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  So we had a lot of equipment. And what a fun class that was. You build something and it works. You don’t stop finding things you forgot or did wrong until it works. And you learn about what happens when things go wrong, which is the number one thing former electronics students always remember about their classes. We all got zapped with accidental shocks now and then. Like the time I got hit with 22,000 volts from a TV set and flew back about five feet. Whoa. But that, I swear, is what hardware guys like me get used to. We grow up not fearing shocks as much as other people.

  I now have a roulette shocker—four people stick in their thumbs and, to the accompaniment of music and flashing lights, it gradually slows down cycling until one person gets a shock. Hardware guys will play this game but software guys are always way too chicken.

  Mr. McCollum let me do as much as I wanted—he even prevented me from getting bored by letting me go to work at a company during school hours on Fridays. It was Sylvania, in Sunnyvale, and I got to learn how to program a computer. Mr. McCollum said that I knew everything in his course and I’d just play pranks on the others in class. Well, we had no computer in our school, so that was the first time I really got face to face with a computer I could program, and after that there was no turning back.

  I never thought I’d be near a computer in my life. I thought, Oh my god! Computers! I bought a FORTRAN book and told myself, I’m going to learn how to program. An engineer down there at Sylvania taught me how to use a keypunch. I remember typing out my first little program and his helping me put it into the computer and running it.

  The first real program I tried to write was called the Knight’s Tour. You jump a knight piece around the chessboard, only in valid moves for a knight, in a pattern so that it hits every one of

  the sixty-four squares on the board exactly once. This is not easy to do. I wrote my program to go up two squares, then over one again and again, to try all the moves until you can’t move again. And if it didn’t hit all the squares by the time it got stuck, the program would back up and change a move and try again from there. It would keep backtracking as far as it needed and then kept going. That computer could calculate instructions a million times a second, so I figured it would be a cinch and would solve this problem quickly.

  So here I am with my program and I’m planning how this is just the beginning of my solving all the sophisticated problems of the world, but guess what? The computer doesn’t spit out anything. The lights on the computer flickered, and then the lights just stayed the same. Nothing was happening. My engineer friend let it run a while longer and said, “Well, probably it’s in a loop.” And he showed me what an infinite loop is—when a program gets stuck and does the same thing over and over and never ends. (Just as an aside, Infinite Loop is today the name of the street where the current Apple headquarters is located.) Anyway, the next week I went back and I wrote my program so that I could flip a switch in order to get printouts of whatever chessboard arrangement it was working on. I remember pulling the printouts out and studying them that very day and realizing something. The program was in fact working the way it was supposed to. I hadn’t done anything wrong. It just wasn’t going to come up with a solution for 1025 years. That’s a lot longer than the universe has even been around.

  That made me realize that a million times a second didn’t solve everything. Raw speed isn’t always the solution. Many understandable problems need an insightful, well-thought-out approach to succeed. The approach a program uses to solve something, the rules and steps and procedures it follows, by the way, is called an algorithm.

  What Is the Knight’s Tour?

  The Knight’s Tour is more than just a mathematical problem where you have to get a knight around a chessboard. It’s an ancient puzzle, and people have been trying and failing at it for centuries. The goal is to move the knight sixty-four times so it lands on each and every chess square only once.

  I found two sites you might like if you’re interested in this. http://www.borderschess.org/KnightTour.htm is a Knight’s Tour puzzle you can do without a chessboard. You do it online. Another page on the same site— http://www.borders chess.org/KTsimple.htm–is an actual instruction guide so you can learn how to do it and blow other people’s minds! Good luck.

  • o •

  I had this tremendous respect for teachers back then, I really did. I thought they were just the smartest people in the world, right up there with engineers. They were able to stand up there and talk so naturally, just teach us like that. I mean, I knew I was real smart, but because teachers had the ability to read up on topics and then talk about them with so much confidence, I figured they had to be much smarter than I was. I thought at the time that all my high school teachers were smart thinkers.

  Now I’m a bit more cynical after seeing too many cases where intelligence in students is defined as everyone reading the same thing, including the same newspaper and magazine articles, and having the same answer, and agreeing with the way the matter is presented.

  If you read the same things as others and say the same things they say, then you’re perceived as intelligent. I’m a bit more independent and radical and consider intelligence the ability to think

  about matters on your own and ask a lot of skeptical questions to get at the real truth, not just what you’re told it is.

  I had a really long walk to arid from Homestead High School every day, and I started using that time to really think. It was a walk of a few miles, and I started to analyze my own intelligence. I was struggling in my head with the fact that I had been extremely smart in math and science and weaker in English and history. Why was that? Well, I figured those were more subjective categories, and I watched as nice, sweet-talking girls went up to the teacher and got their grades raised right there on the spot. And I thought: Well, gosh, when you’re just writing words down, they’re just words—it’s all subjective and it’s hard to tell what the real answer is. What I loved most about math was that you had to have an answer that was either correct or incorrect. You know what I mean? No gray areas—your answer was correct or incorrect and that was it. (Once I found I did have an answer that the teacher marked incorrect but I knew was right. And it turned out the book was wrong. Books do that sometimes.) Compare this to a book report or an essay you’re supposed to write where there are so many interpretations and so many ways to write it. Who’s to say which version the teacher will like? Who’s to say who really understood the book, or who got more out of it?

