every week it had a little bit more working on it too
but I would set it down and let people type on the keyboard
and I would explain what's in it
If they would come up to me and ask the question I can answer
eh you know nowadays I would have the ability to tell them what it is
you know and be a little bit more promotional
but back then I could only answer questions that they asked me
but a kinda group started gathering around me.
And Steve Jobs saw that I had a lot of interest around me at the club
and he said "let's start selling it"
and let's make this company. He came up with the name Apple
and eh and eh that's how it started.
Apple was at best a funky company...started by a couple of
teenage hackers who
had previously been working as Alice in Wonderland characters in a
local shopping mall and they started it in this garage right here.
The first Apple computer was built here, now there are more than
ten million in use around the world.
And I was there - well for a short time I was an employee of
Apple Computer,
employee number 12 and one day I helped move materials
out of this garage.
At the time Steve Jobs said that the company was short of loot
so he offered to pay me in company shares,
but I held out for the money -
my mother still reminds me of that incident.
The Apple 1 was even less of a computer than the Altair
a single circuit board that came with neither a case nor a keyboard.
Still, Steve Jobs managed to sell 50 Apple 1's.
That experience showed Jobs there was a market for a real computer:
the Apple II.
It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of
hardware hobbyists
that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board
and add the transformers for the power supply and the case
the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera,
go get the rest of the stuff.
For every one of those there were a thousand people that couldn't
do that, but wanted to mess around with programming
software hobbyists. Just like I had been when I was, you know, ten,
discovering that computer.
And so my dream for the Apple 2 was to sell the first real
packaged computer.
Steve Jobs's dream was impossible.
It needed too many chips, making the product too complicated
and expensive to build.
But Woz didn't know it was impossible.
And then I got in to a way of why have memory for your TV screen
and memory for your computer, make them one,
and that shrunk the chips down, and I shrunk the chips here,
and why not take all these timing circuits
and I looked through manuals and found a chip that did it in one
chip instead of five, and reduced that,
and one thing after another after another happened.
I wound up with so few chips, when I was done I said:
hey, a computer that you could program to generate
coloured patterns on a screen,
or data or words or play games or anything,
it was just the computer I wanted, you know, for myself pretty much,
but it had turned out so good.
He said: "I think we have a computer we could sell a thousand
a month of."
How can you sell a thousand a month, you know?
But we needed some money for tooling the case, things like that,
we needed a few hundred thousand dollars.
That was a lot of money for two people who had nothing in their lives
to speak of, didn't have a 400 dollar bank account.
So I went looking for some venture capital.
The scruffy 19 year-old seduced the conservative world
of venture capitalists.
The man Jobs persuaded to part with his cash was Arthur Rock,
the inventor of venture capital and the man who had
originally funded Intel.
At least the Intel boys had graduated from university
and owned suits.
Well, he wore sandals and he had long, very long hair and
a beard and a moustache,
but very articulate.
He was, I think at one time in his life, and it was probably when
I first met him that he ate nothing but fruit.
- So as a mainline venture capitalist, is this...
- This is not the norm.
With money in hand and