iWoz (7 page)

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 col- leges 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 earlier, 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.

A lot of card games are based on "tricks" where one person puts a card down and the other players follow with their own cards, and the highest-ranking card of the suit of the first card down wins. That's a trick. Now, in hearts, you try to avoid taking certain cards: for example, eveiy heart you win in a trick counts against you. In spades, you have a round of bidding first, betting how many tricks you and your partner—the person across the table from you in a game of four players—will take. If you bet five tricks and get that many, you get fifty points. But if you overbid and don't get as many tricks as you thought you would, you lose that many points. In spades, all of the spades have the special ability to trump the other cards.

But bridge is at the top end. You not only bet how many tricks you can take with your partner, whose hand you cannot see, but you also have to bet which suit will be the trump suit that beats all other suits.

Bridge is such a good balance of strategy and offense and defense. And at the same time, you're looking at your hand and trying to guess what others might have and passing signals for the bidding. You have to play on so many levels at once. We really

started out, like I said, knowing nothing. So we all had fun, since we were all playing at the same level.

But it's funny, we thought we were real bridge players, but we never could've gotten around and competed with real bridge players. A few years later when I was working at Hewlett- Packard, I tried to join a bridge club in my apartment building and I couldn't even begin to play with those women. You see, I'd never really memorized all those rules of how much you bid when you have which hands. So all I'd end up doing is messing up my partner.

These days, I can play bridge pretty well, but it's only because I read the bridge column in the newspaper every single day for years until I could figure out the formulas in my head.

• o •