I heard, he threw it against a wall and put it in a box and said, “Send it to him.” As if Apple owned it. The Frog guy told me that Steve told him they couldn’t do any work for us because Apple “owned” Frog. Not true, and everyone knew it. But Frog told us they felt uncomfortable doing it without Apple’s permission—Apple was a big customer—so they weren’t going to do it.
Well, I wasn’t going to argue. I don’t truly know what the real story was, but I thought, Good, fine. We’ll go somewhere else. And we did go somewhere else.
• o •
Of course, I had to choose a microprocessor for the device. I ended up choosing two processors. So the remote later went down in history as the first remote control with a dual processor!
Anyway, thinking about the two microprocessors and working
with Joe, I decided it might be nice to have one microprocossoi for small tasks like reading the keyboard and keeping time, and another to do the heavy-duty work. The larger processor I used was an updated version of the old MOS 6502 I’d used for the Apple I. The other was a smaller, cheaper processor. I think we paid 50 cents apiece for it in quantity. It was a 4-bit processor meaning, remember, it could process only 4 bits of data at a time. That was all we needed for these smaller tasks.
However, a little processor like that is hard to write a program for. Man, was it hard to control. It was almost as hard as program ming the state machine in the floppy disk. Nothing was built into the hardware, and when you don’t have the hardware resources, you have to take advantage of what you do have inside the chip. And you wind up with weird instructions that do things in weird ways. That’s because the chip didn’t already have built into it well-thought-out instructions a human could easily understand and use. That was to keep the cost to a minimum.
But the program on the 4-bit microprocessor wound up doing two basic things: keeping the time of day, monitoring the keyboard, running the LCD display, and enabling power to some of the rest of the circuit, and it also communicated with the bigger, 8-bit microprocessor, telling it what keys had been pressed and receiving data to display on the screen.
We sat down and sketched out on paper where we wanted the lines of letters, numbers, and a few special words to pop up on our LCD. And we found a company that would make us an LCD. We gave them our layouts, and they eventually brought us back LCDs with a bunch of connection pins. And that LCD would actually connect to the same 4-bit microprocessor chip that was reading the keyboard.
Now, the real guts of our product—memorizing all these different infrared codes and repeating them when you pressed buttons—was going to be done by the second, more powerful
microprocessor. Because of the updated version of the 6502, I thought, Great. I am so familiar with this! It had a very beautiful architecture inside. The way it was structured to be, with very few transistors inside doing a lot of work, it was just so good and it did the right job.
The Apple II had my little development system that I wrote myself, and I could type instructions in quickly and test them out. What if I could have that for this microprocessor? So we actually designed our board in such a way that you would be able to hook up through a serial port so that we could connect a terminal or computer directly to it. That would enable you to type and see data on the screen, although the remote control was really the computer. (It was like a little cousin of the Apple II.)
What terminal? Well, I decided the Apple II C would be a great terminal. There were programs that could make it behave like a terminal that talked to other computers.
Remember how I told you that in the Apple III had added this mini-assembler that let me type in things like LDA for loading the A register, or #35, which meant 00110101, the binary language of Is and 0s that computers can understand? That program and many other development tools were built into the Apple II, but would really be useful in the remote control as well.
I had a friend I’d worked with at Apple, John Arkley. He was a consultant, and he offered to convert the debugging and other code I’d written for this new 6502 microprocessor. We paid him and he did it.
And it was great. I would hook a little Apple II C into our breadboard—our wired prototypes—and type away and do the debugging. It’s like I had a new little Apple II inside of the remote control. It had all the fun of an Apple II.
And when we finished designing it, this product was great. We were all just blown away by how great these tools turned out.
So then we had a manufacturing issue. Who was going to man
ufacture the device? And suddenly an old friend of mine showec I up from my childhood days with the Electronics Kids. Remember my neighbor Bill Werner? He was the one who did all the toilet-papering of the houses with me and got all that phone cord to create the house-to-house intercom system in our neighborhood.
By high school, though, Bill had kind of gone in a bad direction. Not like me. He got bad grades, got a motorcycle, got in trouble for burglarizing an electronics store, got into some bad stuff. But now he’d turned his life around, and we ended up hiring him—he had worked at the Silicon Valley manufacturing firm Selectron. And we hired his wife, Penny, too, to do some secretarial work. So our team was building.
Selectron was the kind of company we needed. It did manufacturing, like I said, and that was the one thing we had left—figuring out how to build this device in mass quantities.
• o •
Meanwhile I got a call one day from a venture capitalist in England. You see, years before, in the early days of Apple before we went public, he’d called me up and offered to buy some of my stock at a low price, and I’d said yes. But he hadn’t bought it.
