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  I eventually came to conclude that, yes, I believed the same thing. And at a super young age, I knew 1 would do something scientific when I grew up, too.

  • o •

  I forgot to mention before that my dad was kind of famous, in his own way. He was a really successful football player at Caltech. People used to tell me all the time that they used to go to the games just to see Jerry Wozniak play. And my mom, she was great to me and my younger brother and sister. She’d be home when we came home from school, and she was always really pleasant and funny and interesting and gave us stuff to eat that was special to us. And was she ever funny! I think it was from her—definitely not my dad—that I got this sense of humor of mine. The pranks I like to play, and the jokes. I have been playing pranks on people for years and years. And my mom, well, I guess you could thank her for that. She just has this wonderful sense of humor.

  When I was in the sixth grade in 1962, my mother was big into Republican politics. She was a huge supporter of Richard Nixon, who was running for governor of California, and there was some

  event in San Jose where Nixon was speaking and she said, “Oh, Steve, why don’t you come along?” And she had a plan, a joke I would do. She wanted me to meet him and tell him, opening up a piece of paper, that I represented the Ham Radio Operators of Serra School, and that our group unanimously supported Richard Nixon’s election for governor. The joke was, I was the only sixth-grade ham radio operator in the school, probably in the whole state. But I did it. I walked up to Nixon and presented the paper, which we literally wrote with a crayon just before leaving home.

  1 said, “I have something for you.” Nixon was really gracious, I thought. He seemed kind, and he smiled at me. He signed one of my schoolbooks I had with me, and even gave me the pen he signed it with. About twenty flashbulbs went off, and I ended up on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News for this. Me! The only ham radio operator at Serra School and probably the youngest one in the whole state, representing a club made up of nobody but me, presenting a fake certificate like it was the real thing. And everyone believed it. Wow!

  So it was funny and everything, but something bugged me, and I’m going to tell you that it still bugs me to this day. Why did nobody get the joke? Doesn’t anybody check facts? The newspaper cutline said something like, “Sixth grader Steve Wozniak represents a school group that’s for Nixon.” They didn’t get that there was no school group, that it was all a joke my mom made up. It made me think that you could tell a newspaperperson or a politician anything, and they would just believe you. That shocked me—this was a joke they took for a fact without even thinking twice about it. I learned then that you can tell people things— crazy jokes and stories—and people will usually believe them.

  • o •

  We spent most of my early years in Southern California, where my dad worked as an engineer at various companies before the secret job at Lockheed.

  But where I really grew up was Sunnyvale, right in the heart of what everyone now calls Silicon Valley. Back then, it was called Santa Clara Valley I moved there when I was seven. It was all just really agricultural. It was totally different from the way it is now. There were fruit orchards everywhere. Our street, Edmonton Avenue, was just a short one-block street bordered by fruit orchards on three of four sides. So pretty much anywhere you drove on your bike you’d end up in an apricot, cherry, or plum orchard. And I especially remember the apricots. Every house on my block had a bunch of apricot trees in their yard—our house had seven of them—and in the fall the apricots would get all soft and kind of splatter wherever they landed. You can imagine what great projectile weapons they made.

  When I think of that street, looking back, I think it was the most beautiful place you could imagine growing up. It wasn’t as crowded back then, and boy, was it easy to get around. It was as moderate of temperature as anywhere else you could find. In fact, right around the time I moved there—this was 1958—I remember my mother showing me national articles declaring it to be the best climate in America. And as I said, since the whole place had barely been developed, there were huge orchards every which way you went.

  Edmonton Avenue was actually a small Eichler subdivision— Eichler homes of that period were kind of famous for being architecturally interesting homes in middle price ranges. They stand out as special homes to this day. And the families in them were a lot like mine—middle class, with dads commuting to work at the new electronics and engineering companies starting up, and moms at home. Because of that, and the fact that a bunch of my friends could pretty easily get electronics parts and all kinds of wires from our dads’ garages or company warehouses, I thought of us as the Electronics Kids. We grew up playing with radios and walkie-talkies and weird-looking antennas on our roofs. We played baseball and ran around, too. A lot.

  I remember when I was in the fifth grade I was really athletic. I was always being told I was the best runner, the top athlete in school, the best baseball player, and I was really popular because of all that. But electronics was really my life, and I loved devising all kinds of projects with the Electronics Kids.

  In fourth grade for Christmas, I got the most amazing gift from my parents. It was an electronics hobby kit, and it had all these great switches and wires and lights. I learned so much playing with that stuff. And it was because of that kit that I was able to do the neatest things with the Electronics Kids. I was the key kid in designing a house-to-house intercom connecting about six of our houses.

  The first thing to do was to get the equipment we needed. The main thing was wire. But where were a bunch of kids supposed to get yards and yards of wire? And how we got it—it was just unbelievable. One of the guys in my group, Bill Werner, literally walked up to a phone guy and asked him if he could have some telephone wire. He’d seen long spools of it in the guy’s truck, so he just asked him for one of them. I don’t know why, but the telephone guy just gave it to him, saying, “Here’s a cord, kid.”

