The Hickory Pit, set on a particularly faceless strip in the faceless Californian city of San Jose, does not look a promising place for a heart-to-heart. Inside the concrete shell is a cavernous, diner-style hall that is aching to return to the 1950s: rows of booths decked in candy-pink and blue plastic, veneer table tops, fluorescent lights.
Steve Wozniak looks right at home - which, it turns out, isn’t surprising, given the amount of time he has spent here recently. It is easy to walk right past one of Silicon Valley’s legendary computer engineers. A waiter gestures to the back of the hall, but I see only two men bent over handheld gadgets connected by a cable. A polystyrene box with the remains of the ribs they have just eaten is on the table.
The waiter insists that Woz, as he is widely known, is back there, and a second pass reveals that one of the game-players is indeed the man I have come to have lunch with. Only he has already eaten.
In an explosion of explanation, Wozniak says he and his companion are playing Tetris; did I know he was once the world champion?; had I played Breakout? - he designed that one for Atari in the days before video games were written in software, when they were baked into the machine’s hardware. Almost at once he has launched into a description of how those early circuits worked, reliving the four days and nights it took him to work out how to put all the dots in the right places on the screen.
“You hook up all the wires on the chips so that the chips alternate one, zero, one, zero, click, click, click, click,” he says, tapping it out, getting the memory from the early 1970s down pat.
This obsessive engineer, his beard now greying and chest-hair sprouting from the top of his yellow T-shirt, is the other half of the Apple myth. These days Steve Jobs may be better known, but Steve Wozniak’s place in Silicon Valley folklore is just as strong.
He was - indeed, still is - the primal computer nerd, a bearded whizz who rode a boyhood love of electronics to spectacular early successes of the computer industry. The Apple II, a machine he designed single-handedly in 1976, is reckoned by many to be one of the most impressive engineering feats of recent decades, a machine that laid the blueprint for the desktop and laptop machines that have become central to modern life. It turned him and Jobs into stars and multimillionaires, and launched the personal computer revolution almost overnight.
We are sitting here now because Wozniak has written his memoirs. To be more precise, he has spoken and a journalist friend, Gina Smith, has written the words down. He recently sat in this same booth for what he reckons to have been 50 days straight while he and Smith went through the text. I think of all the Hickory Pit ribs that represents.
So what does Steve Jobs, four years younger and at high school when the two first met, make of Wozniak’s rendition of this slice of Valley history? “From what I understand, he read it and thought it made him look like an asshole,” says Wozniak.
I can see Jobs’ point. Wozniak’s book, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon, tells the story of how, after those sleepless nights wiring up Breakout - one of the first hit video games - Jobs, the salesman, gave him half of the $700 he said Atari had paid for the work. Only it turns out Atari actually paid several thousand dollars, and he claims Jobs had short-changed his friend.
Nor does Wozniak go out of his way to seem overly careful of his friend’s feelings. “Steve can be annoying to people,” he says as he reminisces about the decade the two men spent at Apple, before both left in 1985. “And he can be obnoxious. He would walk into meetings and just say, ‘Forget it. It’s all a bunch of junk. You’re not doing it,’ and walk out, and: ‘You’re all idiots.’”
Lest Wozniak be misunderstood, it should be noted that he speaks with an engineer’s frankness, even naivety. He has complained of being quoted out of context before, though that seems only natural given the guileless barbs he throws out.
He says of the book, trying to right the balance, “I’m sure I said some very good things about Steve Jobs, I can’t remember.” For the record, he did - but not enough to outweigh the jibes.
The waitress has come back with iced tea refills three times and we can’t put off ordering food any longer. This is not the sort of place you come if you are concerned about your cholesterol. I flirt with the idea of ordering the full rack of ribs with all the trimmings, lose my nerve and opt instead for the Junior Rack. Wozniak asks for a slice of key lime pie, seems genuinely disappointed when it turns out there is none, and settles for cherry.
When you listen to Wozniak talk, it quickly becomes clear that he is like an ageing rock star - eager to relive the glory days. For the first hour and more, in mind-numbing detail, he races through the electronics projects of his youth, all the resistors, flashing light bulbs and soldered wires of school projects dating back to age 11.
He is an engineer’s engineer, a man who sees the twists and turns in the history of computing as the direct and sole result of engineering choices made by men such as him. Ask any business-school student how it was that Apple squandered its early lead in personal computing, and you will be told that it was because of a business decision not to license its technology to other computer makers. Microsoft, producing software for the “open” IBM PC, won the day. Wozniak, though, can focus only on the engineering shortcomings of the machines that followed his own pristine creation, the Apple II.
