This much I know for sure: I was meant to be an engineer who designs computers, an engineer who writes software, an engineer who tells jokes, and an engineer who teaches other people things.
Now, finally, there was a time in my life—a time right after that third year at Berkeley—that I finally got my dream job. But it wasn’t a job building computers. It was a job designing calculators at Hewlett-Packard. And I really thought I would spend the rest of my life there. That place was just the most perfect company.
This was January of 1973, and for an engineer like me, there was no better place to work in the world. Unlike a lot of technology companies, Hewlett-Packard wasn’t totally run by marketing people. It really respected its engineers. And that made sense, because this was a company that had made engineering tools for years—meters, oscilloscopes, power supplies, testers of all types, even medical equipment. It made all the things engineers actually used, and it was a company driven by engineers on the inside so far as what engineers on the outside needed. Man, I loved that.
For just a few months before that, right after I finished Berkeley in June, I worked at a much, much smaller company, called Electroglas. That was a blast, too. Getting that job was almost too easy. I’d looked in the newspaper ads, and the first ad I saw was for an electronics technician for $600 a month, or close to that. I called them up and they said, “Come on down for an interview.” Well, I went down and they gave me this incredibly easy written test—you know, with electronic formulas and all. Of course, I knew that stuff. I’d known it forever. They interviewed me and instantly hired me, so I had a job. And they paid me enough that I was actually able to get my first apartment. It was in Cupertino, just a mile from my parents’ house. And it was just the greatest, greatest thing.
But six months later I heard from my old friend Allen Baum, who by then was working as an intern at Hewlett-Packard. He was excited, telling me he was actually hanging around the guys who’d designed the HP 35 calculator. This, to me, was the most incredible invention of all time.
I’d been a slide rule whiz in high school, so when I saw the calculator, it was just amazing. A slide rule was kind of like a ruler—you had to look at it precisely to read the values. The most accurate number you could get was only three digits long, however, and even that result was always questionable. With a calculator, you could punch in precisely the digits you wanted. You didn’t have to line up a slider. You could type in your numbers exactly, hit a button, and get an answer immediately. You could get that number all the way out to ten digits. For example, the real answer might be 3.158723623. An answer like that was much more precise than anything engineers had ever gotten before.
Well, the HP 35 was the first scientific calculator, and it was the first in history that you could actually hold in your hand. It could calculate sines and cosines and tangents, all the trigonometric and exponential/logarithmic functions engineers use to calculate and to do their jobs. This was 1973, and back then calculators—especially handheld calculators—were a very, very big deal.
So Allen’s internship was working in the calculator group. He told me he’d told his managers all about me, that I was a great designer and had designed all these computers and things, and all of a sudden I found myself interviewing with a vice president of engineering, and the people under him, and the people under them. I guess they were impressed, because they made me an offer right away to come work there. They told me I could help design scientific calculators at HP. I thought, Oh my God.
I did love my job at Electroglas. I got to stand up all day, which I like, and help test and repair circuits. (A lot of their chips went bad because, instead of sockets, they used the soldered resistor-transistor logic [RTL] method of attaching chips.) I liked everyone I worked with and I’d made a lot of good friends. So when I told them about the job offer at HP, man, they did everything to keep me. They told me they’d make me a full engineer, they would up my salary over what HP had offered, and I felt bad because I really did love that company.
But even though Electroglas was what I considered to be a great job, it was nothing compared to what I considered to be the ideal job in the whole world: working on handheld scientific calculators at the only company in the world that could build a product like that. How could you beat that?
I was already a big fan of Hewlett-Packard. When I was at Berkeley, I’d even saved up to spend $400 (that’s about $2,000 in today’s money) on the HP 35.
There was no doubt in my mind that calculators were going to put slide rules out of business. (In fact, two years later you couldn’t even buy a slide rule. It was extinct.) And now all of a sudden I’d gotten a job helping to design the next generation of these scientific calculators. It was like getting to be a part of history.
This was the company for me because, like I said, I’d already decided that I wanted to be an engineer for life. It was especially neat because I got to work on a product that at the time was the highlight product of the world—the scientific calculator. To me, it was the luckiest job I could have.
