We’ve all heard the story about how the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs,
started a computer giant in the mid 1970. The two upstarts had a lot of
moxie, but not a lot of money. The story goes that Jobs and “The Woz,”
as he has been affectionately nicknamed, toiled away on designing and
building the Apple I in the former’s garage.
It turns out that none of it was true. At least, the part about building computers in the garage wasn’t. Wozniak told Bloomberg that the iconic garage was nothing more than a fable.
“The garage is a bit of a myth, it’s overblown,” said Wozniak. “The
garage represents us better than anything else, but we did no designs
there.”
When you think of the early days of Apple, you think of a couple of
guys drinking beer in a garage while laying out chipboards and soldering
wires. When you think of a tech startup today, those same images come
to mind because we’ve believed for so long in the garage myth.
Wozniak noted that the early team would drive the computers to the
garage to get them working, and then took them directly to retailers to
sell. There was no work being done on prototypes or product planning.
They didn’t do any manufacturing there. He said the garage was something
for the team to feel like home in.
“It wasn’t like there was a whole company and you’d walk in to see a
bunch of people at desks,” he said. “There were hardly ever more than
two people in the garage and mostly they were just sitting around doing
nothing productive.”
As The Woz puts it, the garage is more of an idea that represents
Apple’s beginnings. Even if much of the work took place elsewhere, we
will always imagine a couple of guys drinking beers and building
computers while listening to Fleetwood Mac.
*** [9/2/15]
Woz interview: Steve Jobs played no role in the design of the Apple I and Apple II computers
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