Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Built Apple [Outliers]  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Knowledge Project]] - Full Title: Steve Wozniak: The Engineer Who Built Apple [Outliers] - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/bb47a456-821a-4569-955e-11c338df4ca0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Childhood Labs Shaped An Engineer** - Steve Wozniak taught himself electronics with his father's blackboard lessons and built complex projects from childhood. - His early tinkering created patience and a drive to design novel machines rather than copy others. Transcript: Shane Parrish In 1976, Steve Wozniak offered his personal computer design to Hewlett Packard, where he worked as an engineer. HP said no, so he and Steve Jobs started Apple. Four years later, Wozniak was worth $88 million. Then he did something that Silicon Valley still doesn't quite understand, something that violated every rule of how you're supposed to win in the Valley. The man who created the computer that built Apple into a fortune 500 company never wanted to run a company at all. He just wanted to stay at the bottom of the org chart building cool stuff. This is the story of the founder who won by refusing to play the game everyone else was playing. Welcome to Outliers. I'm your host Shane Parrish. This show is all about learning from others, mastering the best of what they've figured out so you can use their lessons in your life. While Steve Jobs was building a mythology, Wozniak was in his HP cubicle designing computers on paper because he couldn't afford the parts. While Jobs dreamed of changing the world, Wozniak just wanted to impress the homebrew computing club. But here's what almost no one understands. Wozniak's radical openness, the philosophy Jobs fought against, is the exact reason that Apple survived long enough for Steve Jobs to become Steve Jobs. There's a lesson here about what happens when you refuse to compromise, even when it costs you billions. It's time to listen and learn. Silicon Valley didn't exist in 1957. The place that would birth Apple and Google was still called Santa Clara Valley. It smelled like apricots. Seven-year Steve Wozniak had just moved to Sunnyvale with his family. Their street was bordered by orchards on three sides. But Steve wasn't thinking about fruit trees at all. He was thinking about electrons. His father, Jerry, worked at Lockheed on military projects so secret, he couldn't mention them at dinner. But the physics behind them, that was fair game. When Steve asked questions, his dad didn't brush him off. He pulled out a blackboard and started from the beginning. Wozniak would later write, the way my dad taught me was not to rote memorize how parts are connected to form a gate, but to learn where the electrons flowed to make the gate do its job, to Truly internalize and understand what is going on, not just read some stuff off some blueprint or out of some book. His dad taught him to see the invisible, to understand not just what electrons did, but ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/abfe20ab-5960-4b16-9a3a-6c17aabcf1ba)) - **Paper Designs Became A Real Computer** - Wozniak designed computers on paper for years because he couldn't afford parts, then built the Cream Soda Computer with free samples. - The project proved he could build a working machine and led to his first public recognition. Transcript: Shane Parrish In his senior year, he discovered something that would change his life, the Small Computer Handbook. It described a mini-computer, and Wozniak spent sleepless nights studying it, figuring out how to build his own version. He started designing computers on paper. It was really messy at first, full of errors. But it was the start of something incredible. Soon he was collecting manuals for every mini computer being made. His ritual never varied. He wrote, because I could never afford the parts to build any of my computer designs, all I could do was design them on paper. Typically, once I started a design, I'd stay up very late one or more nights in a row, sprawled on my bedroom floor with papers all around and a Coke can nearby. Since I could never build my designs, all I could do is try and beat my own designs by redesigning them even better using fewer parts. I was competing with myself and developed tricks that certainly would never be describable or put in books. I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sorts of design tricks I'd come up with to save parts. I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper. The constraint of not being able to afford the chips fueled the competition with himself. He became obsessive about doing more with less, but he told no one. After high school, short on money, he needed work and access to real computers. He and his friend Alan Baum walked in the wrong building looking for Data General, but found themselves at a company called Tenet. They were hiring. Steve and Alan applied on the spot. At Tenet, Steve mentioned his years of paper designs to an executive, lamenting that he couldn't afford the parts to build them. The man's response changed everything. I can get you the parts. Finally, after years of paper design, Steve could build something real. But he couldn't ask for hundreds of components. There was a limit to free samples. So he gave himself a constraint. 