As an example of how great a company HP was, consider this. During this time—the early 1970s—the recession was going on and everyone was losing their jobs. Even HP had to cut back 10 percent on its expenses. But instead of laying people off, HP wound up cutting everyone’s salary by 10 percent. That way, no one would be left without a job.
You know, my dad had always told me that your job is the most important thing you’ll ever have and the worst thing to lose.
I still think that way. My thinking is that a company is like a family, a community, where we all take care of each other. I never agreed with the normal thinking, where a company is more competition driven, and the poorest, youngest or most recently hired workers are always the first to go.
By the way, I was twenty-two when I got that job at Hewlett-Packard.
Once I got into HP, I met a lot of people there and became good friends with the engineers, the technicians, even some of the marketing people. I loved the environment. It was just very free. I still had long hair and a beard, and no one seemed to mind. At HP, you were respected for your abilities. It didn’t matter how you looked.
We had cubicles, I remember. For the first time, I sat in a cubicle and was free to walk around and talk to other people. During the day, you could throw out ideas about products and debate them. And HP made it easy to do that. Every day, at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., they wheeled in donuts and coffee. That was so nice. And smart, because the reason they did it was so everyone would gather in a common place and be able to talk, socialize, and exchange ideas.
More on HP
Stanford 1934 graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in their garage in 1939. Now, a lot of people confuse that story with Apple’s, saying that we started Apple in a garage. Not true. HP started in a garage, true. But in the case of Apple, I worked in my room at my apartment and Steve worked in his bedroom in his parents’ house. We only did the very last part of assembly in his garage.
But that’s how it goes with stories.
HP’s first product was a precision audio oscillator, called the Model 200A. It measured sound waves and cost under $50, which was a quarter of the price of other companies’ less reliable oscillators. And here’s a cool fact. One of HP’s earliest clients was Walt Disney Productions, which used eight Model 200B audio oscillators for testing the sound system for the movie Fantasia.
A few years before, during those long walks I took during high school, I’d decided that I was into truth and facts and solid calculations. I knew I never wanted to play social games. The Vietnam War only solidified that attitude. That’s why I was sure, even at twenty-two, that I didn’t want to switch from engineering to management, ever. I didn’t want to go into management and have to fight political battles and take sides and step on people’s toes and all that stuff.
I knew I could do that at HP—that is, have a long career without ever having to get into management. I knew this because I’d met a couple of engineers who were a lot older than me, and they had no desire to be in management either. So after I met them, I knew that was possible.
I worked at HP for quite a while—about four years. I didn’t have a college degree yet, but I promised my managers I would work toward one by taking night classes at San Jose State nearby.
I couldn’t imagine quitting my job and going back to school full-time, because what I was doing was too important.
At HP, I got into calculator circuits and how they were designed. I looked at the schematics of the engineers who had invented this calculator processor, and I was able to make modifications to those chips.
But the longer I worked there, the more I found myself drifting away from the computers of my past: computers and processors, registers, chips, gates, building all these things I used to be fascinated by. Everything was so good in my life; I just set my computer ambitions aside.
I’d even missed the fact that microprocessors—the brain of any modern computer today—were getting more and more powerful and more and more compact. I lost track of the chips that were coming up. I lost track of the fact that we were almost at the point where you could get all of a computer’s main brainpower—its central processing unit (or CPU)—onto just one small chip.
I stopped following computer developments so closely. And I didn’t really think of our calculators as computers, though of course they were. They did have a couple of chips inside that added up to a little microprocessor—a very strange one, I admit, but in those days you had to design things strangely and come up with weird techniques. Your chips could really do only one thing at a time. Back then, chips were simpler, you couldn’t fit more than a hundred or so transistors on a chip, compared to more than a billion today.
So everything was weirder then. And because I was so happy in my job, I didn’t know what I was missing.
What’s a CPU?
You hear the letters “CPU” thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? And what did its invention change in terms of today’s computer revolution?
CPU, short for central processing unit, is a term that’s usually used interchangeably with “microprocessor.” That is, provided the CPU is on one chip. When I first started building computers, like the Cream Soda Computer, there was no such thing as a CPU on a chip—that is, a microprocessor.
As it turned out, Intel came out with the first true microprocessor in the mid-1970s. It was called the 4004.
