iWoz (11 page)

She invited me to a Scientology meeting, and of course I went. I ended up in the audience watching this guy make this incredible presentation about how you can basically be in better control of yourself and that you could get really happy from that.

After the meeting, the girl I met sat with me in some little office for an hour, trying to sell me these courses to become a better person. I was going to have to pay money for them.

I said to her, "I've already got my happiness. I've got my keys to happiness. I don't need anything. I'm not looking for any of this stuff." And I meant it. The only thing I mightVe wanted was a girlfriend, that's for sure, but the rest of the stuff I already had. I had a sense of humor, and I had this attitude about life that let me choose to be happy. I knew that whether to be happy was always going to be my choice, and only my choice.

Plus I had these values, values I'd grown up with. I already had this peaceful feeling inside my head. To this day, I'm one of those people whose head just floats. I really did feel happy most of the time. I still do.

So the bottom line, of course, is she never sold me any courses or anything. In fact, she just walked out and never came back. When I wasn't interested in buying her courses, she left and just let me sit there. I sat and sat, waiting for her to come back. Finally I walked out the door and left, too. I thought, Man, that's too bad. She was just about sales, that's all she was.

• o •

After my year at De Anza, I decided the thing to do was to take a job where I could actually program computers. I thought I'd skip a year of school so I could earn enough money to go for a third one, at Berkeley maybe.

Now, for a while I'd been telling my dad that I definitely was going to own a 4K-byte Data General Nova someday. That was just enough kilobytes needed to program in. It was this huge, powerful computer at the time. I loved its internal architecture and everything about it. I even had a poster of it up in my room. So I heard there was a place in Sunnyvale that sold these Data General computers. My friend Allen Baum and I drove down to the place.

Well, the office was beautiful, and right in the middle of the lobby was this big glass display with a large computer in it. It wasn't a room-sized computer like a mainframe, but a midsized

computer. It was about as large as a refrigerator, with other things like large printers and disk drives the size of dishwashers attached to it. There were some wires hanging loose with engineers working on them. And I thought, Wow, here's a computer actually being designed and built. That was a shock for me to see.

Another shock turned out to be that I had walked in the wrong door, that I wasn't at the Data General company at all, but at a smaller company called Tenet. Allen and I both filled out applications for jobs as programmers—and you know what? We got them.

We got to program in the language FORTRAN, and also in machine language, which is nearest to the lowest-level language (Is and Os) a computer can understand. We got to know that computer so deeply that summer. We really got into the depths of its architecture. Personally, I didn't think much of the architecture inside, although they ended up building something pretty good—a working computer, a fast computer, a low-cost computer for what it was. I mean, it cost more than $100,000, and those were 1970 dollars. I was impressed by that. It had an operating system that worked well and several programming languages.

Now, of course, in no way was that Tenet computer like our computers today. It had no screen for a display and no keyboard to type into. It had lights you had to read off a front panel, and it took information from punch cards. But for the time being, yeah, I guess it was pretty cool.

• o •

Tenet actually went out of business the next summer—I stayed for the duration, having decided not to return to school that year after all—but my time there turned out to be really fortunate.

You see, during the summer, I remember telling one Tenet executive how I had spent the last few years designing and redesigning existing computers on paper but could never build one because I didn't have the parts.

One time, at my old friend Bill Werner's house, I got Bill to call up a chip company, but he could never get them to give us free parts, never. But I asked this Tenet executive, and he said, "Sure, I can get you the parts." I guess he had access to sample parts, and that was what I needed.

To help him avoid having to get me tons and tons of parts— parts I would need to build some kind of existing minicomputer—I decided I would build a computer that was just a little one with very few chips.

I'm talking about, like, about twenty chips—which is veiy, very few chips compared to the hundreds it would have taken to build a normal computer at the time.

Now, I had this other friend, Bill Fernandez, who lived down the block. I started hanging around at his house, and we just started putting together this little computer I designed (first on paper, of course) piece by piece, bit by bit. He helped me by doing all kinds of things—like soldering, for instance.

Anyway, we would do this in his garage, and then we'd ride our bikes down to the Sunnyvale Safeway, where we would buy Cragmont cream soda, and then drink it while we worked on this machine. That's how we started referring to it as the Cream Soda Computer. All the Cream Soda Computer was, really, was a little circuit board that allowed you to plug in connectors and solder the chips I had to the connectors. This board was tiny—I would say it was no larger than four to six inches.

Like all the computers at the time, there wasn't a screen or a keyboard. No one had thought of that yet. Instead you'd write a program, punch it into a punch card, slide it in, and then you'd get your answer by reading the flashing lights on the front panel. Or, for instance, you could write a program that would tell the computer to beep every three seconds. And if it did, then you would know it was working. It turned out just as I had designed it, with few chips because I didn't want to ask that executive for too many free samples. So it was just the most minimum thing you could even call a computer. What I mean by that is, it could run a program. It could give you results.

The other significant thing about it was the fact that it had 256 bytes of RAM. (That's about the size in memory a word processor would take today to store this very sentence.)