20 chips. Most computers use hundreds. Wozniak teamed up with Bill Fernandez, who lived down the block. They worked in Bill's garage, taking breaks to ride their bikes for cream soda. That's how it got its name, the Cream Soda Computer. It was revolutionary in its minimalism. No screen or keyboard. Those didn't exist yet. Just a tiny circuit board with flashing lights. You'd punch a program into a card, slide it in, and read the answer from the blinking lights. But it had something special, 256 bytes of RAM. RAM chips were almost unheard of. Most computers used magnetic core memory with messy voltages. RAM was clean and simple. You just plugged it in and connected it to the processor. Steve's mother called a newspaper about her son's invention. A reporter came to see it. Then disaster struck. The reporter stepped on the power cable and something blew up. The computer started smoking. It was broken, but Steve had proven something crucial. The only important thing was that finally, finally I'd been able to actually build a computer, my very first one. ([Time 0:09:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a30c1223-bf66-4a5c-b229-ea9b8261540c)) - **First Venture: The Blue Box** - Wozniak and Steve Jobs built and sold blue boxes as teenagers to make free phone calls and earn money. - That early partnership blended engineering skill with Jobs' drive to commercialize projects. Transcript: Shane Parrish Wozniak discovered an article about phone freaks, people who'd figured out how to make free phone calls by playing specific tones into the payphone. So Wozniak and Jobs decided to test to see if the article was true. They got in a car and headed for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which had at the time one of the greatest technical libraries in the world. They searched for phone manuals to find the right tones. While the article mentioned some, it didn't mention them all. Listen to what he writes here. This is awesome. I was flipping around and suddenly stopped on a page. There it was, a complete frequency list. Sure enough, just as the article said, a one was composed of 700 hertz and 900 hertz tones together. A two was composed of 700 hertz and 1100 hertz. I froze. I grabbed Steve and nearly screamed in excitement that I'd found it. We both stared at the list, rushing with adrenaline. We kept saying things like, oh shit, and wow, this thing is for real. I was practically shaking with goosebumps and everything. It was such a eureka moment. We couldn't stop talking all the way home. We were so excited. They bought the parts and went to Jobs' house, but they couldn't get it to work. Wozner writes, we played the tones from our tape recording, but we weren't able to get the call to go through. Man, it was so frustrating. No matter how hard we tried to get the frequencies right, they wavered. I just couldn't make them accurate. I kept trying, but I just couldn't perfect this thing. I realized I didn't have a good enough tone generator to prove the article true or false, one way or the other. But I was not about to give up. Woz ends up creating a digital blue box using crystals, which are far more reliable. He didn't get it to work right away. That's not what happens in engineering, but he plugged away at it for months and eventually got it to work. ([Time 0:12:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e77c5a44-30e3-492b-8688-cecc32b3dfc7)) - **Homebrew Sparked The Apple I** - After seeing the Intel 8008, Wozniak realized his paper designs could become microprocessor-based personal computers. - He built the Apple I, showed it at Homebrew, and Xeroxed schematics freely for the community. Transcript: Shane Parrish That night, the night of the first meeting, this whole vision of kind of a personal computer just popped into my head all at once, just like that. Right then, he started sketching what would become the Apple I. But this wouldn't be like the cream soda computer or the Altair with primitive panel of switches and lights. Wozniak had already built a terminal that could display text on a TV screen. So why not combine them? Why not put the computer right inside the terminal? Every computer before the Apple I had a front panel of switches and lights, he noted. Every computer since has had a keyboard and a screen. While this seems obvious now, it wasn't in 1975. Loading a simple program in the Altair took half an hour of flipping switches. You had to know exactly which ones. On Wozniak's design, you could do it in under a minute. To see what was in the Altair's memory meant decoding patterns of blinking lights. On his design, you'd see it instantly on your screen. Still at HP, Wozniak went to the office early to study chip manuals. The Motorola 6800 processor cost $40 with his employee discount. Then he heard about the 6502, half the price, same functionality. At a tech show, he bought several for $20 each. Alone in his HP cubicle before dawn and late end of the night, fueled by TV dinners, he built his computer. The soldering took one night. Writing in the monitor program 256 bytes of code that would replace the front panel took several more, all done by hand on paper because