An insight into the Woz

Apple co-founder and icon Steve Wozniak visited Australia last week to deliver a speech on how technology will continue to enhance our lives. Woz, as he is affectionately known as, is not shy in coming forward. On any topics. Here we gathered a collection of bite sized snippets that we found to be insightful and down right amusing.

Why technologists are important: To understand where technology might lead us it helps to understand what technology is and what helps technologists think because those who make the rules and those that make the systems affect our lives the most.

More on why technologists are important: Technologist when they are young are inspired. They fall in love with stuff...You discover that tech can be very interesting. You can actually build and understand a whole set of devices that other people can't understand. It gives you a one-upmanship. It's like knowing a bunch of trivia paths and being an little entertainer.

Are technologists strange people? Well, sometimes. When you grow up in tech and you are a real genius at it, you become sort of a social outsider and people think 'oh, he is just an electronics genius or something'. But then, when you are a social outsider, technology becomes a kind of refuge to exemplify 'here's what I am good at, so I am going to do it even further'.

How you can have fun with technology: When we were in school we would make little ticking metronomes that would sound like a bomb and put it in the locker [of fellow students]. But we would always go that one step further and think and be creative and we'd put a resister in it so when you open the locker the ticking sped up. The laughter! It drove us a lot.

Why you can't cut corners as an engineer: Something you learn about engineering. First of all anything you do wrong doesn't work. It has to be very precise. Engineers have to check and double check and super check to make sure things works. Nothing can be left not working or it's unreliable.

Designing simple technology: Technology can be expensive. For example when I was young I could not afford a single chip. So all I could do was design on paper. I made up a game, because you get bored: How can I design it better than I did before? How can I use fewer parts. It was a little game that I made up and I played it for about two years. I would design every computer that was made for manufacture over and over and I would reduce the parts. It turned out that was really good practice because it taught me. I came to value the simplicity, the fused parts, the directness of solving a problem... The best things I did at Apple were because I didn't have that much money and I had to think in terms of making things simple. And because I had never done it before. I just wanted to be an inventor and find the better way that other people had found before me.

Why technology is best learned by pursuing a goal: Your goal pushes you. Sometimes the best mangers of a program project have never written a project in their life but they know how to manage and knowing how to manage they will get to the right answers and right end points. And sometimes you have to throw out your knowledge to get the best things done. The best things I did in Apple were generally because I never knew how to do them before. I sat down and knew what I wanted to end up with -- and taking little complements of parts, built it.

On being a network administrator: I was a network administrator for 10 years and I hated it. It was just the most stressful thing in the world. If my son wanted to go