Steve Jobs ‘played no role at all’ in designing the Apple I or Apple II computers: Apple co-founder Wozniak
There are two new movies in the pipeline that are about to hit the theaters soon that portrays the life of Steve Jobs. However, you would be surprised when the Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak claimed that Steve Jobs had no role to play in the designing of the first commercially successful Apple computers.
Steve Wozniak had confirmed this news during an interview in late August with a 14-year old entrepreneur, Sarina Khemchandani, the founder of ReachAStudent, a website that helps students interact with potential mentors.
As a recap, the Ashton Kutcher “Jobs” movie portrayed Jobs’ involvement in the design and development of Apple’s first products, which had managed to attract some controversies.
During the interview, Ms Khemchandani asked Mr Wozniak what role Steve Jobs played during the creation of the original Apple I and Apple II computers. She was replied with a short answer by Woz as ‘None’.
Woz told Ms Khemchandani that since he was in school, he had been designing computers and coming up with inventive ways to create computers with fewer and fewer parts. The first Apple computers, including the Apple II, were designed by Woz before he ever met Jobs, he said:
Steve Jobs played no role at all in any of my designs of the Apple I and Apple II computer and printer interfaces and serial interfaces and floppy disks and stuff that I made to enhance the computers. He did not know technology. He’d never designed anything as a hardware engineer, and he didn’t know software. He wanted to be important, and the important people are always the business people. So that’s what he wanted to do.
I wanted to be the engineer, in a laboratory, like a mad scientist. So that was my thing.
The Apple II computer, by the way, was the only successful product Apple had for its first 10 years, and it was all done, for my own reasons for myself, before Steve Jobs even knew it existed.
Originally, the Apple I was sold for US$666.66. However, as this is rarely available today, it’s auction prices have been as high as US$668,000, which is more than one thousand times its original sales price.
The modest success of the Apple I led to the Apple II computer, an extremely popular desktop computer, which in turn led to enormous success for the company.
“I had already created it, and it was just waiting for a company, and Steve Jobs was my good friend, the businessman.”
For his part, Steve Jobs played an important part in marketing and selling the complete Apple II computer systems.
By the end of 1980, over 100,000 Apple II computers were sold which led to enormous success for the duo, as well as global recognition of the Apple brand.
Almost 17 years after first going on sale, with an estimated six million machines sold during that time, the Apple II line of computers finally came to an end in 1993.
Watch the video below where Wozniak talks about this and the famous story of how he and Jobs met.