Well, he called at a slightly later date and asked again if I would sell him the Apple stock at that price. I’m not sure what the offer was, but it was low. By this time Apple stock was easily worth ten times whatever he was offering, even though it wasn’t yet public. He said, “You promised to sell me some at this price. Will you?”
So I kept my word. His venture capital company made a ton of money on the London market, a ton of money.
Now, at CL 9,1 told him all about this new company I was starting, and he said, “Can I visit you?” I told him sure. He showed up. I remember thinking, Man, this guy is really staid. Just very formal—so reserved in his language and manner. He was English, okay. I guess he was stuffy compared to us, and you can imagine how loose we were.
Anyway, I described to him what we were doing, and he immediately said he wanted to invest. I told him I wasn’t taking any money, that I was financing it all. But he actually begged me.
Well, when people beg me and say they want to be a part of something, I always give in.
After his investment came in, I suddenly had another big investment from the big Silicon Valley venture firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), which had also done 3Com, Adaptec, and Silicon Graphics. This guy from England had brought his friends in, you see. So all of a sudden we had two or three million dollars.
So we pulled that off in a few months, and we began to realize we were going to need a bigger place to set up shop. I called an old friend of mine from Commodore, Sam Bernstein, a guy who’d written articles for newspapers. He was sort of a reporter. And I always liked the way he thought and the way he organized his thinking. So I asked him to come on board—this wa
s early on— as president. We got along splendidly.
• o •
We ended up keeping CL 9 in business for about three years, maybe a little more. There are still people out there who talk about how amazing our product was. I don’t regret doing it for a second. I ended up selling the company to someone, but they couldn’t raise money and closed it down.
But at the time, I had other challenges to think about. I had two small children at home (Jesse and Sara). So it was hard making sure I had enough time to devote to them.
I mean, after the 4-bit microprocessor project was done, it was time to do the 8-bit. And I set out to do it and was just having a lot of difficulty getting started on that job. I had my kids I was giving a lot of attention to. And my relationship with Candi was starting to get rocky. We were fighting. We weren’t getting along at all. We had fights about how to raise the children, especially. And we were talking separation.
Well, I had an idea to just take off and hang out in a hotel room somewhere beautiful for a week. I planned to just disappear from the world and go to Hawaii and write the code.
So I went to Hawaii, the Hyatt on Kaanapali Beach, and I sel up my little Apple II C so I could start typing the new program in. (Someone was watching the kids.) I thought solitude would help me finish the project. At least I hoped so.
But what happened was, I didn’t do a single thing that entire week. I literally sat there looking out my window and watching whales every day; I got used to the hotel schedule. I swear, about ten times a day somebody would come into the room to restock the minibar, change the sheets and towels, check this, check that. All day there were these major interruptions. I hated that.
So after that week of doing nothing, I thought I should stay another week. I found out I could keep that same room that I loved for another week.
Well, guess what? I wound up staying there for four weeks and not doing one single bit of code. I did nothing there, absolutely nothing. I just enjoyed being there. While I was there the Challenger space shuttle disaster happened—it was January 28, 1986—and that was really extremely upsetting to me. But whatever the reason, I did nothing.
At first I thought this was okay. Many times in the past, as I’ve described to you, my head is thinking about a problem ahead— it’s all in my head—and by the time I sit down to write things down, the code, I can write it really quickly and productively. I can do a lot in a short time because I’ve figured it all out beforehand. So I expected that to happen and it didn’t.
It was then that I thought, You know what? There are a lot of engineers in the world and I’ve got kids. I think I’d rather just hire somebody to do this part of the code. It was like I had sort of reached my limit of being able to mentally—with the 4-bit microprocessor—put myself through this kind of design effort.
So we hired another programmer to do that job on the 8-bit microprocessor. I wanted to spend more time with my children.
I stayed at CL 9 for another year, but that was really when my life changed once again.
Giving It Away
I didn’t start Apple so that I would get more money than I would ever need to live on. I never planned in my life to seek great wealth. And I’d always been inspired by stories of those who gave in order to do good things in life.
So I felt this was the right thing to do. And it felt good. I was around people on the boards of the museums and the ballet who were more inclined to social activity. They were less about humor and jokes, less than I was, anyway. But they were good people who believed in what they were doing, and I believed in them.
The first project I funded was the Children’s Discovery
Museum of San Jose. I funded it entirely for many years, even-mutually to the tune of a few million. Then I helped start The Tech of Silicon Valley, a computer museum. I also did the initial financing for the San Jose Cleveland Ballet, now known as the Ballet of Silicon Valley. Why ballet? Again, it was the people. They were great and I had confidence in them.
I also contributed to an expansion of the Center for the Performing Arts in San Jose, which benefited both the ballet and the orchestra. This was a donation that would directly benefit the city of San Jose. How neat to donate to a city.
