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Phoenix666 writes:

The Woz speaketh. Gather 'round, Children, and hearken unto him:

More than 40 years after founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak has a lot to say about the early days of the world's richest company, and about technology, learning and being a born engineer.

On stage at the IEEE TechIgnite conference in Burlingame, California, on Wednesday, he gave a glimpse into how a tech legend thinks.

On open source

In the early 1970s, Wozniak read about phone phreaking, in which "phreakers" made free phone calls by using electronics to mimic the tones used for dialing each number. To learn how to do it, he went to the only place he knew that had books and magazines about computers: The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He went on a Sunday and walked right in. "The smartest people in the world don't lock doors," Wozniak said.

A similar philosophy led him to give away his design for what later became the Apple 1. After drawing up plans that would let people build their own computers for $300, he handed them out at the Homebrew Computer Club, an early gathering place for tinkerers who helped launched the PC revolution. He didn't even include copyright notices.

"My motivation wasn't to start a company, wasn't to make money, it was actually just to show off my engineering excellence," he said. It was a non-engineer friend, Steve Jobs, who persuaded him to monetize both phreaking and the personal computer.

Read on for further thoughts on resourcefulness, on myths and movies, on robotics, on education, and on his dream job.

Original Submission