After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.

Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

I'm also a fan with sticking with the most standard software that millions of other users also use, because you get the benefit of all those other users' problems and solutions.

Steve Jobs made the case to Xerox PARC execs directly that they had great technology but that Apple knew how to make it affordable enough to change the world. This was very open. In the end, Xerox got a large block of Apple stock for sharing the technology. That's not stealing outright.

What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

You need the kind of objectivity that makes you forget everything you've heard, clear the table, and do a factual study like a scientist would.