RAM chips were almost unheard of at this time. Back then, almost all computers had a type of memory called "magnetic core memories." When you dealt with them, you had to deal with messy voltages to spike the right currents down the wires, the wires that had to go into these little round magnetic cores that looked like tiny donuts you needed a magnifying glass even to see. This was definitely not the type of electronics I had in mind. With RAM chips, though, you just plug them in and connect them to the CPU, the brain of the computer. You connect them to the processor with wires and that's that. So, as you can see, I was extremely lucky to get those eight chips that added up to 256 bytes. And as I said, even then you couldn't do much of anything in that small a space.

• o •

What Is RAM?

RAM, short for random-access memory, was a new type of computer storage back in 1970. These are chips whose contents can be accessed in any (i.e., random) order. All computers today have RAM chips inside to store data—not permanently, but while your computer is on and you're working. When the computer shuts down, the contents of RAM goes away.

That's why you need to save your programs to disk.

One day my mom called the
Peninsula Times
newspaper and told them about the Cream Soda Computer. A reporter came over and asked some questions about it and took some pictures. But just as he was finishing, he accidentally stepped on the power supply cable and blew out the computer. The Cream Soda actually smoked! But the article ran anyway, and that was pretty cool.

But you know what? I knew deep inside that it didn't matter that I had built this computer. It didn't matter because the computer couldn't do anything useful. It couldn't play games, it couldn't solve math problems. It had way too little memory. The only important thing was that finally, finally, I'd been able to actually build a computer. My very first one. It was an extraordinary milestone in that sense.

Five years later, companies would be building and selling computer kits that were just about at this level—they had the same amount of memory and the same awkward front panel of lights and switches.

Looking back, I see the Cream Soda Computer as kind of a jumping-off point for me. And I got there early.

• o •

One other thing: the Cream Soda Computer turned out to be the way I first met Steve Jobs. I was four years ahead of him in school so I didn't know him; he was closer to Bill Fernandez's age. But one day Bill told me, "Hey, there's someone you should meet. His name is Steve. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he's also into building electronics like you are."

So one day—it was daytime, I remember—Bill called Steve and had him come over to his house. I remember Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill's house for the longest time, just sharing stories—mostly about pranks we'd pulled, and also what kind of electronic designs we'd done. It felt like we had so much in common. Typically, it was really hard for me to explain

to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. And I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.

So Steve came into the garage and saw the computer (this was before it blew up) and listened to our description of it. I could tell he was impressed. I mean, we'd actually built a computer from scratch and proved that it was possible—or going to be possible—for people to have computers in a really small space.

Steve and I got close right away, even though he was still in high school, remember, and lived about a mile away in Los Altos. I lived in Sunnyvale. Bill was right—we two Steves did have a lot in common. We talked electronics, we talked about music we liked, and we traded stories about pranks we'd pulled. We even pulled a few together.

• o •

When I met Steve Jobs I was still hanging out with this other guy I'd known since high school, Allen Baum.

Allen was kind of a nerdy, skinny guy with glasses when I first met him back in high school. We were both in the super-elite of students, not just the ones in top classes but students who outperformed pretty much everybody else. We'd be selected out by teachers to compete in math contests or go to speeches and lectures, that kind of thing. So we all knew each other. Most of us were considered by other kids to be kind of weird outsiders, and Allen was even smaller, scrawnier, and more outside than I was. He was even nerdier.

Later he came to be very into hippie things and San Francisco- type music like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, but he started out just completely way, way on the outside.

From high school on, I used to like to go visit Allen and his parents. They were Jewish with relatives who'd died in concentration camps; it was shocking and all so new to me. Allen's father, Elmer, was an engineer who loved humor—he was incredibly

funny—and he was really active in civil rights causes. His mom, Charlotte, was like that, too. I thought of Elmer and Charlotte Baum as being so much like me—-just kind of casual and fun.

So, as I said, I was hanging out with Allen a lot when Steve Jobs, who by now was a junior at Homestead High, had an idea. He wanted to create a huge sign on a giant bedsheet with a flip- off sign—you know, the middle-finger salute—right during graduation. He thought the sign should say "Best Wishes." We started calling it the "Brazilian Best Wishes" sign.

So we went right to work. We got this big sheet—it had been tie-dyed because Allen and his brothers were always tie-dying everything back then—and spread it out in Allen's backyard. Anyway, we started sketching out our drawing with chalk—a big hand with its finger sticking up. And Allen's mother even helped us draw it—she showed us how to shade it so it looked more like a real hand, less like a cartoon. I remember how she sort of realized what the hand was doing partway through, but she just snickered at us and smiled, saying, "I know what that is." But she didn't stop us. I guess she didn't know what we planned to do with it, exactly.

On the sheet, we signed it "SWAB JOB. The S and W stood for Steve Wozniak, the A and B stood for Allen Baum, and JOB stood for Steve Jobs. We finished the sheet and rolled it up. Late that night, we climbed onto the top of the C building, where we planned to drop it. The idea was that we would attach it to this forty-pound fishing line and kind of pull it down when the graduating Homestead High seniors walked past.

Well, we practiced it and found out that you just can't pull a sheet down off a roof and have it roll down nicely. It doesn't come down off the roof easily, and it will pull other junk off the roof, and it can come down all weird in different shapes.

So the next night we tried to make this little cart thing with an axle and two wheels that we could pull. The idea was that it

would let the sheet down gradually. The axle was nearly eight inches wide. But we found that one of the wheels would always get stuck on its little track. We just couldn't get it right.