Wozniak: I didn't reduce chip count for manufacturing. I wanted to prove I was clever

Plus: Beware of a hotspot called 'spanky'

Computing pioneer Steve Wozniak didn't set out to revolutionize the computer industry. He just wanted the respect of his fellow engineers.

Steve Wozniak at the Civo Navigate US event – click to enlarge. Pic: Civo

During a Q&A session at Civo's Navigate event in San Francisco this month, Wozniak explained how the creative streak that had led him to strive for efficiency in circuit board design came about: "Trying to make things with fewer chips wasn't for manufacturing.

A few main [tech] companies ... control everything, even if they don't invent it and create it themselves anymore … and that bugs me

"It was just trying to prove I'm clever.

"I didn't want to start an industry or a company as much as I wanted engineers to look at my designs, which we published with those early computers, and say, 'Woah… what a brilliant engineer.' I wanted respect from engineers."

Steve Wozniak's career stretches back to the 1970s, when he built his first computer, designed calculators for HP, and met Steve Jobs. The duo would go on to found the Apple Computer Company, and Wozniak's Apple I would be the upstart's first microcomputer, swiftly followed by the best-selling Apple II.

Time has, however, moved on, and the world that spawned the Apple I doesn't exist anymore. "Everything in technology grows hugely, but now it's consolidated to basically a few main companies that control everything, even if they don't invent it and create it themselves anymore … and that bugs me.

"It's a little more difficult than it was when I was around."

Today, Wozniak is more interested in increasing bandwidth and developing photonics – a way of using light to improve the performance of chips and communications – though still recalls the early days of the World Wide Web.

"I got in so early," he laughed, "I got woz.com and woz.org. I ran servers for well-known musicians, for companies, for people out of my own home on Macintoshes, and they never crashed when every other Macintosh was crashing several times a day."

Why? "The reason they didn't crash was that they were not running Internet Explorer."

Although Wozniak might be thinking about photonics and advances in generative artificial intelligence – "all this machine learning stuff and AI, it's actually going to help make us … better as humans" – the spirit of Woz the prankster remains.

During his keynote, he talked about creating a device to interfere with televisions surreptitiously and pranking the unwary. "Everything you do in life should have an element of fun," he said, later explaining how he'd recently started to use a Raspberry Pi Zero to make mischief with aircraft passengers hunting for Wi-Fi.

"I'll tune in the Raspberry Pi to the airplane's network … and then I'll have a little five-dollar Raspberry Pi Zero, I'll have it put on a second Wi-Fi of its own and name the network 'spanky' with no password. Everyone on the plane can log in… eleven people connected. So I started using it as a honeypot.

"I'm always into doing this for more fun than starting companies."

We asked Raspberry Pi supremo Eben Upton what he made of Wozniak's Pi usage. Upton said it was "really gratifying that Woz himself finds our products useful."

Upton agreed that things had become more difficult since Wozniak's early adventures with computers: "Founding Apple would be much harder today than it was in the 1970s: You can't just walk down to an electronics shop and buy state-of-the-art silicon (6502 then, 64-bit multi-core Arm application processors now) at a reasonably competitive price and put together today's equivalent of an Apple I."

"It's a serious problem if you believe that bottom-up innovation is where the next world-changing technology will come from," said the Pi supremo.

The world has changed in the half-century since Wozniak worked on those early designs. However, it is gratifying to see that one of the founders of Apple remains curious and not lost his sense of fun over the years. ®

Editor's note: The headline on this article was changed to correctly quote Steve Wozniak. It previously erroneously quoted Eben Upton. Our apologies for any confusion.