“Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and designed the company’s first product, the Apple I, remembers the early days.,” Brandon Lisy reports for Businessweek.
Two snippets:
Lisy: Did you think Apple would become a behemoth?
Woz: When we started the company, I knew that the computer was so far ahead of anything the rest of the world had ever seen. We knew we had a revolution. Everyone who joined Apple, this was the greatest thing in their life.
Lisy: We always hear about the garage. Is that a big part of the story?
Woz: The garage is a bit of a myth. We did no designs there, no breadboarding, no prototyping, no planning of products. We did no manufacturing there. The garage didn’t serve much purpose, except it was something for us to feel was our home. We had no money. You have to work out of your home when you have no money.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: They did do testing and boxing in the garage. From iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (2006), which we highly recommend (it’s better than Steve Jobs official biography):
After the boards were finished, we rounded up Steve’s friend Dan Kottke and Steve’s sister, Patty to plug chips into sockets for $1 a board. Steve would bring us maybe 10 or twenty assembled boards at a time from the manufacturer. And there we would sit on a lab bench in the garage of Steve parent’s house at 11161 Crist Avenue. Then I would plus each assembled board into the TV and keyboard we had there and test it to see if it worked.
If it did, I put it in a box. If it didn’t, I’d figure what pin hadn’t gotten into the socket right or what circuit was shorted. I’d fix the bad ones and put them in the box. After a dozen or two were in the box, Steve would drive them down to Paul Terrell’s store [Byte Shop in Mountainview, California] and get paid in cash. – Steve Wozniak, I, Woz, 2006