iWoz: Co-founder tells his side of Apple story | In Depth | Reuters.com
Co-founder tells his side of Apple story
Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:39am ET
By Eddie EvansNEW YORK (Reuters)
There was excited chatter as the revolutionaries met in a nondescript garage in Menlo Park, California, but in the beginning few of them really knew how they would change the world.And yet within a year of that first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club on March 5, 1975, a computer was in the hands of consumers for just a few hundred dollars and the personal computer revolution was under way.Steve Wozniak says that meeting inspired him to design and build the first Apple computer, but he almost didn’t show up. “I was shy and felt that I knew little about the newest developments in computers,” he recalls.
Shyness is a theme for Wozniak. He is “the other Steve” in the duo behind Apple Computer Inc., the self-effacing engineer to steve jobs’ brash marketing whiz.While Jobs, now presiding over the success of Apple’s iPod, is almost a household name, the other Steve has been content to stay out of the limelight, until now.In a book titled “iWoz” published this week, Wozniak seeks to tell the engineer’s side of the story and set a few things in the record straight.For him, the day that defined the personal computer was June 29, 1975, the first time he typed a character on a keyboard and saw it show up on the screen right in front of him.”Every computer before the ‘Apple I’ had that front panel of switches and lights. Every computer since has had a keyboard and a screen,” he writes.