My whole life was basically trying to optimize things.
You don’t just save parts, but every time you save parts
you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time
it takes to understand something. And how good you can build
it without errors and bugs and flaws.
... design them on paper and try to get better and better and better. I was
competing with myself. But that’s just the story of how my skill got so good. It’s
because I could never build anything, I just competed with myself to come up
with ideas that nobody else would come up with.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money, and (b) not having done it before, ever.
I had no tools; my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. I know what’s
going on better if I’m not going through a tool.
He would ask questions like, “What’s the market?” And I’d say, “A million.” And he’d say,
“How do you know?” And I said, “Well, there’s a million ham radio operators,
and computers are more popular than ham radio.” Nobody in the world could
ever deny that. But it’s not the sort of analysis that they wanted. And there were
no analysts yet that were predicting that this was going to be a big marketplace
anyway.
If there was any engineering to do, hardware or software, I did it, because Steve could do stuff, but he couldn’t do it as well as I. So never once did he even try.
Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?
Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail.
You have to be so careful that you haven’t left something out. You have to think
harder and deeper than you normally would. It’s hard with today’s large, huge
programs.
Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to
your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities.