you couldn't afford computer time. On Sunday, June 29, 1975, at 10 p.m., after hours of debugging, Wozniak typed on the keyboard. Letters appeared instantly on the screen. It's so hard to describe this feeling when you get something working on the first try. It's like getting a putt from 40 feet away. He didn't realize it then, but this was the first time in history anyone had typed on a keyboard and seen it appear on their own computer screen. That's just over 50 years ago today. Think how wild that is. At homebrew meetings Wozniak would set up this computer after the main sessions. He was too shy to present to the whole group but one on one he was in his element. People were shocked. He'd used just 30 chips. The Altair needed hundreds of dollars of additional equipment to do anything useful, and his worked with your home TV. True to the homebrew spirit, Wozniak gave away his complete design, Xeroxing copies to anyone who wanted it. Hundreds of copies. Steve Jobs watched the crowds gathering around Wozniak's table. By Thanksgiving, he noticed something Wozniak hadn't. The people at homebrew are taking the schematics, but they don't have the time or ability to build it. So Jobs proposed selling printed circuit boards. People could buy the board, solder their own chips, and have a working computer in days instead of weeks, make them for $20, sell them for $40. Wozniak hesitated. They'd need $1,000 just to get the boards printed. They'd have to sell at least $50 to break even. Were there even 50 people who'd want one? They were sitting in Steve Jobs' car when he said the words that changed everything. Well, even if we lose our money, we'll have a company. For once in our lives, we'll have a company. That convinced me, Woz wrote, to be two best friends starting a company. Wow, I knew right then that I'd do it. ([Time 0:20:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dfbbe226-2be2-40a6-b49e-3e9fb180e1d9)) - **Openness Fueled Early Adoption** - Wozniak freely shared his Apple I schematics, embodying Homebrew openness and accelerating community adoption. - That culture created early demand and positioned Apple as a grassroots movement. Transcript: Shane Parrish Hundreds of copies. Steve Jobs watched the crowds gathering around Wozniak's table. By Thanksgiving, he noticed something Wozniak hadn't. The people at homebrew are taking the schematics, but they don't have the time or ability to build it. So Jobs proposed selling printed circuit boards. People could buy the board, solder their own chips, and have a working computer in days instead of weeks, make them for $20, sell them for $40. Wozniak hesitated. They'd need $1,000 just to get the boards printed. They'd have to sell at least $50 to break even. Were there even 50 people who'd want one? They were sitting in Steve Jobs' car when he said the words that changed everything. Well, even if we lose our money, we'll have a company. For once in our lives, we'll have a company. That convinced me, Woz wrote, to be two best friends starting a company. Wow, I knew right then that I'd do it. How could I not? The revolution had started in a garage with 30 engineers and had to move through Wozniak's mind in one night. ([Time 0:22:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/391b6fbf-2568-4c2e-bba8-51a87121f6ef)) - **Be Transparent With Employer Inventions** - Tell your employer about inventions made during employment if they legally belong to the company. - Be ethical and transparent even if the company later declines ownership or support. Transcript: Shane Parrish Everything he designed while working at HP technically belonged to HP. I believed it was my duty to tell HP about what I had designed while working for them, he said. That was the right thing, the ethical thing. Plus, I really loved that company what followed was a comedy of corporate blindness that would cost hubert packard trillions wasnyak went to his boss and explained that he designed An inexpensive desktop computer a meeting was arranged with executives in the conference room wasnyak showed them the apple One. The response was corporate and immediate. What if it doesn't work on every TV? How could HP ensure the quality if they couldn't control which TV customers owned? Besides, the division didn't have the budget for new projects. They turned it down. New ideas are so fragile, they need to be nurtured and not torn apart like this. I was disappointed, Wozniak said. But now I was free to enter the Apple partnership. A few weeks later, Wozniak showed the finished circuit board to other HP engineers. Then his phone rang. It was Jobs. Are you sitting down? No. Well, guess what? I've got a $50,000 order. Paul Terrell from ByteShop wanted 100 computers fully built for $500 each. I was shocked. $50,000 was more than twice my annual salary. With that kind of money on the table, Wozniak decided to give HP one more chance. Their legal department contacted every division in the company. It took two weeks. Still no interest. They even sent Wozniak a formal letter releasing all claims to his design. ([Time 0:24:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/65f90e9e-f11d-48de-827f-18af311477ae)) - **Byte Shop Order Kickstarted Apple** - A Byte Shop order for 100 fully built Apple I computers for $50,000 