Steve Wozniak > Quotes

“If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window”
― Steve Wozniak

“Artists work best alone. Work alone.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,’ he said. ‘We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God…”
― Steve Wozniak

“I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.”
― Steve Wozniak

“Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.”
― Steve Wozniak

“I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control. We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God.

[CNN interview (December 8, 2010)]”
― Steve Wozniak

“when you don't have the hardware resources, you have to take advantage of what you have inside the chip”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz - Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself.”
― Steve Wozniak

“this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone…I didn’t ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.”
― Steve Wozniak

“And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience.”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“Try to think of new ways to solve the old problems. Very often we look at something we have and say, "I could make it better.' That's innovation.”
― Steve Wozniak

“A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all these projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book ... I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.”
― Steve Wozniak

“I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“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”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you're perceived as intelligent. I'm a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you're told it is.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It

“Even HP had to cut back 10 percent on its expenses. But instead of laying people off, HP wound up cutting everyone’s salary by 10 percent. That way, no one would be left without a job.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“He took the time—a lot of time—to show me those few little things. They were little things to him, even though Fairchild and Texas Instruments had just developed the transistor only a decade earlier.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Soon after the West Coast Computer Faire, where we introduced the Apple II, a couple of other ready-to-use personal computers came out. One was the Radio Shack TRS-80, and the other was Commodore’s PET. These would become our direct competitors. But it was the Apple II that ended up kicking off the whole personal computer revolution. It had lots of firsts. Color was the big one. I designed the Apple II so it would work with the color TV you already owned. And it had game control paddles you could attach to it, and sound built in. That made it the first computer people wanted to design arcade-style games for, the first computer with sound and paddles ready to go. The Apple II even had a high-resolution mode where a game programmer could draw special little shapes really quickly. You could program every single pixel on the screen—whether it was on or off or what color it was—and that was something you could never do before with a low-cost computer. At first that mode didn’t mean a lot, but eventually it was a huge step toward the kinds of computer gaming you see today, where everything is high-res. Where the graphics can be truly realistic. The fact that it worked with your home TV made the total cost a lot lower than any competitors could do. It came with a real keyboard to type on—a normal keyboard—and that was a big deal. And the instant you turned it on, it was running BASIC in ROM.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“little,”
― Steve Wozniak, I, Woz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon - Getting to the Core of Apple's Inventor

“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.”
― Steve Wozniak

“If I hadn’t gotten in the car accident that year, I wouldn’t have quit school and I might never have started Apple. It’s weird how things happen.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Now, I accept that Apple had to work the way a company has to. There are a lot of people who operate the company, and there are a lot of people on the board who run things. So the reasoning is very difficult to see. I mean, this was a time when the company had one reputation but it was totally different on the inside. It very much bothered me that you can get away with all kinds of things when you are successful. For example, a bad person can get away with a lot of things if they have a lot of money. And a bad person can hide it—hide behind the money—and keep on being a bad person.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“How Ma Bell Helped Us Build the Blue Box In 1955, the Bell System Technical Journal published an article entitled “In Band Signal Frequency Signaling” which described the process used for routing telephone calls over trunk lines with the signaling system at the time. It included all the information you’d need to build an interoffice telephone system, but it didn’t include the MF (multifrequency) tones you needed for accessing the system and dialing. But nine years later, in 1964, Bell revealed the other half of the equation, publishing the frequencies used for the digits needed for the actual routing codes. Now, anybody who wanted to get around Ma Bell was set. The formula was there for the taking. All you needed were these two bits of information found in these two articles. If you could build the equipment to emit the frequencies needed, you could make your own free calls, skipping Ma Bell’s billing and monitoring system completely. Famous “phone phreaks” of the early 1970s include Joe Engressia (a.k.a. Joybubbles), who was able to whistle (with his mouth) the high E tone needed to take over the line. John Draper (a.k.a. Captain Crunch) did the same with the free whistle that came inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch. A whole subculture was born. Eventually Steve Jobs (a.k.a. Oaf Tobar) and I (a.k.a. Berkeley Blue) joined the group, making and selling our own versions of the Blue Boxes. We actually made some good money at this.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“hope you’ll be as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors—great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it’s within your reach. And it’ll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“Apple II C computer. This was the small Apple II—a really small one—as small as today’s laptops except you had to plug it into a wall. I thought it was just a beautiful computer, my favorite one to this day. I really think it was one of the best projects ever done at Apple.”
― Steve Wozniak, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon

“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”
― Steve Wozniak