More Proof That Steve Jobs Was Always a Business Genius

2 minute read
Jobs & Wozniak At The West Coast Computer Faire
Steve Jobs (left) and Steve Wozniak at the first West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II computer was debuted, in San Francisco, April 16th or 17th, 1977Tom Munnecke—Getty Images
By Lily Rothman

By now, it’s become part of the Steve Jobs mythology that, while he wasn’t as skilled at the tech side as some of his co-workers might have been, he was the one with the business acumen to turn personal computers into the mega-industry it is today.

But, unlike some after-the-fact creation myths, this particular bit of received wisdom has been around since the beginning — the very beginning. The Homebrew Computer Club, which first convened on this day, Mar. 5, in 1975, was where Apple’s Steve Wozniak and others would trade tech ideas and parts. In a 1983 TIME profile of Steve Jobs, Wozniak revealed that his friend Steve Jobs would occasionally come to meetings, but not for the same reasons everyone else did:

Wozniak and some other friends gravitated toward an outfit called the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, and Jobs would occasionally drop by. Wozniak was the computer zealot, the kind of guy who can see a sonnet in a circuit. What Jobs saw was profit. At convocations of the Homebrew, Jobs showed scant interest in the fine points of design, but he was enthusiastic about selling the machines Wozniak was making.

“I was nowhere near as good an engineer as Woz,” Jobs freely admits. “He was always the better designer.” No one in the neighborhood, however, could match Jobs’ entrepreneurial flair and his instincts for the big score. It was Jobs who badgered local electronics suppliers for credit; Jobs who arranged for payment (“They’d say, ‘Well, how’s 30 days net?’ We said, ‘Sign us up.’ We didn’t know what 30 days net was”); Jobs who attracted a first-class industrial p.r. firm and a team of experienced managers; Jobs who organized the early manufacturing; Jobs who finally persuaded Wozniak to leave Hewlett-Packard; and Jobs who gave the fledgling company a name (“One day I just told everyone that unless they came up with a better name by 5 p.m., we would go with Apple”).

Read the full story, here in the TIME Vault: The Updated Book of Jobs

More Must-Reads from TIME

Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com