Steve Jobs part 1

While a student in McCollum’s class,
Jobs became friends with a graduate
who was the teacher’s all-time favorite
and a school legend for his wizardry in
the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose
younger brother had been on a swim
team with Jobs, was almost five years
older than Jobs and far more knowl-
edgeable about electronics. But emo-
tionally and socially he was still a high
school geek.
Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at
his father’s knee. But their lessons
were different. Paul Jobs was a high
school dropout who, when fixing up
cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis
Wozniak, known as Jerry, was a bril-
liant engineering graduate from Cal
Tech, where he had quarterbacked the
football team, who became a rocket
scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engi-
neering and looked down on those in
business, marketing, and sales. “I
remember him telling me that engi-
neering was the highest level of impor-
tance you could reach in the world,”
Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes
society to a new level.”
One of Steve Wozniak’s first
memories was going to his father’s
workplace on a weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad
“putting them on a table with me so I
got to play with them.” He watched
with fascination as his father tried to
get a waveform line on a video screen
to stay flat so he could show that one
of his circuit designs was working
properly. “I could see that whatever
my dad was doing, it was important
and good.” Woz, as he was known
even then, would ask about the resis-
tors and transistors lying around the
house, and his father would pull out a
blackboard to illustrate what they did.
“He would explain what a resistor was
by going all the way back to atoms and electrons. He explained how resistors
worked when I was in second grade,
not by equations but by having me
picture it.”
Woz’s father taught him something
else that became ingrained in his
childlike, socially awkward personality:
Never lie. “My dad believed in hon-
esty. Extreme honesty. That’s the big-
gest thing he taught me. I never lie,
even to this day.” (The only partial
exception was in the service of a good
practical joke.) In addition, he imbued
his son with an aversion to extreme
ambition, which set Woz apart from
Jobs. At an Apple product launch event in 2010, forty years after they
met, Woz reflected on their differ-
ences. “My father told me, ‘You always
want to be in the middle,’ ” he said. “I
didn’t want to be up with the high-
level people like Steve. My dad was an
engineer, and that’s what I wanted to
be. I was way too shy ever to be a
business leader like Steve.”
By fourth grade Wozniak became,
as he put it, one of the “electronics
kids.” He had an easier time making
eye contact with a transistor than with
a girl, and he developed the chunky
and stooped look of a guy who spends
most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At the same age when Jobs
was puzzling over a carbon micro-
phone that his dad couldn’t explain,
Wozniak was using transistors to
build an intercom system featuring
amplifiers, relays, lights, and buzzers
that connected the kids’ bedrooms of
six houses in the neighborhood. And
at an age when Jobs was building
Heathkits, Wozniak was assembling a
transmitter and receiver from Halli-
crafters, the most sophisticated radios
available.
Woz spent a lot of time at home
reading his father’s electronics jour-
nals, and he became enthralled by stories about new computers, such as
the powerful ENIAC. Because Boolean
algebra came naturally to him, he mar-
veled at how simple, rather than com-
plex, the computers were. In eighth
grade he built a calculator that in-
cluded one hundred transistors, two
hundred diodes, and two hundred
resistors on ten circuit boards. It won
top prize in a local contest run by the
Air Force, even though the competi-
tors included students through twelfth
grade.
Woz became more of a loner when
the boys his age began going out with
girls and partying, endeavors that he found far more complex than design-
ing circuits. “Where before I was pop-
ular and riding bikes and everything,
suddenly I was socially shut out,” he
recalled. “It seemed like nobody spoke
to me for the longest time.” He found
an outlet by playing juvenile pranks. In
twelfth grade he built an electronic
metronome—one of those tick-tick-
tick devices that keep time in music
class—and realized it sounded like a
bomb. So he took the labels off some
big batteries, taped them together, and
put it in a school locker; he rigged it to
start ticking faster when the locker
opened. Later that day he got called to the principal’s office. He thought it
was because he had won, yet again,
the school’s top math prize. Instead
he was confronted by the police. The
principal had been summoned when
the device was found, bravely ran onto
the football field clutching it to his
chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz
tried and failed to suppress his laugh-
ter. He actually got sent to the juvenile
detention center, where he spent the
night. It was a memorable experience.
He taught the other prisoners how to
disconnect the wires leading to the
ceiling fans and connect them to the
bars so people got shocked when touching them.
Getting shocked was a badge of
honor for Woz. He prided himself on
being a hardware engineer, which
meant that random shocks were rou-
tine. He once devised a roulette game
where four people put their thumbs in
a slot; when the ball landed, one
would get shocked. “Hardware guys
will play this game, but software guys
are too chicken,” he noted.
During his senior year he got a
part-time job at Sylvania and had the
chance to work on a computer for the
first time. He learned FORTRAN from
a book and read the manuals for most of the systems of the day, starting with
the Digital Equipment PDP-8. Then he
studied the specs for the latest mi-
crochips and tried to redesign the
computers using these newer parts.
The challenge he set himself was to
replicate the design using the fewest
components possible. Each night he
would try to improve his drawing from
the night before. By the end of his se-
nior year, he had become a master. “I
was now designing computers with
half the number of chips the actual
company had in their own design, but
only on paper.” He never told his
friends. After all, most seventeen-year-olds were getting their
kicks in other ways. On Thanksgiving weekend of his
senior year, Wozniak visited the Univ-
ersity of Colorado. It was closed for
the holiday, but he found an engi-
neering student who took him on a tour of the labs. He begged his father
to let him go there, even though the
out-of-state tuition was more than the
family could easily afford. They struck
a deal: He would be allowed to go for
one year, but then he would transfer to
De Anza Community College back
home. After arriving at Colorado in the
fall of 1969, he spent so much time
playing pranks (such as producing
reams of printouts saying “Fuck
Nixon”) that he failed a couple of his
courses and was put on probation. In
addition, he created a program to
calculate Fibonacci numbers that
burned up so much computer time the university threatened to bill him
for the cost. So he readily lived up to
his bargain with his parents and trans-
ferred to De Anza.