Failure™ Magazine

Steve Wozniak

The Failure Interview.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under History, Science & Technology

Tandy?
No closeness to Tandy. After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80. Tandy, like Commodore with their Pet, was non-expandable. You would buy it with 4k of memory and you’d have 4k of memory for life. Early on we came out with our floppy disk drive. How do you add a floppy disk drive to a Tandy? It turns out there was no designed way built in. So the Tandy machines and the Commodore machines, because of their lack of expandability, lost out in the early exciting things, which were floppy disks and VisiCalc. They had to go back to the drawing board. They tried to make their products go for a while longer, which was another mistake. They would have been smarter to get to the drawing board sooner. That’s really where Apple won out.

What’s your primary computer nowadays?
For a decade it’s been a PowerBook because I like to be free and flexible and have it all with me in my hands. A certain size computer—go right back to the Apple II—is just the size I want.

What do you see happening over the next couple of years with computers?
Well, you can always say that the speeds and the hard disk capacity are going to go up. Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies. Speed, it’s hard to say where we need more at the moment. I’ve always noticed it in the past and now for the first time in my life I’m just not pressed to be seeking speed.

I think computers are obviously getting thinner and smaller. The screens on laptops have gotten larger and larger. The display size is approaching the size of a briefcase. It would be nice to design a real briefcase—you open it up and it’s your computer but it also stores your books.

Obviously, prices of displays are still dropping. Maybe they will replace televisions. Other than that I don’t know. The world is going a lot more wireless. But I don’t react to it as strongly as most people do because 7 years ago I taught a class that was wireless. Everybody came in the door, plugged in a little transmitter, and it sat right next to their PowerBooks.

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