The whole purpose of the CPU, which really is the brains of a computer, is to seek and execute all the instructions someone stored in the computer as a program. Say you write a program that spell-checks a document. Well, the CPU is capable of finding that program (which is represented in the machine as the binary numbers 1 and 0) and communicating with the other components of the computer to make it run.
Sometimes a bunch of us engineers would take small planes and fly to lunch somewhere. A lot of us had our pilot’s licenses. For my first flight ever in a plane, I ended up in Myron Tuttle’s plane. Myron was a design engineer, like me, a guy who worked with me in my cubicle. That day he let me sit in the copilot’s seat, which I thought was so cool.
I remember there were two people in the back, other people in our group. So here we are, flying for lunch to Rio Vista, near Sacramento.
When Myron landed, we just bounced and bounced and bounced. I had never been in such a small plane before, so I just thought, Oh, this is interesting. So this is how a small plane is. Really bumpy when you land.
At lunch, the other pilots had this private conversation. (I found out later they were trying to decide whether they would let Myron fly us back!) Well, it turned out they decided, okay, it was just one flight, and the runway in San Jose was 10,000 to 12,000 feet long. They thought maybe Myron would be able to do a better job on the return flight.
So we flew back after lunch—and there it was again, another one of those really, really bouncy landings. Again I just thought that’s how you land in small planes. There was a first bounce, then a second bounce that was pretty hard, then a scraping sound, and then it bounced, bounced, bounced, and bounced again for what seemed like the millionth time down the runway.
I must’ve been white as a sheet, I think everyone was. And not one of us could say a word. We taxied around the runway for a few minutes, and still the three of us didn’t say a word to Myron. Not one word.
That silence was uncomfortable. Finally I felt like I had to say something, just anything technical, because he’s an engineer and all. So after we got out of the plane, I said to Myron, “Hey, that’s interesting that they bend the propeller like that—is that for aerodynamic reasons?”
And Myron said, “They don’t.” That’s all he said.
I realized I had just said the worst possible thing.
Myron had bent his propeller on that landing.
To be fair to Myron, it’s not impossible that I did something in my copilot seat that made the bounce worse. It’s possible that in my own fright I touched something I shouldn’t have.
At any rate, I heard Myron never flew again after that. As for the propeller he bent, he had to buy it. We mounted it on the lab wall, something for us to always look at and remember. Like it was a joke.
I think most people with day jobs like to do something totally different when they get home. Some people like to come home and watch TV. But my thing was electronics projects. It was my passion and it was my pastime.
Working on projects was something I did on my own time to reward myself, even though I wasn’t getting rewarded on the outside, with money or other visible signs of success.
One such project I called Dial-a-Joke. I started it about two weeks before I went to work at HP, and it went on for a couple of years after that.
Now, a lot of people start companies, and I know a lot of people will probably be reading this book only because I started Apple. But what I wish more people knew about me is what I think I should really be famous for: creating the very first Dial-a-Joke in the Bay Area, which was one of the first in the world.
A dial-a-joke service was something I had wanted to do for a while, mostly because I’d been calling dial-a-joke numbers (remember Happy Ben?) all around the world with my Blue Box. So I knew there were dial-a-joke lines in places like Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles, but there were none in the San Francisco Bay Area. How could that be? I couldn’t believe it. And you know me; I always like to be in the forefront of things. So I decided I was going to be the first one to do it.
Before long I really did have the first dial-a-joke in the Bay Area, and it was unbelievably popular. In fact, it had so many calls that I could only keep doing it for a couple of years. I was fielding thousands of calls a day by the end of it. Eventually I couldn’t afford it anymore.
To do a dial-a-joke system, the first thing was to get an answering machine. You couldn’t just buy them. It was illegal to connect one to your phone line without actually renting it from a phone company. Keep in mind that there were no phone jacks in the walls back then. Just wires connected to screws.
I knew movie theaters had answering machines, though. That was for prerecording movie titles and showtimes. Somehow I managed to rent one of those machines for about $50 a month. That was pretty expensive for a young guy like me. But I wanted to do it for fun, and money wasn’t going to stop me. Well, at least not at first.
Next, I needed jokes. I got them from The Official Polish-Italian Joke Book, by Larry Wilde. That book was the best-selling joke book of all time.