  What Bill got was a spool of wire about a foot in diameter. It was a lot, a whole lot, of wire. It was two-wire cable, solid copper wire inside of plastic insulation in the colors white and brown, twisted every inch or so to keep the two wires together and to minimize electrical noise from being picked up. Think of it as a plus wire and a minus wire. If some electrical interference is strong, it gets picked up equally by the plus and minus wires due to their being twisted. The point is that there is never a single wire that is always slightly closer to the interference signal. The plus and minus wires serve to cancel out the interference. You get as much minus as plus. That’s how telephone cords work, as I found out from this. It is also where the term “twisted-pair” comes from.

  And so then I figured out what to do with all this cord, designing on paper really careful lines with my different-colored pens. And I figured out where the switches would be, and how we would connect carbon microphones (that’s how microphones were back then) and buzzers and lights so we kids wouldn’t be waking our parents up with loud noises that would let them know what was up. We had to make sure we could do this in absolute secrecy, and that we kids could turn the buzzers off at night so we could wake ourselves up just by the light.

  Once we finished the design, the bunch of us rode our bikes down to Sunnyvale Electronics, the local store and hangout for kids like us. We bought all this neat stuff, the microphones and the buzzers and the switches, you name it.

  The next thing we did was connect the wire between all the houses. There were these wooden fences that separated all the houses on our short little street, and we just went along the fence in broad daylight, stringing this wire along and stapling it in. You know, it’s possible that putting staples into wire would short it out. We were so lucky that didn’t happen. And we stapled that wire all the way up the block—from one of my friends’ houses to mine, and then I set up my switch box, drilled some holes in it, mounted some switches, and you know what? It worked! So then we had a house-to-house secret intercom system so w
e could talk to each other in the middle of the night.

  We were about eleven or twelve then, so I’m not trying to convince you this was a professional modern engineering system, but it really worked. It was just a tremendous success for me.

  In the beginning, we used it to call each other, I guess it was just so cool to be able to talk to each other. We’d call each other up and say things like, “Hey, this is cool! Can you hear me?” Or, “Hey, press your call button, let’s see if it works.” Or, “Try my buzzer out, give me a call.” That was about the first week or two, and after that we started using it as a way to sneak out at night.

  It didn’t ring in this case, it had to quietly buzz, and it had to work on lights. So Bill Werner or one of the other guys would signal me, or I would signal one of them, and we had a code that would mean different things. I can’t tell you how many nights I woke up to that buzzer or a light thinking: Oh boy, we’re going out tonight!

  We were a group of kids who loved climbing out our windows and sneaking out at night. Maybe it was just to talk, or go out and ride bikes, or sometimes it was to toilet-paper people’s houses. Usually girls’ houses. Ha. We’d go out in the middle of the night and say things to each other like, “Does anyone know anyone who has a house we should toilet-paper tonight?” To tell you the truth, I never had any idea who we should toilet-paper—I never thought like that—but the other guys usually had someone in mind.

  And then we would go to the all-night store and try to buy, like, twenty-five rolls of toilet paper. I remember the clerk saying, “Hey, why do I get the feeling that this isn’t to be used for its intended purpose?” I laughed and told him that we all had diarrhea. And he sold it to us.

  Chapter 2

  The Logic Game

  I did a lot of reading at night when I was a kid, and one of my absolute favorites was the Tom Swift Jr. series. I would just eat up those books so quickly; new issues would come out a couple of times a month and I’d devour them. I don’t think it would be exaggerating at all to say he was truly my hero.

  Now, Tom Swift Jr. was this kid—a teenager, actually—older than me but still a kid like me. So I looked up to him. And he was also a scientist/engineer who got to build things in a laboratory. Anything Tom wanted he could build, and he had his dad to help him with tilings. He’d go in and hook wires together and make contraptions at a company he and his dad owned. So Tom had his own company, he had his own modes of travel, and he had his best friend named Bud Barclay. Anyway, in my opinion, Tom Swift Jr. had the perfect life. And whenever there was a crisis on Earth, any kind of conflict that needed handling, he sprang into action. Say the authorities on Earth had detected some alien energy source and the only way to hold it back would be with a plasma field. Well, Tom Swift Jr. would build a plasma field. He could build a submarine if he wanted to. There was no limit to what he could build. I remember once he built a spaceship to win a race around the Earth to get the money to do something good—you know, something good for the planet and all the people on it.

  That was the kind of thing I wanted to do—build something that would end up allowing me to do something really good for people. I wanted to be a do-gooder from the start, just like Tom Swift Jr. was.

  Well, my mom set a curfew at 9 p.m. every night. But after she turned the lights out, I used the light from this little streetlight outside my window to read. It hit my floor in one certain space. I would put the Tom Swift Jr. book down there on the floor where the light shone in, then put my head over the edge of the bed so I could read it late, late into the night. I wanted to be just like Tom Swift Jr.