  And so somewhere on those long, long walks, I decided that logic was superior. This confirmed what I already thought, but I remember these walks really cementing the idea. I realized that I probably was not in the mainstream of people and social goings-on. I realized I thought differently than most other kids I knew. I thought: Hey, things are facts or things are lies. Mathematics is a truth because two plus two equals four, and if someday somebody finds out two plus two equals five, well, then we just have to come up with a new truth to deal with that. And to me, the very closest thing to truth—the main ethic I’d gotten from my dad and the ethic he’d ingrained in me—was logic. Logic was the

  thing. I decided that the most important measure of a person was truth, and that the calculations engineers made were the mark of people who lived truthfully.

  • o •

  One day at Sylvania I saw a manual entitled The Small Computer Handbook. I had this interest in computers but I only found out about them and how they worked by lucky accidents. This was one of my life’s luckiest accidents.

  The Sylvania engineers let me take this handbook home. Inside, it described the guts of the Digital Equipment PDP-8 minicomputer. This computer sat in a tall rack of equipment and had switches and lights and looked like it belonged on a factory floor or somewhere. I couldn’t say exactly because I’d never seen a real computer anywhere other than Sylvania. This one handbook finally solved a search I’d been on since fourth grade to discover what a real computer was inside.

  I had a good
knowledge of logic design, combining parts to make logic circuits. Now I had a description of what a real computer was. On my own I sat down for many nights figuring out ways to combine logic parts to make one of these PDP-8 computers. That first computer design of mine on paper was huge and unfinished and probably full of errors. But it was just a start.

  Over the next few years, beginning with my senior year in high school, I found ways to obtain manuals for almost every minicomputer being made. There was a flood of these minicomputers introduced in this time frame. They were taking computing to a smaller level than the huge machines that filled rooms. A typical minicomputer with enough memory to program (in a friendly programming language) was about the size of a microwave oven.

  I got manuals for minicomputers from Varian, Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment, Data General, and many more companies. Whenever I had a free weekend, I’d take catalogs of logic components, chips, from which computers are made, and a particular existing computer description from its handbook, and I’d design my own version of it. Many times I’d redesign the same computer a second or third time, using newer and better components. I developed a private little game of trying to design these minicomputers with the miiiimum number of chips. I have no idea why this became the pastime of my life. I did it all alone in my room with my door shut. It was like a private hobby. I didn’t share this activity with my parents, friends, teachers, or anyone over the years. It was that private.

  Because I could never afford the parts to build any of my computer designs, all I could do was design them on paper. Typically, once I started a design, I’d stay up very late one or more nights in a row, sprawled on my bedroom floor with papers all around and a Coke can nearby. Since I could never build my designs, all I could do was to try and beat my own designs by redesigning them even better, using fewer parts. I was competing with myself and developed tricks that certainly would never be describable or put in books. I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sorts of design tricks I’d come up with to save parts. I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper.

  Chapter 4

  The “Ethical” TV Jammer

  A guy named Rich Zenkere was selected class clown of Homestead High Class of 1968. He was a funny guy who sat next to me in a lot of classes because in most of our classes we had to sit in alphabetical order. And Wozniak is pretty close to Zenkere in the alphabet. So Rich, some other guy who sat near us, Scott Sampson, and I agreed that the three of us should look for colleges together.

  We planned to visit Caltech. We planned to fly down to Pomona, California, where Scripps, Pomona College, and California Polytechnic are located.

  And then we got this great idea to visit the University of Colorado at Boulder. It was where Rich’s dad had gone.

  What an exciting time this was for me. I had never been out of California in my life. I remember we got on the plane in San Jose Airport, back when it had only two gates, and took a 707 to Denver. We drove from Denver to Boulder by taxi and arrived when it was too dark to see anything. We passed out from exhaustion in the hotel room. And then, in the morning, we turned on the TV to find that it had snowed something like a foot and a half the night before. So we pulled the drapes, and sure enough there were inches and inches of snow outside. We were all excited.

  I had never been around real snow in my life. Where I lived, it might, snow a little some years, but never enough to stick on the ground and definitely never enough to make a snowball with. So this was amazing! All of a sudden we were outside throwing snowballs at each other. This was a whole new adventure for me.

