In Good Company - The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak)

Steve Jobs is one of the most famous people in the IT world (for those of you who don't know IT stands for Information Technology, aka computer geeks). He is head geek for the cult that is Apple. Steve Jobs (aka God to Apple fanboys) and Steve Wozniak (aka the Woz) founded Apple Computers using some spare parts and an "office" in the garage of the Woz's parents home. Home computers did not exist, Bill Gates was playing with BASIC and hadn't yet concieved MSDOS which would hurl his little company Micro-Soft (yes MicroSoft used to have a dash in the name, and Apple Inc. used to be Apple Computers Inc.) into stardom.

Apple Computers is the father of home computers, and MicroSoft is the mother. The two go hand in hand, dispite what those clever little Apple comercials tell you. Without Apple Micro-Soft would have never gotten off the ground, and without Micro-Soft home computers would have remained the nieche computer of choice of ubergeeks and ignored by most average people. Micro-Soft and Apple have a long history of sharing, co-operation, and piracy. If you want to learn more about that I recommend the historical fiction movie about the love-hate relationship between Jobs and Gates, the movie is The Pirates of Silicon Valley, while it is fictionalized and sensationalized it sticks basically to the truth and paints an interesting picture.

Steve Jobs has floated in and out of control at Apple continually being the villian of its struggles and the saviour of its successes. Under his leadership such things as the iMac and the iPod and the iPhone were all born, as was Steve Jobs apparent obsession with the letter "i". Steve Jobs wasn't always the happy iCEO driving his iCar to his iOffice to meet with the iBOD (BOD=Board of Directors) about his latest i-dea, in college his was quite the little shit disturber.

When Jobs was still in highschool Woz called him up with an article about "Blue Boxes", we're not talking recycling here folks, these little divices allowed you to phreak a phone, in other words make free calls. They had quite a little business selling some of the best blue boxes around $40 in parts an hour of Woz's time building them and presto $150 device to the masses. The business died quickly though, not because the law caught up with them there was nothing the law could do, but rather the phone company got wise and changed the switching methods making blue boxes obsolete.

The Woz flunked out of college and Jobs went to college in Oregon. He discovered the hippy lifestyle, drugs like LSD and marijuana flowed freely, as did sex and lots of other fun stuff. He worked for Hewlett-Packard (possibly) and Atari. While at Atari The Woz helped him design the game Breakout and while Jobs promised to share the bonus he got from Atari for the game Jobs gave Woz only $700 of the $7000 paycheck he recieved for the game.

At this point the Woz is working for Hewlett-Packard and home computers kits can be bought for geeks to assemble. They are simple and really don't do much by todays standard. No software at all, not even an opperating system. The Woz couldn't afford the Altair kit at the time, but he was an electronics genious, why should he settle for an off the shelf kit when he had the know how to produce his own processor. So he did.

Legend says that the Steve Jobs went to Hewlett-Packard with the Woz's design for home computer and showed it to them hoping they would buy the idea from him. They shot him down, according to legend with the following quote "Hey, we don't need you. You haven't gone through college yet." Supposedly Atari also turned down the idea of buying the design from Jobs and Woz, but this has been up for debate since both Atari and HP have denied the claims that were mainly put forward by Jobs alone. Since they could not sell the idea they decided to try to sell the product, they sold anything they could to raise money and began going to electronics stores to try to convince them to carry the Apple computer kit. The idea was not going well, but several store owners allegedly said that if they made actuall assembled computers instead of just logic boards and kits then they would carry them. The first Apple computers were a joke, basically assembled computers without monitor keyboard Operating System or anything resembling software, and the casing was a wooden box built by a cabinet maker.



The Woz was determined to do better so Jobs and Woz got to work on the Apple II. The Apple II was the worlds first fully assembled Personal Computer (yes that's right Mac's are PC's) they included a version of BASIC programming language and you could actually get this computer to do things. Apple exploded into the world market place. Apple is unconventional and Jobs is known to be irrational, the original Apple logo is a testament to that, the rainbow Apple logo is reputed to be the most expensive logo to print ever. Jobs demanded that the rainbow be included in the logo, despite the fact that this made it many times more expensive than it ought to be, not a traditionally good business stratagy, yet it worked, the rainbow apple is instantly recognizable as the logo for ubergeeks and artists prime coince in computers, the Apple Macintosh.



These two stoners, good for nothing hippies managed to take Apple to amaizing hights. Marijuana didn't slow them down, make them less ambitious. Stoners of the world are in good company with the two Steves.