So I hooked up the machine and recorded a joke. Using my best Slavic accent, I’d say: “Allo. Tenk you fur dialing Dial-a-Joke.” Then: “Today’s joke ees: Ven did a Polack die drinking milk? Ven de cow sat down! Ah, ah. Tenk you fer dialin’ Dial-a-Joke.”
The first day, I just gave the number to a few people at work and told them to let their kids try it.
The next day, I read another joke into the machine. And every day I’d do that, reading a new Polish joke into the machine.
You wouldn’t believe how fast Dial-a-Joke ramped up. The first day, there were just a couple of calls. Then there were ten. The next day, there were maybe fifteen. And then suddenly it spiked up to a hundred calls, then two hundred calls a day. Within two weeks, the line was busy all day. I would call it from work and I couldn’t even get through. After school let out that year, there were like two thousand calls a day on a single line phone number. I made a point of keeping my jokes as short as I could—under fifteen seconds—just so I could handle more calls a day. I couldn’t believe how popular it got!
I started to really have a blast with it. Every now and then, just for fun, I’d take live calls when I got home from work. I’d say, “Allo. Tenk you fur dialing Dial-a-Joke.” I got to talk to lots of people and hear weird things about their schools and teachers and other students. I took notes. That way, if I asked someone (in my Polish accent, of course) what high school do you go to, and they answered “Oak Grove,” I could say, “Hey, does Mr. Wilson still wear those weird red pants?”
So they were amazed by me. They heard the recordings and they knew I actually picked up the phone sometimes—they thought this old Polish guy knew everything about them! I told them my name was Stanley Zebrazutsknitski.
At one point I bought two books of insults—2,001 Insults, volumes 1 and 2. A lot of these insults were really funny. Sometimes I would say something a little critical to a caller—like, “You not so bright, are you?”—just to get them going. Usually they would retort by calling me something nasty, like an old fart. That’s when I could start reading the insults out of the book, ones that were so clever no one could come back with anything good. As hard as anyone tried, I would always win the insult battle.
Somewhere around that time, I got complaints from the Polish American Congress that the jokes defamed people of Polish descent. Being a Polish Wozniak who tells and laughs at Polish jokes, I asked them if they would mind if I switched to Italian jokes. They said that would be fine.
See, the notion of political correctness didn’t exist back then. The Polish-Americans didn’t care if I told ethnic jokes as long as they weren’t about Polish people!
Want to Hear a Dial-a-Joke?
The first dial-a-joke service is rumored to have been created by New York Bell in the early 1970s. Want to hear some examples? You can hear archived recordings at http://www.dialajoke.com.
And you know what? Twelve years later the same Polish American Congress gave me its Heritage Award, its highest award for achievements by a Polish-American.
As it happened, most of my callers were young teenagers. Adults don’t have the time or the patience to keep dialing a busy number over and over to get through.
But the kids, because they were dialing it over and over, frequently misdialed the number. One time, on a weekend, I took a live call from this woman who said, “Please, you’ve got to stop that machine. My husband works nights and he’s got to sleep days, and we’re getting a hundred calls a day that are meant for you.” So the next day I called the phone company and had them change the number. I did that just for her.
I didn’t hear any more complaints for the next month, so I assumed the phone number switch worked. But a manager at the phone company called me to tell me that a lot of other people were complaining.
And that was frustrating to me because I didn’t want to make trouble for anyone. So I started thinking about getting an easy-to-dial number. I was in Cupertino where one of the prefixes was 255, so I thought, How about 255-5555? That would be easy to dial—you could keep dialing the same touch-tone, and your finger wouldn’t have to leave the space. I tried calling this number, and I found out that no one had it. I also found out that nobody had 255-6666.
I called a manager at the phone company—Dial-a-Joke was such a big deal by now that even shy Steve Wozniak could talk to phone company managers. I suggested that the remedy for all the misdialing should be an easy-to-dial phone number. I asked first for the 255-5555 number, but they weren’t allocating numbers in the 5000 range. So I said, “How about 255-6666?” He checked and said, “Fine.” And he gave it to me.
I ended up getting some cards printed up that said: “The Crazy Polack. Heard a good one lately? Call 255-6666.”