In this version of events, his machine marked the high point of a golden age in electronics. It was a time when a single person, inspired by nothing more than a desire to produce the best work he possibly could, was able to change the course of computing history. It took only three months of work. If one person could do that, why wouldn’t the following years bring a flowering of technology?
“We just envisioned all these computers where the human was more important than the technology,” he says. This has left a trail of bugs, badly designed products and machines that don’t make allowances for their all-too-fallible users, he maintains. “I’m absolutely convinced that Apple, just like the rest of the world, has lost that formula.”
What went wrong? In Wozniak’s somewhat simplistic world-view, the Engineer was replaced by the Businessman. The causes of the weaknesses that crept into the personal computer business? “A lack of good, solid testing. A lack of good caring. Just basically the way the business is run.”
The food has arrived and the ribs are surprisingly good. The sides - oak-roasted corn and wood-smoked beans - are pretty much inedible. I look enviously at the thick wedge of cherry pie.
Wozniak warms to his theme. In this story, the engineer is the lone hero, the creator. This is “the person who’s coming up with all the ideas just sitting down and programming it and getting it to work and show off and adding in the little touches they think of”.
In this idealised world - which is still the world that inspires many of the engineers drawn to Silicon Valley - this hero-engineer is also the artist.
“It’s gotta be a part of me,” says Wozniak. “It’s an art. When it’s gotta be a part of me, I’m gonna make it as perfect as can possibly be. I remember doing the floppy disk board [for the Apple II] when I laid it out myself, little pieces of tape where the metal traces on the PC board will go. I’m laying it out for two weeks every night till four in the morning. And when I got done, I realised that if I had designed the circuit a different way I would have five holes through the board instead of eight. So I took everything apart and redid it. The user doesn’t see the holes. But it mattered to me. It’s a part of me. It’s like my own body is the device.
“There was a window in time when things did work that way.”
This smacks of self-mythologising. Yet if this is a hallucination it is a common one in Silicon Valley, which still thrives on the dream that a lone engineer with a good idea can change the course of the world - in part because Wozniak himself helped to prove that it was true. Money may dictate the way that giant industries such as personal computing are built, but it can do nothing to stop the next hero-engineer from having his dream.
“The intent to try new things and find them is sort of built into the human being and the human brain,” says Wozniak. “It’s just part of our own innate curiosity. Thinking up a new idea that could really radically [make things] better can happen anywhere, and it doesn’t necessarily happen because I’m gonna put some money down to some bright engineers and they’re gonna come up with it.”
That mantle has now passed to the Google generation. For Wozniak himself, nothing else has ever come close to that early glimpse of engineering perfection. While Jobs later returned to Apple and launched a second act, Wozniak’s later efforts - a company that built unified remote-control devices for the living room, and one that tried to create wireless electronic tags that people could use to keep track of pets or personal items - fizzled.
He professes satisfaction from the years spent as a concert promoter, philanthropist and (for eight years) teaching 10-year-olds, yet still clearly hankers for a place back at the centre of the personal-computing revolution he helped launch.
“I would love to have some involvement [at Apple.] But I don’t think Steve would like it,” he says, before conceding that his knowledge of computer system design is no longer current. It is hard to avoid the feeling that, however indelibly the two men’s pasts are linked, Wozniak is now like one of those old school friends or faintly embarrassing relatives that sometimes turn up; someone to be tolerated with a forced smile.
Of a recent business venture, he says: “One friend sort of suggested, ‘Hey, you should put Steve on your board or something like that.’ The answer came back very quickly, ‘No.’” Jobs was invited to write a foreword for the book but refused.
It is 4pm and lunchtime is long past. Wozniak, a self-confessed gadget freak, goes to the back of the Hickory Pit to retrieve his Segway - the self-balancing two-wheel electrical transporter that was once seen by its Silicon Valley backers as the machine that would revolutionise transportation. Instead, it has become little more than a curiosity.
It’s nowhere near sunset yet, but as Wozniak prepares for the ride west on this oddball piece of machinery, it feels like it should be.
The Hickory Pit, San Jose
1 x junior rack of ribs
2 x cherry crunch pie
2 x coffee
1 x iced tea
Total: $25.67
