iWoz (16 page)

• o •

Once I got into HP, I met a lot of people there and became good friends with the engineers, the technicians, even some of the marketing people. I loved the environment. It was just very free. I still had long hair and a beard, and no one seemed to mind. At HP, you were respected for your abilities. It didn't matter how you looked.

We had cubicles, I remember. For the first time, I sat in a cubicle and was free to walk around and talk to other people. During the day, you could throw out ideas about products and debate them. And HP made it easy to do that. Every day, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., they wheeled in donuts and coffee. That was so nice. And smart, because the reason they did it was so everyone would

More on HP

Stanford 1934 graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard

founded Hewlett-Packard in their garage in 1939. Now, a lot of people confuse that story with Apple's, saying that we started Apple in a garage. Not true. HP started in a garage, true. But in the case of Apple, I worked in my room at my apartment and Steve worked in his bedroom in his parents' house. We only did the very last part of assembly in his garage.

But that's how it goes with stories.

HP's first product was a precision audio oscillator, called the Model 200A. It generated sound waves and cost under $50, which was a quarter of the price of other companies
¹
less reliable oscillators. And here's a cool fact. One of HP's earliest clients was Walt Disney Productions, which used eight Model 200B audio oscillators for testing the sound system for the movie
Fantasia.

gather in a common place and be able to talk, socialize, and exchange ideas.

A few years before, during those long walks I took during high school, I'd decided that I was into truth and facts and solid calculations. I knew I never wanted to play social games. The Vietnam War only solidified that attitude. That's why I was sure, even at twenty-two, that I didn't want to switch from engineering to management, ever. I didn't want to go into management and have to fight political battles and take sides and step on people's toes and all that stuff.

I knew I could do that at HP—that is, have a long career without ever having to get into management. I knew this because I'd met a couple of engineers who were a lot older than me, and they had no desire to be in management either. So after I met them, I knew that was possible.

I worked at HP for quite a while—about four years. I didn't have a college degree yet, but I promised my managers I would work toward one by taking night classes at San Jose State nearby.

I couldn't imagine quitting my job and going back to school full-time, because what I was doing was too important.

• o •

At HP, I got into calculator circuits and how they were designed. I looked at the schematics of the engineers who had invented this calculator processor, and I was able to make modifications to those chips.

But the longer I worked there, the more I found myself drifting away from the computers of my past: computers and processors, registers, chips, gates, building all these things I used to be fascinated by. Everything was so good in my life; I just set my computer ambitions aside.

I'd even missed the fact that microprocessors—the brain of any modern computer today—were getting more and more powerful and more and more compact. I lost track of the chips that were coming up. I lost track of the fact that we were almost at the point where you could get all of a computer's main brainpower—its central processing unit (or CPU)—onto just one small chip.

I stopped following computer developments so closely. And I didn't really think of our calculators as computers, though of course they were. They did have a couple of chips inside that added up to a little microprocessor—a veiy strange one, I admit, but in those days you had to design things strangely and come up with weird techniques. Your chips could really do only one thing at a time. Back then, chips were simpler, you couldn't fit more than a thousand or so transistors on a chip, compared to more than a billion today.

So everything was weirder then. And because I was so happy in my job, I didn't know what I was missing.

• o •

What's a CPU?

You hear the letters "CPU" thrown around a lot, but

CPU, short for central processing unit, is a term that's usually used interchangeably with "microprocessor." That is, provided the CPU is on one chip. When I first started building computers,

like the Cream Soda Computer, there was no such thing as a CPU on a chip—that is, a microprocessor.

 As it turned out, Intel came out with the first true micro- processor in the mid-1970s. It was called the 4004.

The whole purpose of the CPU, which really is the brains of a computer, is to seek and execute all the instructions someone stored in the computer as a program. Say you write a program that spell-checks a document. Well, the CPU is capable of finding that program (which is represented in the machine as the binary numbers 1 and 0) and communicating with the other components of the computer to make it run.

Sometimes a bunch of us engineers would take small planes and fly to lunch somewhere. A lot of us had our pilot's licenses. For my first flight ever in a small plane, I ended up in Myron Tut- tle's plane. Myron was a design engineer, like me, a guy who worked with me in my cubicle. That day he let me sit in the copilot's seat, which I thought was so cool.

I remember there were two people in the back, other people in our group. So here we are, flying for lunch to Rio Vista, near Sacramento.

When Myron landed, we just bounced and bounced and bounced. I had never been in such a small plane before, so I just thought, Oh, this is interesting. So this is how a small plane is. Really bumpy when you land.

At lunch, the other pilots had this private conversation. (I found out later they were trying to decide whether they would let Myron fly us back!) Well, it turned out they decided, okay, it was just one flight, and the runway in San Jose was 10,000 to 12,000 feet long. They thought maybe Myron would be able to do a better job on the return flight.

So we flew back after lunch—and there it was again, another one of those really, really bouncy landings. Again I just thought that's how you land in small planes. There was a first bounce, then a second bounce that was pretty hard, then a scraping sound, and then it bounced, bounced, bounced, and bounced again for what seemed like the millionth time down the runway.

