They were
two guys named Steve, so Steve Jobs was called Steve and Steve Wozniak
went by Woz. At 25, Wozniak was the technical brains. Jobs, 21, was the
dreamer with a knack for getting others to dream along with him. They
had gone to the same high school, and in the hazy years after graduation
—both were college dropouts—a shared interest in electronics
brought them together. Jobs didn't yet have his own place, so when their
formal partnership began, the decision was made in a bedroom at his
parents' ranch house in Los Altos, Calif.
Most computers in 1976 were
room-size machines with Defense Departmentsize price tags, but Wozniak
had been tinkering with a new design, and his computer was different. It
wasn't much to look at—just a bunch of chips screwed to a piece of
plywood—but it was small, cheap and easy to use, and Jobs had
noticed the stir it caused when they took it to a local computer club.
"He said, 'We'll make it for 20 bucks, sell it for 40 bucks!'" Wozniak
remembers. "I kind of didn't think we'd do it." Jobs came up with the
name, inspired by an orchard in Oregon where he had worked with some
friends: Apple Computer. "When we started the little partnership, it was
just like, Oh, this will be fun," Wozniak says. "We won't make any
money, but it'll be fun."
They didn't go out and celebrate that day.
Woz wouldn't even quit his day job designing chips for calculators at
Hewlett-Packard until months later, after Jobs had sold his Volkswagen
bus for seed money. Nobody, not even Jobs, saw what was coming next:
that Apple would create the look and feel of every desktop in the world
and start our love affair with the personal computer.
TIME Cover
Collection: Click
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