I figured that would be the end of the misdialing problems, but it wasn’t. I remember coming home from Hewlett-Packard to the apartments in Cupertino, where I lived, and there were three people waiting. They said they worked at Any Mountain, which was and still is a major ski supply shop in California. And their number was 255-6667, one digit different. They said they were getting so many crank calls and weird people and kids calling they were afraid to answer their own phone! I was kind of proud of the fact that my little operation was able to affect that big a business, but I really did want to change my number again to protect them. So I did that. I changed it to a 575 prefix—575-1625—but that 575 prefix was actually set up for high-volume calls like radio station contests and that kind of thing. And I had that number until the end of Dial-a-Joke a couple of years later.
But Dial-a-Joke was hurting for money. The cost of the answering machine alone was breaking me.
At one point I thought maybe I could get money from the callers to help pay for Dial-a-Joke. I added the message, “Please send money to P.O. Box 67 in Cupertino, California.” In three months I received only $11. Only once did I get a whole dollar. Usually I’d get a nickel, dime, or quarter taped to a piece of paper.
The biggest problem with Dial-a-Joke, like I said, was the expense. Not only did renting the machine cost a lot of money, but I was constantly having to rent new machines from the phone company.
To give you an idea, in theaters, these machines lasted years. But with me, they were lasting, like, a month. So every month I’d have to call up the phone company and say, “You’ve got to come over here to fix your answering machine, it’s no good.”
And really I loved doing that because they were charging me so much to rent it, it seemed only right that I wouldn’t have to be stuck with it once it broke down. I liked to see them lose money, too. So this guy would show up at 5 p.m., when I got home from work, with a whole new machine. I’d meet the guy, let him into the apartment, he’d install the machine, and that was that.
One month, when I got home that day after five when the repairman was supposed to be there, there was instead a note from him saying he’d been there at 2 p.m.
Two p.m.? I called up the phone company. “He’s always supposed to come after five. You better have him come after five tomorrow.” Well, the next day I got a note saying he’d been there at 3 p.m. So now I called the phone company almost livid—and that is really unusual for me—and I said something like: “You’d better tell him to be there at 5 p.m. this time.” But then the next day, again, there was a note saying he’d been there at 2 p.m. What was going on? I had no idea.
But I had gone three days with a nonworking machine that I was paying for, and that was no joke to me.
Now, I decided to play the game a different way. I called them and this time just very politely asked them to get the guy there at five. I hooked up an illegal but working answering machine to my Dial-a-Joke phone and left a message in my Slavic voice that told all the kids the machine was broken because of the phone company, and if they liked Dial-a-Joke they better call 611 (the number for telephone repair) to complain. And I told them to have all their friends call, too.
The next day I was pretty much in meetings all day at Hewlett-Packard, but I got home at 4:45 p.m., just in time to disconnect the illegal answering machine before the telephone guy got there. Then I called 611 and said, “I have a complaint.”
She said, “I know. Dial-a-Joke.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
A Good Number Is Hard to Find
I told you about 255-6666. That was the first good phone number of my life. Many years later, I got the home number 996-9999, which had six digits the same. That was a milestone for me. When I lived in Los Gatos, I got numbers like 353-3333 and 354-4444 and 356-6666 and 358-8888.
My main goal with phone numbers was to someday get a number with all seven digits the same. The way they divided phone numbers between San Jose and San Francisco, all of those numbers went to San Francisco. For example, 777-7777 was the San Francisco Examiner. But as the area codes started running out of phone numbers, they started duplicating the prefixes, allowing San Jose’s area code to someday have numbers that started with 222, 333, 444, or whatever.
In the early days of cell phones, I had a scanner that would let you listen to people’s cell phone calls. It would show me the phone numbers of callers. One day my friend Dan spotted a number in our 408 area code starting with 999. I immediately called the phone company to get 999-9999 for myself. Unfortunately, they couldn’t pull that number out of a larger group of numbers someone else had reserved.
A few weeks later, Dan spotted a number starting with 888. This time I lucked out.
I got the numbers 888-8800, 888-8801, up to 888-8899. So by about 1992, I had achieved my lifetime goal of having the ultimate phone number.