  For some weird reason, we had shown up over Thanksgiving weekend. I guess we thought they’d have tours on a holiday, but of course they didn’t. So we just kind of walked around the empty campus for a couple of days. At one point we actually found an engineering building and there was a student inside. He walked us around the halls and showed us where the different departments were. He showed us all the engineering stuff and talked to us about the kinds of engineering projects going on at Colorado.

  Walking through the snow those two days, I was just so enamored of the place. The brick buildings were beautiful. Their reddish color looked so impressive up against the backdrop of the Flatiron Mountains. It was a college out in the middle of nowhere—it was about a mile walk to the city.

  I thought, Tliis is just so beautiful. It’s so wonderful to walk around this campus in the snow. And it was that snow that made me decide this was the college I was going to be attending. Its entrance requirements were low compared to my grades and SAT scores—I had perfect 800 scores on all my science and math entrance tests except for chemistry, where I only got a 770. But this was the college I was going to go to. The snow made me decide. I made the final decision right then and there.

  • o •

  The only problem was, my dad said Colorado would be too expensive. Next to some state university in New England, it charged the second-highest tuition in the country for out-of- state students.

  But we finally worked out a deal. He said I could go to Colorado for my freshman year and then to De Anza Community

  College, which was close to home, for my sophomore year. After that, I would transfer to the University of California at Berkeley for my junior year, where tuition would be much, much cheaper. I also applied to Berkeley—my parents forced me to—and I sent in my application on the very last day you could.

  I was accepted at Colorado and my parents paid everything in advance that summer, including the dorm fees and the tuition fees. But then my dad kept imploring me to go to De Anza, it was so much closer to home and cheaper. And he could afford, then, to give me a car.

  So I went down to register at De Anza and saw that the classes for chemistry, physics, and calculus were all full. What? I couldn’t believe it. Here I was—the star science and math student at my high school and all set to be an engineer—and the three most important courses I needed were locked out.

  It was horrible. I called the chemistry teacher on the phone, who said if I showed up I could probably get in, but I couldn’t shake this terrible feeling that my future was shutting down. I could see it shutting down right in front of me. I felt my whole academic life was going to be messed up right from the start. And it was right then that I changed my mind, and decided to see if it was still possible to go to Colorado.

  School had already started there, but after a couple of calls I found out I could still go. I had everything set up, airplane flight schedule and everything. I bought the tickets, went down to San Jose Airport, and flew into Colorado the next day. Just in time for the third day of classes.

  I remember arriving on campus that fall and thinking it was so beautiful, early September in Colorado. The leaves were yellow and orange and gold, and I felt like I was just so lucky.

  My roommate was Mike. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the dorm room with my bags was that he’d posted up about twenty foldout Playboy centerfolds on the walls.

  Wow, that was different! But I thought Mike was a neat guy, and I used to like listening to his stories of life as a military brat, about his high school in Germany and all the experiences he had. He was very sexually advanced, I thought. Sometimes he’d tell me he wanted the room alone on certain nights, and I knew why. I’d say, Well, okay. I’d take this tape recorder I had and a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes—Simon & Garfunkel was my big group then—and I’d go over to Rich Zenkere’s room and come back much later. I remember one time I was sleeping and he brought in this Mormon girl in the middle of the night. He was really something.

  Meanwhile, I’d hang around with other friends I’d made in the dorm. I went to football games. Our mascot was a buffalo named Ralphie (a humiliating name for anyone!), and a bunch of students dressed like cowboys would race him around on the field before the game. Ralphie was a real buffalo. I remember how my friend Rich Zenkere told us that, twenty years e
arlier, Colorado’s main rival back then, the Air Force Academy, managed to kidnap him. And when the Air Force Academy players showed up for the big game they cooked and ate poor Ralphie.

  I believed the story at the time, but you never knew about Rich. He took things so lightly and easily, always smiling and joking about the most serious things. He was a little bit dishonest, though. We worked together washing dishes at a girls’ dorm, and he ended up getting fired for faking time cards and stuff.

  I spent a lot of time in Rich’s room with him and his two roommates, Randy and Bud, playing hearts, poker, and bridge. Randy was interesting to me because he was a serious Christian—a born-again Christian—and the other two guys would denigrate him for it. Like he was dumb because of it. But I used to spend a lot of time talking to him about his beliefs. I had never had any kind of religious training whatsoever, so I was impressed when he told me about Christian tilings like “turning the other cheek” and

  forgiveness. I definitely became his friend. So anyway, we’d usually play cards late into the night, and I remember thinking, This is just the best year of my life. It was the first time in my life I could decide what to do with my time—what to eat, what to wear, what to say, what classes to take and how many.

  And I was meeting all kinds of interesting people. The bridge thing ended up getting huge for me. We started playing it right around finals week, and then it stuck. The four of us played bridge right off the seat of our pants. We didn’t have any books or tables in front of us, or anything that normal bridge players use. We just sort of figured out for ourselves what bridge bids worked and which ones didn’t. I mean, in my mind, bridge is more sophisticated than other games.