A collection of quotes and thoughts by Steve Wozniak on computers, inventions, agnostic, apple, technology, google, internet, communication, invasion and privacy.
108 Top Steve Wozniak Quotes That Are Sure To Inspire You
Quick Facts
Famous As:
Co-founder of Apple Computer (Apple Inc.)
Steve Wozniak, along with Steve Jobs, was the man behind the personal computer revolution during the 70s and 80s. This American technology entrepreneur, inventor, programmer and electronics engineer co-founded the monumental multinational technology giant ‘Apple Inc’. He was instrumental in the development of Apple I and Apple II computers. The credit for various Apple patents such as Microcomputer for use with video display, Apparatus for digitally controlling PAL color display and Controller for magnetic disc, recorder, or the like goes to Wozniak. Wozniak has received several honorary degrees from various prestigious institutes such as ‘University of Colorado’, ‘North Carolina State University’ and ‘Michigan State University’. Apart from bagging the ‘Isaac Asimov Science Award’ from the American Humanist Association, he was the recipient of prestigious awards such as ‘ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award’ and ‘National Medal of Technology’. He was also inducted into the ‘Manufacturing Hall of Fame’ by the Industry Week. Many renowned artists played the role of Wozniak in numerous feature films, movies and television series. The most popular of them being ‘Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine’, ‘Pirates of Silicon Valley’ and ‘The Secret History of Hacking’. Here’s a compilation of his enlightening quotes and thoughts that give us a glimpse of his mind. Take a look at the popular sayings and quotations by Steve Wozniak.
I learned not to worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.
There are good things I see on Samsung phones that I wish were in my iPhone. I wish Apple would use them and could use them, and I don't know if Samsung would stop us.
Our first computers were born not out of greed or ego, but in the revolutionary spirit of helping common people rise above the most powerful institutions.
I hope you're as lucky as I am. The world needs inventors--great ones. You can be one. If you love what you do and are willing to do what it really takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build. It'll be worth it, I promise.
Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me. They're shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone...
I don't believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee... I'm going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.
I never got into Linux. I swear to God, it's only lack of time. I'm past the years of my life where I can really dig into something like running a Linux system. I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea; Linux people always think the way I want to think.
It's can you, Steve Wozniak, design the same computer - maybe it's a Varian 620i - can you design it on paper with fewer chips than last month? Can you design it with 79 chips instead of 80 chips?I had played this game so long that I had all these little tricks in my head that I can't even explain. Nothing was wasted; absolutely zero waste. I told this story recently to the Resource Recovery Association, recycling, and they loved to hear I didn't believe in waste.
My dream was actually just to have a computer some day. If I'd imagined that it meant starting a company to sell them, I probably would have avoided the whole thing.
Pretty much I want to be Steve Wozniak, who I decided I was at a young age and not change. I want to go back to school and get my college degree like I would have without Apple.I want to teach young kids like I would have without Apple. And part of it is I'm accessible. I'm open. And so many people e-mail me and get me. And as much as I can I try to answer people, listen to them, be polite and say yes.
I want to get back to education. When I was in college I paid attention to child psychology portions of our psychology classes. I watch other people work with babies. And I saw the baby as developing like a computer and it intrigued me in my life. I wanted to do that.
I had designed -in high school designed hundreds and hundreds of computers over and over and over, so I developed these skills without ever thinking I'd do it in life as job.
I really, really wanted to be successful in my life just based on me and my mind alone…I didn’t ever want it to be an equation that amounted to a result coming from my brain plus something else.
It's funny how when you're up so late at night for so long your mind can get into these creative places, the kind of creative places that come to you when you're halfway between asleep and awake.
My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.
Steve Wozniak
A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought…alone.
Steve Wozniak
I am the person I want to be. I got to teach and had some of the greatest times in my life learning that I had some teaching skills and doing some incredible things teaching 200 hours of computers a year to fifth graders, making them experts at certain things.
Rockets are bad technology. iPhones are good technology
Steve Wozniak
Somebody who's designing something for himself has at least got a market of one that he's very close to.
Steve Wozniak
What Steve Jobs and I did-and at the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen did-we had no savings accounts, no friends that could loan us money. But we had ideas, and I wanted all my life to be a part of a revolution.
And Communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them.
Steve Wozniak
The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I'm going to San Antonio, for example, I'll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it.
Being an electronic genius was a reputation I had, maybe being even into math and science almost exclusively and not wanting to be in the other normal parts of the world.
Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.
Steve Wozniak
When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they'd use their computer.
Steve Wozniak
Steve Jobs had very strong feelings about what makes a company great, what makes products great. He more or less chose Tim Cook to be in that role, in that position.
Steve Wozniak
My first transistor radio was the heart of my gadget love today. It fit in my hand and brought me a world of music 24 / 7.
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.
Steve Wozniak
Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.
Steve Wozniak
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything we did we were setting the tone for the world.
Steve Wozniak
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.
Your first projects aren't the greatest things in the world, and they may have no money value, they may go nowhere, but that is how you learn - you put so much effort into making something right if it is for yourself.
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.
Don't worry that you can't seem to come up with sure billion dollar winners at first. Just do projects for yourself for fun. You'll get better and better.
Well, even if we lose our money, we’ll have a company. For once in our lives, we’ll have a company.
Steve Wozniak
I want to be able to speak with errors in my wording, errors in my grammar. When you type things into Google search, it corrects your words. With speech, I want it to be general enough, smart enough, to know 'No, he couldn't have meant these words that I think he said. He must have really meant something similar.'
I just believe that the way that young people's minds develop is fascinating. If you are doing something for a grade or salary or a reward, it doesn't have as much meaning as creating something for yourself and your own life.
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.
You can make something big when young that will carry you through life. Look at all the big startups like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. They were all started by very young people who stumbled on something of unseen value. You'll know it when you hit a home run.
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.
Steve Wozniak
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.
All of a sudden, we’ve lost a lot of control,’ he said. ‘We can’t turn off our internet; we can’t turn off our smartphones; we can’t turn off our computers. You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it’s not God…
I saw lots of music devices. I loved playing with music devices. And like most of the world, I thought of a music device as a music device. Steve Jobs tends to look beyond that, and he doesn't see a music device as having any importance at all,he sees music itself to a person as a being the important thing.
When you're designing and inventing the way I did, every minute of your life is put - every neuron in your brain into trying to think about the little code and how you can maybe have one less line of code and a little bit more straightforward from the beginning to the answer. And you don't have time to think about companies and products and how would I build this. So Steve Jobs and I were a very necessary pair.
. I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself. )