I put the number 888-8888 on my own cell phone, but something went wrong. I would get a hundred calls a day with no one on the line, not once. Sometimes I would hear shuffling sounds in the background. I would yell, whistle, but I could never get anyone to speak to me.
Very often I would hear a tone being repeated over and over, and then it hit me. It was a baby, pressing the 8 button over and over. I did a calculation that concluded that perhaps one-third of the babies born in the San Jose 408 area code would eventually call my number. And basically this made my phone unusable.
I’ll tell you about one last number. It was 221-1111. This number has a mathematical purity like no other. It’s all binary numbers—magic computer numbers. Powers of two. But the real purity was how small the digits were, 1s and 2s. By the rules of allocating phone numbers in the United States, no other phone number could have only two 2s and the rest 1s. In that sense, it was the lowest number you could get.
It was also the shortest dialing distance for your finger to move on a rotary phone,
As with 888-8888, I got so many wrong phone numbers every day. One day I was booking a flight and noticed that Pan American Airlines had the number, 800-221-1111.
The next phone call I got, I heard someone start to hang up after I said hello. I shouted, “Are you calling Pan Am?” And a woman came on the line and said, “Yes.” I asked her what she wanted and booked my first flight for a Pan Am passenger that day.
Over the next two weeks, I booked dozens of flights. I made up a game to see how crazy I could make prices and flight times and still have people book it. After a couple of weeks, I started feeling guilty. And vulnerable. I didn’t want to get arrested. So for the next two years, I answered every phone call with, “Pan Am, International Desk. Greg speaking.” My friends would have to yell, “Hey, Steve, it’s me,” when they called. I would trick people into booking the craziest things, but I would always tell them it was a prank and that I was not really Pan Am.
For example, I might tell them that their flight would leave San Jose at 3 a.m., so a lot of times they would be really relieved. I started booking callers on what I called the “Grasshopper Special.” If they flew through our lesser-used airports, it would reduce their fare. I almost always told them to fly to Billings, Montana, down to Amarillo, Texas, then up to Moscow, Idaho, then to Lexington, Kentucky, and then to their destination. Boston.
Hundreds of people took me up on this. Hundreds, maybe thousands, over the course of two years. Anyone who knows me saw me taking reservations constantly. I also booked Grasshopper flights to other countries, telling people they had to stop in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Singapore to get to Sydney.
I told some callers they could fly “freight.” But they had to wear warm clothing.
I kept a straight face because everyone always went for the lower fare. At some point I started telling them it was cheaper to fly on propeller planes than jets. The first time I did this, I tried to book a guy on a thirty-hour flight to London. But he would have nothing to do with it. I did get a number of people to buy into a cheap twenty-hour flight from San Jose to New York City.
The craziest one—and I still smile when I think about it—was the one I called the “Gambler’s Special.” I would tell them that the first leg of their flight had to go to Las Vegas. From there, they had to go to our counter at the airport. And if they rolled a “7,” the next leg would be free.
“Every other call today has been for Dial-a-Joke,” she said, sounding really frustrated. So I just got this big grin on my face. I felt like I had made the big time.
And yes, the guy did show up that day at 5 p.m.—with his supervisor. I let the guy in to replace it, but left the supervisor out in the rain with a book to read called I’m Sorry, the Monopoly You Have Reached Is Not in Service, by K. Aubrey Stone. It’s a really lousy book, actually, but I thought he deserved it.
Eventually I had to give up Dial-a-Joke because I couldn’t keep it up on my tiny HP engineer’s salary. Even though I loved it so, so much.
There is one major thing I haven’t yet told you about Dial-a-Joke. It is how I met my first wife, Alice. She was a caller one day when I happened to be taking live calls. I heard a girl’s voice, and I don’t know why but I said: “I bet I can hang up faster than you!” And then I hung up. She called back, I started talking to her in a normal voice, and before long we were dating. She was really young, just nineteen at the time.
We met, and the more I talked to her, the more I liked her. And she was a girl. I had only kissed two girls up to that point, so even being able to talk to a girl was really rare.
Alice and I were married two years later. And our marriage lasted just a little longer than my career at Hewlett-Packard, which is funny in a sad way.
Because I thought both of those arrangements were going to last forever.