#Apple serial number mystery finally by software#

and everybody owning their own computers at home and said I had a company idea for us.'Īt the time, Wozniak was heavily into the open-source movement, giving away all of his software, designs and intellectual property to start the revolution. 'He came back and he saw the interest in my computer. Steve Jobs, at this time, was working on a farm in Oregon that he had bought into with the funds the two had earned designing a game for Atari called Breakout. where he worked alone,' Wozniak said.įive years later, while Wozniak was in the Homebrew Computer Club, he had the idea for what would become the Apple I: a simple computer that skipped the idea of a front input panel and used a keyboard and screen arrangement to input binary to produce a visual result. 'At first they put him on the day shift, but he doesn't really get along with people that well, so they put him on the night shift. While the head of Atari at the time described Jobs as the type of thinker that the company needed to be hiring, it wasn't all smooth sailing for Jobs. Jobs returned from college and was so amazed by Wozniak's version of Pong and the Atari original that he went to the Atari headquarters and got himself a job there. Wozniak stayed with Hewlett-Packard while Jobs was at college, and said that he remained constantly impressed by new technology, so much so that when he first saw Atari's Pong at his local bowling alley, he went home and built one himself. He would impress higher-ups so the college let him stay without paying dorm fees and they let him go sit in on any classes he felt like if there was room.' 'When you talk to him, his mind is always going a few different places, so he would impress people back then. 'He was a little free-thinking,' Wozniak said. Subsequently, Jobs spent the first week of college in a tent in his dormitory and skipped all of his classes. 'But I thought I was just going to be able to go in and do Shakespeare courses and quantum physics and learn all this neat stuff about the world,' Wozniak quoted Jobs as saying. Jobs eventually went to college in Oregon and, on the drive up with Wozniak, complained that he had to take basic literature and mathematics courses.

I totally bought into it, I just wasn't going to become a part of that hippie movement with drugs and stuff, but Steve was more 'in it',' Wozniak said. 'I appreciated him for the counter-culture movement, and for thinking about different ways of life. He always wanted to be one of those special people, but then he went around just living with people who had nothing and eating seeds and walking around in bare feet and all that,' Wozniak said to laughter. 'He read books that were about the very few of us, like the Shakespeares and the Einsteins, who take the world forward and the rest of us kind of hardly matter in the end. Wozniak's friend told him he should go and see Jobs because he had some computer knowledge, and was fond of playing pranks, which Wozniak said he was also known for. Jobs and Wozniak were introduced to each other through a friend of Wozniak's with whom he built the 'creaming soda computer'.

#Apple serial number mystery finally by software#

I wanted to design hardware, and write software for the rest of my life,' he said, a sentiment that changed just five years after meeting Steve Jobs.

I never wanted to go up the management ladder. 'I wanted to stay at Hewlett-Packard for the rest of my life. I totally bought into it, I just wasn't going to become a part of that hippie movement with drugs and stuff, but Steve was more 'in it'.' 'I appreciated for the counter-culture movement, and for thinking about different ways of life. Wozniak thought that Hewlett-Packard was a great place to work. Wozniak's first job in technology was working as an engineer for Hewlett-Packard, working on the team designing the very first scientific calculator, which he described as 'the iPhone 4 of its day', costing around the equivalent today of $2000. He asked would it cost as much as a down payment on a house.

'I had told my Dad back a long time ago that I was going to own my own computer some day. It was his father who taught him much of what he knows about science and technology, Wozniak recounts. While other kids were getting bikes for Christmas, young Wozniak was tearing the wrapping off a HAM radio, and getting his HAM broadcast licence at age 10. Wozniak told delegates at the Australian Congress Business Council in Queensland last week that, growing up, his father was his main inspiration, followed by one of his school teachers. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Credit: Luke Hopewell)