launched Jobs and Wozniak into production. - They raised funds by selling personal items and assembling boards in Jobs' parents' garage. Transcript: Shane Parrish I've got a $50,000 order. Paul Terrell from ByteShop wanted 100 computers fully built for $500 each. I was shocked. $50,000 was more than twice my annual salary. With that kind of money on the table, Wozniak decided to give HP one more chance. Their legal department contacted every division in the company. It took two weeks. Still no interest. They even sent Wozniak a formal letter releasing all claims to his design. I see now that HP would have done it wrong anyway, Wozniak reflected later. When they finally built a personal computer in 1979, it went nowhere. The ByteShop order changed everything. Jobs negotiated cash on delivery. They borrowed money from Alan's father for parts. In January 1976, they set up shop in Steve Jobs' parents' garage, hiring friends to plug in chips into sockets for a dollar a board. Wozniak tested each one. If it worked, they boxed it. If not, he'd find the problem, fix it, then box it. Jobs would drive the batches and collect cash. ([Time 0:25:12](https://share.snipd.com/snip/eb28b9e1-42a4-4568-bf10-afe0d48be6c2)) - **Expandability Created A Virtuous Ecosystem** - Wozniak insisted on eight expansion slots, enabling user creativity and an ecosystem of third-party hardware and software. - That open architecture became a marketing engine Apple never paid for directly. Transcript: Shane Parrish It came down to a simple question. How many expansion slots should the Apple II have? Steve Jobs wanted two, one for a printer and one for a modem. That's it. Clean, simple, controlled. He'd grown up watching his adoptive father build things with pride, finish products, completed and perfect. You don't leave the hood of a beautiful car open. Wozniak wanted eight slots. He'd been going to homebrew meetings, watching engineers share ideas and push boundaries. He understood something fundamental. The true power of the computer wasn't what it could do out of the box, but what it might become in the hands of creative users. Jobs was optimizing for elegance for the mythical average user who would walk into a store and just fall in love with this beautiful beige box. Hand was optimizing for people who were just like him, the homebrew crowd, the engineers who would buy the first thousand units and become evangelists who would tinker. Jobs wanted to control the experience. Wozniak wanted to unleash it. The argument got heated, really heated. Finally, Wozniak delivered an ultimatum that could have ended Apple before it started. Get yourself another computer if you won't agree to more expansion slots. Years later, Wozniak admitted it might have been a bluff, but at the moment it was real. Without expandability, without the ability for users to define their product for themselves, Wozniak wasn't interested. Jobs blinked. They settled on eight slots, seven general purpose slots and one special slot for memory cards. It was supposedly a compromise, but really it was Wozniak's victory. ([Time 0:31:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/224c3f0d-c159-4b3a-9dbf-b8a6d465e68c)) - **Two-Week Floppy Drive Breakthrough** - Wozniak designed a floppy controller in two weeks by offloading work to the CPU and using far fewer chips. - The low-cost disk drive made floppy storage affordable and unlocked powerful software like VisiCalc. Transcript: Shane Parrish It was simple and it was dramatically cheaper. But here's the really clever part, the part that showed why Wozniak is in a class by himself when it comes to engineering. He realized he could offload the controller's functions to the Apple 2's main processor. Other drives used dedicated hardware chips, but Wozniak had the CPU do these tasks in software instead. He knew it was unconventional. Most engineers would tell you to use hardware for hardware tasks and keep the CPU free. But Wozniak realized the CPU wasn't doing anything else at that time, so why not put it to work? Why pay for expensive controller chips when you have an idle processor sitting right there? The result was a disk drive that was incredibly efficient and cost-effective. It made floppy storage affordable for personal computers for the first time ever, and it depended entirely on the expansion slots Wozniak had fought so hard to include. The DIS2 that Woz designed in two weeks changed everything, but not in the way anyone expected. ([Time 0:36:04](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d529b8cb-249e-4213-8ae4-9412b267af33)) - **Killer App Transformed The Market** - VisiCalc became the first killer app and transformed Apple II into a business machine accidentally. - Software, not marketing, drove Apple II's explosion into corporate use. Transcript: Shane Parrish Because in Boston, Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin had been working on something called VisiCalc, short for Visible Calculator. The world's first electronic spreadsheet. Excel's ancient ancestor. It was crude, revolutionary, and was about to change everything. Before VisiCalc, if you wanted to run financial projections, you had a ledger book and a calculator, and you'd spend hours, maybe days, recalculating everything by hand every