And though I didn’t expect it, in 1988 San Jose’s mayor, Tom McEnery, called me to say they were going to name a street after me! In fact, it would be the same street the Children’s Discovery Museum would be on. The name of the street is Woz Way. And it’s one of the proudest things in my life—to have a street named after me! Not a dumb name, but a cool name. It would be a bummer to have a dumb-sounding street named after you.
Chapter 19
The Mad Hatter
I think there’s a time in everyone’s life when you look back and ask yourself, What else could I have been? What else could I have done? With me there’s just no question about the answer, none at all.
If I couldn’t have been an engineer, I would’ve been a teacher. Not a high school teacher, not a college teacher. A fifth-grade teacher. I specifically wanted to be a fifth-grade teacher ever since I was in fifth grade.
This was something I wanted to do since so early in life. Who knows where these things come from? Probably because my fourth-and fifth-grade teacher, Miss Skrak, was so good to me and I liked her so much. I felt she had helped me so much in life by encouraging me. And I believed, truly believed, that education was important.
I remember my father telling me way back then that it was education that would lift me up to where I wanted to go in life, that it could lift people up in values. I remember how he said that the world was kind of screwed up at the time—there was the Cold War between the USSR and the United States and all that. And he said that with education, the newer generation could learn from the mistakes of their parents and do a better job.
I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.
But by the time I was in high school and college, I’d kind of forgotten about my goals of working in education. There were times when it glimmered back at me. This girl at Berkeley, Holly, the first girl I kissed, well, a relative of her roommate brought around to our dorm a baby, four months old. And Holly, who was interested in child psychology, started doing all kinds of little games with the baby, trying to test where the baby was in its own head. Like she’d move a pencil and see if the baby’s eyes would follow it, that sort of thing. I remember how that just struck me that day, this notion of cognitive development. How shocking it was to me to suddenly realize that the mind really develops in identifiable stages. Almost like logic in a computer, it’s predictable. It was like logic, the thing I was into at the time, an intriguing kind of process—a game with rules.
That made me really remember my desire to be a teacher, and for the rest of my life I was always paying a lot of attention to children wherever I went. Infants, babies, younger children, older children. I’d try to relate to them, to smile, to tell them jokes, to be kind of part of their company. I’d been brought up with the idea that there were “bad people” who might hurt children or kidnap them, so I decided I would be a “good guy” any kid who met me could rely on.
• o •
Some people just love being around children, others don’t as much. I remember one summer when I was working at HP, Steve Jobs told me he really needed a job for some extra money. I drove him down to see the job listings over at De Anza Community College, and we found this job listing for people to stand in Westgate Mall for a week dressed in Alice in Wonderland costumes. They needed an Alice, a White Rabbit, and a Mad Hatter. I was so
intrigued. I drove Steve down to the guy who was interviewing people and telling them what it was like. Basically you put on these costumes, he said, and carry some helium balloons and you stand around. You can’t talk to the children, but they’ll all be around looking at you, he said.
“Can I do it, too?” I
asked. I loved the idea. So basically, they hired Steve, his girlfriend Chris Ann, and me as the Alice in Wonderland characters. We took turns in the costumes with some other people because, even after a twenty-minute stretch, these costumes got terribly hot and sweaty inside. You could hardly breathe. So sometimes I would be the White Rabbit and Steve would be the Mad Hatter, and sometimes it would be the other way around.
It was kind of funny because you had really limited mobility in those big costumes. I remember I went out as the Mad Hatter once, and all of a sudden about ten kids started grabbing me by my arms and my sleeves and spinning me around. For fun. They were laughing! And I couldn’t say anything to stop them, because there were a lot of kids doing it and I wasn’t allowed to talk. They could have toppled me! I was lucky they didn’t.
I thought this job was so fun I even cut back my engineering hours and took an hourly minimum wage for that week so I could spend more time doing it. I loved looking at the kids’ faces when they saw us. I just loved it.
We’d take lunch breaks in our regular clothes and eat at this little restaurant in the mall. One day this little kid—this tiny little kid—points at my tennis shoes and says, “Hey, he’s the Mad Hatter!” I told him, “Hey, be quiet!” Ha. That was a very fun week. So fun.
But Steve didn’t enjoy it as much as I did. I remember years and years later, I was commenting to him how much fun that Alice in Wonderland mall job was, and he said, “No, it was lousy. We hardly got paid anything for it.” So he had bad memories of it, but
I just had the best memories of it. I guess I thought everyone was like me and would like doing something like that with kids.
• o •
I loved being a parent, too. It was great. I didn’t read books on parenting; I didn’t want to read about any structured rules. I wanted to relate to and communicate with the child. Because if you can talk to them, then they’ll talk to you about most of the things in their life. I wanted to expose them to creative thinking, I wanted to show them that you don’t have to narrow and restrict, your thinking the way so many people do. I never once tried to impress even my own values in life on any one of my kids.
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