Atari is a very sad story.
I think everything I have done in my life, my reasons at the time were right no matter how things worked out.
I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!
I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen.
For some reason I get this key position of being one of two people that started the company that started the revolution.
Every dream I’ve ever had in life has come true ten times over.
Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you’re doing because you believe it’s right.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it’s a lie and they’re protected if the person’s famous or it’s a company.
At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff.
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He’s always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
I thought Microsoft did a lot of things that were good and right building parts of the browser into the operating system. Then I thought it out and came up with reasons why it was a monopoly.
In the end, I hope there’s a little note somewhere that says I designed a good computer.
Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.
My whole life had been designing computers I could never build.
You know what, Steve Jobs is real nice to me. He lets me be an employee and that’s one of the biggest honors of my life.
Wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.
The way I did it, every job was A+.
The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn’t have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.
The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life.
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
Steve Jobs didn’t really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don’t deny that.
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way.
My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.
It’s just not right that so many things don’t work when they should. I don’t think that will change for a long time.
It would be nice to design a real briefcase – you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by.
All the best people in life seem to like LINUX.
I’m surprised at the extent of the bigotry. But it really plays out when companies or schools take a side and prohibit the other platform at all. We Mac users should be good even when the other side is bad. We should do what we can to accept the other platforms.
I’d learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw – shapes of characters and things.
Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I’d put myself in the latter category. But I’d never call myself a normal designer of anything.
A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.