time You changed one assumption. When your sales manager called with new numbers, you'd have to start all over again. VisiCalc changed everything. It was Excel before Excel. You could change one cell and watch all the numbers ripple through instantly. For the first time, a middle manager could sit at their desk and ask, what if, repeatedly, without calling accounting. But here's what Apple didn't realize until later. VisiCalc could only run on the Apple 2. And this wasn't because of some brilliant strategy. It was completely accidental. The Apple II just happened to be the only computer with everything VisiCalc needed. Enough RAM to hold the spreadsheet, a proper keyboard, Wozniak's floppy disk could load it quickly, and a high-resolution display to see the columns clearly. All the other computers couldn't run it. They were stuck with 4k of memory and no disk drives by the time they caught up apple had already captured a lot of the business market visi calc became the first killer app software so Compelling it sold the hardware before visi calc when a manager asked why do i need a two thousand dollar computer there was no good answer but visi calc gave them one it will save you 40 Hours a month on financial planning. Productivity would be unleashed. Apple went from selling a thousand units a month to selling 10,000. Overnight, business people became 90% of their market. Apple didn't chase the business market. The business market came to them because the spreadsheets program revealed something nobody knew existed. Every middle manager's desire to become their own financial analyst. Apple thought they were selling to hobbyists. ([Time 0:37:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13dab4b8-f886-4016-904e-3654b59448e4)) - **Waz Plan: Shares For Overlooked Engineers** - On Apple's 1980 IPO Wozniak sold shares at a discount to 40 overlooked colleagues in the "Waz plan." - He prioritized fairness to engineers over maximizing his own financial gain. Transcript: Shane Parrish On December 12, 1980, Steve Wozniak became one of the richest people in America. That morning, Apple went public. The company that four years earlier had been two guys in a garage was now worth almost $2 billion. It was the most successful IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956. The IPO created an estimated 300 millionaires. Steve Jobs' stake was worth $217 million. Mike Marcula saw his $250,000 investment turn into tens of millions. The parking lot at Apple headquarters changed overnight. Hondas and Toyotas were joined by Porsches and Mercedes. The company built on the joy of making something new suddenly had shareholders, quarterly earnings reports, Wall Street analysts. The freewheeling culture that had produced the Apple II was now subject to the relentless demands of public market. But something else happened that December morning, something that revealed the fundamental difference between Steve Wozniak and almost everyone else in Silicon Valley. Wozniak looked around at his colleagues, the engineers who'd helped him debug code at midnight. Many of them, the ones who joined just a bit later, weren't celebrating. They hadn't gotten stock options. Steve Jobs and the board had decided they didn't qualify. This bothered Woz a lot. So he did something corporate executives still struggle to explain. He took his own shares and sold them at a deeply discounted price to 40 colleagues who'd been left out after the IPO. He was giving away shares to people he felt deserved them. He called it the Waz plan. For many, it was life-changing. And then buying their first house, achieving financial security, the company had denied them. One recipient was Dan Cottle, Steve Jobs' oldest friend, who'd been there from the beginning, but whom Jobs had refused to give stock to. Years later, someone asked Wozniak why he did it. His answer was simple. It was the right thing to do. ([Time 0:39:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c995d001-c1fa-40ed-8f6b-9400c081f420)) - **Design-First Hurt Engineering Integrity** - Apple's failure with the Apple III came from prioritizing design aesthetics over engineering realities. - The company drifted from engineer-driven products to marketing-led decisions, costing billions. Transcript: Shane Parrish Launched seven months before the IPO, it was supposed to be Apple's future, the serious business computer that would make the Apple II look like a toy. Management was so confident, they canceled all Apple II development, betting everything on the new machine. But the Apple III was overheating, badly. Steve Jobs had mandated no cooling fans and no visible air vents. They were noisy and inelegant. To dissipate heat, they added a heavy aluminum case, but it couldn't keep up. Integrated circuits would physically expand and pop out of their sockets. Screens displayed garbage. Systems crashed constantly. Sometimes floppy disks came out of the drive visibly melted. Apple's official technical support advice became legendary. When customers called about system failures, technicians would tell them to lift the front of the computer three to six inches off their desk and drop it. The physical shock might reset the loose chips. The official fix for the computer worth thousands of dollars was to drop it