Some great people are leaders and others are more lucky, in the right place at the right time. I'd put myself in the latter category. But I'd never call myself a normal designer of anything.
Hard disks have disappointed me more than most technologies.
And Communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them.
The biggest benefit in my life comes from my Segway, which I use everywhere I am. If I'm going to San Antonio, for example, I'll load it in the car and just go everywhere with it.
When you stop and think about it, a smartphone is basically a whistle you can carry.
I had no money. I had no savings account.So I would bring down my color TV set, a Sears TV with a cable snaked into it - they had no video-in back in those days - and hooked it up to the circuit of very few chips and then a little keyboard you could type on. And I was trying to impress people with how did he do it with fewer chips than anyone could ever imagine?
Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that.
Being an electronic genius was a reputation I had, maybe being even into math and science almost exclusively and not wanting to be in the other normal parts of the world.
I was kind of amazed because I first found out about blue boxes in an article in Esquire magazine labeled fiction. That article was the most truthful article I've ever read in my life... That article was so truthful, and it told about a mistake in the phone company that let you dial phone calls anywhere in the world. What an amazing thing to discover.
I really believe I know why my designs were better than any other human being, but I don't want to take credit for starting Apple, for turning the world around or anything like that.
Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!
Atari is a very sad story.
I worked with such concentration and focus and I had hundreds of obscure engineering or programming things in my head. I was just real exceptional in that way
I don't think I was talking specifically about Steve Jobs. It was just a general philosophy about one person grows up and he's kind of managing companies and every day he's working making sure this is in place and that's in place.
You should stay closely connected to the technology when you start your company.