  And like Tom Swift Jr., I did work with my dad a lot on projects. In fact, my very first project—the crystal radio I built when I was six—was really all because of my dad. It took me a very long

  My Hero

  Tom Swift Jr. was the hero of a whole series of children’s adventure novels published by the same people (Stratemeyer Publishing) that did the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys titles.

  James Lawrence, who said he had a deep interest in science and technology, was the author of most of the titles. I mentioned Bud Barclay already, Tom Swift Jr.‘s best friend, but the stories had other elements in common. Anyone who’s read them may remember dastardly spies from Eastern European countries like “Brungaria,” and an amazingly capable element called “Tomasite,” which could make anything atomic-powered.

  One famous plot—I believe it was in book 22—involved scientifically regenerated dinosaurs. That was decades before Jurassic Park.

  time in my life to appreciate the influence he had on me. He started when I was really young, helping me with these kinds of projects.

  • o •

  My dad’s and my relationship was always pretty much about electronics. Later, it became about what I did as an engineer working at Hewlett-Packard on calculators, or on the first computers I built at Apple. But first, for years and years, it was all about what Dad did in engineering. I watched, listened, and worked with him. It was about how fast he could show me things and how fast I could learn them.

  Dad was always helping me put science projects together, as far back as I can remember. When I was six, he gave me that crystal radio kit I mentioned. It was just a little project where you take a penny, scrape it off a little, put a wire on the penny, and touch it with some earphones. Sure enough, we did that and heard a radio station. Which one, I couldn’t tell you, but we heard voices, real voices, and it was just so darned exciting. I distinctly remember feeling something big had happened, that suddenly I was way ahead—accelerated—above any of the other little kids my age. And you know what? That was the same way I felt years later when I figured out how resistors and lightbulbs worked.

  But now I had actually built something, something they didn’t have, a little electronics thing I had done and none of them were able to do. I told other kids in the first grade, “I built a crystal radio,” but no one knew what I was talking about. None of them. I felt at that moment a kind of glimmer that I might have a lead in things like this from then on. Does that sound crazy? But after building that little crystal radio and telling everyone about it, I knew I had done something most people would think was hard and few kids my age had done. And I was only six. I thought: Okay. That’s done. What else can I do?

  It’s funny, because ever since that crystal radio project when I

  was six, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain my designs and inventions to people who didn’t know what I was talking about. So this has happened and keeps happening to me over and over. Even now.

  • o •

  All through elementary school and through eighth grade, I was building project after electronic project. There were lots of things I worked on with Dad; he was my single greatest influence.

  In the fifth grade, I read a book called SOS at Midnight. The hero of the book was a ham radio operator, and all his friends were ham radio operators. I remember how they sent each other messages with the ham radio and when, after the main guy got kidnapped, he was able to beat the kidnappers by cleverly rewiring the TV a little and sending out a signal to his friends. The story was okay—it was just a story. But what really got me was the fact that there were people who used these ham radios to speak to each other long distance—city to city, even state to state. Now, this was a time when it was hard for me to imagine even making a longdistance phone call you could actually afford. Ham radio was the most effective way to reach out to people in faraway places without leaving home—and cheaply. This was something that much later led to my phone phreaking (using special tones to make free longdistance calls) and then to my use of the ARPANET, which later evolved into the Internet we have today.

  The other thing—the special thing—was on the last page of SOS at Midnight. It said how to become a ham radio operator. It said you can become a ham radio operator at any age. All you had to do was contact the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) for more information.

  I went to school the next day and
told my buddy on safety patrol, “I’m going to get a ham radio license!” I was really boasting, because no one back then knew what I was talking about.

  Ham Radio Making a Difference

  To this day, ham radio is popular all around the world. It’s a hobby. Ham radio amateurs use their two-way radios to talk to each other, share information, and just have fun.

  But it’s more than a hobby. From the start, ham radio operators performed a public service in protecting the airwaves from radio pirates, and being extremely ethical about how they used public airways.

  Many ham radio operators from the early days have gone on to make significant contributions to society. There is a lot of practical applicability in the building and use of ham radio. I’m a good example.

  Ham radios were pretty obscure. But this kid I told, he said, “Oh, you know, there’s this guy down the street, Mr. Giles, and he’s teaching a class on this. Are you in it?” So this was really lucky. I remember being astounded. It turned out that on Wednesday nights Mr. Giles—who actually was a ham radio operator—had these classes I could take. I learned Morse code there, I learned some of the electronics calculations I needed, I learned what frequencies ham radio operators were allowed to use. Basically, I got to learn all the stuff that was going to be on the test you had to take to be a licensed ham radio operator. My dad saw what I was doing, and he got his license with me. We both took the test and passed when I was in the sixth grade. And for that Christmas, I got kits to build a Hallicrafters transmitter and a Hallicrafters receiver. In today’s money, it probably cost a couple thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money to spend on a sixth grader. And building the radio transmitter and receiver was a lot of work! You had to unpackage hundreds of parts. I had to learn to solder for that, too. In fact, I soldered together the whole