on your desk. To Wozniak, the cause was simple. The Apple III had been designed by the marketing department and not by the engineers. Jobs had pushed his aesthetic vision without regard for technical feasibility, something he would do over and over again, and often it worked out. The case was finalized before the motherboard, forcing engineers to cram immature technology into a space that was too small. This was the complete opposite of the Apple II. The Apple II started with brilliant engineering and built the product around what worked. The Apple III started with how it should look and forced the engineering to comply. This is a tension that still exists today. What made it painful for Wallace was that his Apple II was thriving. While the Apple III failed, the Apple II was becoming the best-selling computer in the world. And it wasn't because of Apple's marketing. It was because of the ecosystem that had grown around those eight expansion slots Wozniak had fought so hard to include. Third-party companies kept building expansion cards. Software developers kept writing programs. Tech magazines were full of Apple II advertisements, none from Apple itself. The open architecture created a virtuous circle that reinforced itself. By 1983, the Apple II would become the first computer to sell a million units. Meanwhile, Apple forced everyone in the company to have an Apple III on their desk. When Wozniak traveled the country giving speeches to computer groups, he saw the same thing everywhere. 90 people with Apple IIs, three people with Apple IIIs. The company was pretending to be an Apple III company when it was actually an Apple II company. Almost every ad Apple ran showed the Apple III. They never showed the machine that was actually paying everyone salaries. In today's money, they'd lost at least a billion dollars on the Apple III, all of it subsidized by the Apple II's success. ([Time 0:41:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/77b1e2a0-e3ff-4d74-a5d8-ebac6e1674c4)) - **Open Architecture Scaled To Enterprises** - IBM emulated open architecture and won corporate trust, showing openness scales beyond hobbyists. - Apple's closed-system response failed to match the ecosystem power IBM created. Transcript: Shane Parrish The culture that had built Apple was shattered. Public companies answered to shareholders and not to engineers who built the products. For Wozniak, this was the final confirmation the company he co-founded had become something he no longer recognized. In 1981, IBM entered the personal computer market. Apple ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal that said, welcome, IBM, seriously. It was meant to be cocky, but it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding about what was about to happen. The IBM PC wasn't technically revolutionary. It used commodity parts and a processor less capable than Apple's, but IBM brought something that Apple couldn't match. Credibility in corporate America, their legendary sales force, their support network, their brand. And IBM made a critical decision. They designed the PC with an open architecture. They published complete technical specifications and encouraged third-party developers to build for it. They did exactly what Wozniak had wanted Apple to do. The ecosystem that had made the Apple II so successful, the one that came from those eight expansion slots Wozniak fought for, IBM replicated it on purpose. Within a year, the IBM PC became the safe choice for corporate America. Within two years, it dominated the business market. The Apple 3 never stood a chance. The irony was brutal. ([Time 0:44:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cb290345-aedc-45d0-ae9b-581efbfed2aa)) - **Choose Happiness Over Status** - Prioritize personal happiness over sheer wealth when roles conflict with your values and passions. - Choose work that lets you stay close to what you love, even if it means leaving power or money behind. Transcript: Shane Parrish Museums and robotics competitions he became exactly what he always wanted to be, an engineer who happened to have money, not a businessman who happened to know engineering. When people ask him about walking away from billions, he always gives the same answer. Happiness equals smiles minus frowns. It's a formula he developed as a kid and never abandoned. As for Apple, the Macintosh that Wozniak couldn't support eventually saved the company. But not before Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985. Not before Apple nearly went bankrupt. Not before Jobs returned in 1997 and transformed Apple into the most valuable company on earth. Jobs' vision of the sealed, elegant appliance, the vision Wozniak fought against in 1976, eventually won. The iPhone, the iPad, the modern Mac are all beautiful closed systems that users admire but don't really modify much. But here's what's easy to miss. Job's closed system only worked because Wozniak's open system funded them. The Apple II kept the company alive for years. Its profits bankrolled everything that came after. Those eight expansion slots Wozniak fought for became the financial engine that allowed Jobs to eventually build his vision. ([Time 0:46:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/660c2e3d-6091-4c3c-8775-5e68334fbdbc))