Steve Wozniak got his start as a down-to-earth engineer, but the Apple co-founder made the case for keeping your head in the clouds sometimes.
In an on-stage interview with Tech Nation's Moira Gunn at the Intel Developer Forum held in San Francisco, Wozniak talked about a life driven by his passion for the electronics and computing. And passion can be a more important incentive than money, he said.
"The rewards are in your head. The reward is invisible. It's what you like to do," said Wozniak, who designed the Apple I computer and its commercially successful successor, the Apple II, largely during his spare time.
Wozniak was in the right place at the right time, falling into computer design during an era when electronics were growing more powerful but were still simple enough that designs could be done by a smart human being. And he found a small circle of technophiles who shared similar views and ended up building the first personal computers. They, too, were driven by passion.
"We had dreams that computers would improve education and improve communication and help us achieve a lot of tasks. A lot of us in our group understood it," though their vision did not extend as far as today's broadband-connected Internet. "What we were doing was not [figuring out] how [to] build a computer, it was how you get a computer that fits into the home. Price, looks--a lot of that stuff. It gave us more passion. We used the word 'revolution' all over the place."
This article was first published as a blog on CNET News.com.
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