If someone asks a lot of technology developers to what the Think Different motto refers, the names of Apple () founders would probably jump into the answers. But if you asked that same question to Steve Wozniak, creator of the company with Steve Jobs, the answer could be less obvious: Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi.
Wozniak and Jobs have transformed the Think Different (different thinking) into their companion’s motto and a successful slogan for the world’s most valuable technology company. For Wozniak, however, some may not understand exactly what that means.
“Thinking differently can be a little misunderstood. I always talked to Steve Jobs about thinking differently. I was shy, and I didn’t want to go out and do things that other people did, because then I would be competing,” said the founder of Apple at an event organized by the unique identity validation company on Tuesday (20) in Sao Paulo. “I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be held responsible. So I just went out and looked for other things, strange things that no one was doing.”
For him, innovation is nothing more than invention – and the inventors are different from engineers who have undergone good schools, have been trained properly and are even able to do better tasks than others: “Being an inventor is part of personality, and personality is a psychological word.”
“I was one of these types, the lone inventor you read in books or see in movies, and they have a strange idea, run to a laboratory, try to build something, test, show, even if they don’t worth money or something, they just want to keep doing things that didn’t exist before,” he says.
To build one of the first personal computers in the world, Apple 1 – the first to use a typing keyboard and have a video screen – WOZ, as it is usually called, also developed Apple 2, one of the first large -scale microcomputers.
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“We wanted people to think, ‘Wow, all these amazing things that came from people like Gandhi and others, this amazing thinking that affects our lives,’ we wanted people to think computers or a company like Apple can be conceived this way,” he says.
After leaving Apple in 1985 (despite continuing to date as an employee and receiving a symbolic salary from the company), Woz created the first universal remote control and pursued a career as a tech teacher for children. In 2017, he founded Woz U, an educational platform focused on software engineering and technological development.
