Steve Wozniak
speaker
809 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2025
last heard 21 May
Steve Wozniak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Typically, once I started a design, I'd stay up very late one or more nights in a row, sprawled on my bedroom floor with papers all around and a Coke can nearby.
Since I could never build my designs, all I could do was try and beat my own designs by redesigning them even better using fewer parts.
I was competing with myself and developed tricks that certainly would never be describable or put in books.
I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sorts of design tricks I'd come up with to save parts.
I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper.
The constraint of not being able to afford the chips fueled the competition with himself.
He became obsessive about doing more with less, but he told no one.
After high school, short on money, he needed work and access to real computers.
He and his friend Alan Baum walked in the wrong building looking for data general, but found themselves at a company called Tenet.
They were hiring.
Steve and Alan applied on the spot.
At Tenet, Steve mentioned his years of paper designs to an executive, lamenting that he couldn't afford the parts to build them.
The man's response changed everything.
I can get you the parts.
Finally, after years of paper design, Steve could build something real.
But he couldn't ask for hundreds of components.
There was a limit to free samples.
So he gave himself a constraint, 20 chips.
Most computers use hundreds.
Wozniak teamed up with Bill Fernandez, who lived down the block.
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