I must've been white as a sheet, I think everyone was. And not one of us could say a word. We taxied around the runway for a few minutes, and still the three of us didn't say a word to Myron. Not one word.

That silence was uncomfortable. Finally I felt like I had to say something, just anything technical, because he's an engineer and all. So after we got out of the plane, I said to Myron, "Hey, that's interesting that they bend the propeller like that—is that for aerodynamic reasons?"

And Myron said, "They don't." That's all he said.

I realized I had just said the worst possible thing.

Myron had bent his propeller on that landing.

To be fair to Myron, it's not impossible that I did something in my copilot seat that made the bounce worse. It's possible that in my own fright I touched something I shouldn't have.

At any rate, I heard Myron never flew again after that. As for the propeller he bent, he had to buy it. We mounted it on the lab wall, something for us to always look at and remember. Like it was a joke.

• o •

I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime.

Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn't getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success.

One such project I called Dial-a-Joke. I started it about two weeks before I went to work at HP, and it went on for a couple of years after that.

Now, a lot of people start companies, and I know a lot of people will probably be reading this book only because I started Apple. But what I wish more people knew about me is what I think I should really be famous for: creating the very first Dial-a-Joke in the Bay Area, which was one of the first in the world.

A dial-a-joke service was something I had wanted to do for a while, mostly because I'd been calling dial-a-joke numbers (remember Happy Ben?) all around the world with my Blue Box. So I knew there were dial-a-joke lines in places like Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles, but there were none in the San Francisco Bay Area. How could that be? I couldn't believe it. And you know me; I always like to be in the forefront of things. So I decided I was going to be the first one to do it.

Before long I really did have the first dial-a-joke in the Bay Area, and it was unbelievably popular. In fact, it had so many calls that I could only keep doing it for a couple of years. I was fielding thousands of calls a day by the end of it. Eventually I couldn't afford it anymore.

• o •

To do a dial-a-joke system, the first thing was to get an answering machine. You couldn't just buy them. It was illegal to connect one to your phone line without actually renting it from a phone

company. Keep in mind that there were no phone jacks in the walls back then. Just wires connected to screws.

I knew movie theaters had answering machines, though. That was for prerecording movie titles and showtimes. Somehow I managed to rent one of those machines for about $50 a month. That was pretty expensive for a young guy like me. But I wanted to do it for fun, and money wasn't going to stop me. Well, at least not at first.

Next, I needed jokes. I got them from
The Official Polish- Italian Joke Book
, by Larry Wilde. That book was the best-selling joke book of all time.

So I hooked up the machine and recorded a joke. Using my best Slavic accent, I'd say: "Alio. Tenk you fur dialing Dial-a- Joke." Then: "Today's joke ees: Ven did a Polack die drinking milk? Ven de cow sat down! Ah, ah. Tenk you fer dialin' Dial-a- Joke."

The first day, I just gave the number to a few people at work and told them to let their kids try it.

The next day, I read another joke into the machine. And every day I'd do that, reading a new Polish joke into the machine.

You wouldn't believe how fast Dial-a-Joke ramped up. The first day, there were just a couple of calls. Then there were ten. The next day, there were maybe fifteen. And then suddenly it spiked up to a hundred calls, then two hundred calls a day. Within two weeks, the line was busy all day. I would call it from work and I couldn't even get through. After school let out that year, there were like two thousand calls a day on a single line phone number. I made a point of keeping my jokes as short as I could—under fifteen seconds—just so I could handle more calls a day. I couldn't believe how popular it got!

I started to really have a blast with it. Every now and then, just for fun, I'd take live calls when I got home from work. I'd say, "Alio. Tenk you fur dialing Dial-a-Joke." I got to talk to lots of people and hear weird things about their schools and teachers and other students. I took notes. That way, if I asked someone (in my Polish accent, of course) what high school do you go to, and they answered "Oak Grove," I could say, "Hey, does Mr. Wilson still wear those weird red pants?"

So they were amazed by me. They heard the recordings and they knew I actually picked up the phone sometimes—they thought this old Polish guy knew everything about them! I told them my name was Stanley Zebrazutsknitslci.

At one point I bought two books of insults—
2,001 Insults
, volumes 1 and 2. A lot of these insults were really funny. Sometimes I would say something a little critical to a caller—like, "You not so bright, are you?"—just to get them going. Usually they would retort by calling me something nasty, like an old fart. That's when I could start reading the insults out of the book, ones that were so clever no one could come back with anything good. As hard as anyone tried, I would always win the insult battle.

Somewhere around that time, I got complaints from the Polish American Congress that the jokes defamed people of Polish descent. Being a Polish Wozniak who tells and laughs at Polish jokes, I asked them if they would mind if I switched to Italian jokes. They said that would be fine.

See, the notion of political correctness didn't exist back then. The Polish-Americans didn't care if I told ethnic jokes as long as they weren't about Polish people!

Want to Hear a Dial-a-Joke

The first dial-a-joke service is rumored to have been created by New York Bell in the early 1970s. Want to hear some examples? You can hear archived recordings at
http://www.dialajoke.com
.

And you know what? Twelve years later the same Polish American Congress gave me its Heritage Award, its highest award for achievements by a Polish-American.