Steve Wozniak

I needed to hear one person saying that I could stay at the bottom of the organization chart as an engineer and not have to be a manager.

He called jobs immediately with the news.

The next morning, he came in early to HP and told everyone he was leaving to start his own company.

They were officially incorporated as Apple Computer in early 1977.

Mercoula had to meet with patent lawyers who went through every clever trick in Wozniak's design.

They ended up with five separate patents that would become, as Wozniak put it, one of these patents in history that became very, very valuable.

But there was one design decision that nearly destroyed Apple before it started.

It came down to a simple question.

How many expansion slots should the Apple II have?

steve jobs wanted two one for a printer and one for a modem that's it clean simple controlled he'd grown up watching his adoptive father build things with pride finished products completed and perfect you don't leave the hood of a beautiful car open wozniak wanted eight slots

He'd been going to homebrew meetings, watching engineers share ideas and push boundaries.

He understood something fundamental.

The true power of the computer wasn't what it could do out of the box, but what it might become in the hands of creative users.

Jobs was optimizing for elegance for the mythical average user who would walk into a store and just fall in love with this beautiful beige box.

Wozniak, on the other hand, was optimizing for people who were just like him, the homebrew crowd, the engineers who would buy the first thousand units and become evangelists who would tinker.

Jobs wanted to control the experience.

Wozniak wanted to unleash it.

The argument got heated, really heated.

Finally, Wozniak delivered.

Wazniak wasn't interested.