iWoz (5 page)

Unfortunately, though, the system didn't win. It blew up. What I mean by blew up is, the night before the competition, some of the transistors started to put out smoke. Obviously something was wrong. I knew it was going to take forever to find out what piece of equipment had blown and there was no way I was going to be able to do this in time for the contest. What a disappointment, because I like to win. I always, as early as I can remember, wanted to be the best at things. And I often was, as luck had it.

But I also thought at the time that it didn't mean as much to

me at that point, just winning the science fair, because I knew, and my dad knew, that I had actually built this fairly complicated logic machine and it worked.

I mean, even as a kid it was obvious to me what the important thing really was. I said to myself, Look, showing someone an award from a science fair is not as important as knowing you already have the award somewhere at home. And that's not as important as having earned it, even if you don't have the award at home at all. And that's not as important as the most important thing: that you've done the learning on your own to figure out how to do it. I did that learning on my tic-tac-toe machine, and it was very, very close to being done and complete. I'm still proud of it. For me it's the engineering, not the glory, that's really important.

• o •

Okay, so I'd built that tic-tac-toe system basically by putting together electronic gates. The idea was to put the gates together into a system of transistor circuits that would never let you beat it. And as I said, I came up with the rules by playing all possible games.

But in the eighth grade I did something altogether different. I came up with a machine I called the Adder/Subtractor. This would be the closest thing to an actual computer I'd ever designed. I can say this because I designed it so it would do something—you could add or subtract numbers, and the result would show up on an electric display—but also because it wasn't made up of just a set of logic gates like the tic-tac-toe machine. Addition and subtraction are logic, just like tic-tac-toe; based on inputting Is and Os, you can calculate what Is and Os come out.

The Adder/Subtractor wasn't more complicated in terms of size or construction time than the tic-tac-toe machine, but this project actually had a goal that was closer to real computing. A more important purpose than tic-tac-toe. We're taught to add

and subtract in school, but nobody teaches you tic-tac-toe. It's not that important. Adding numbers could put a man on the moon; tic-tac-toe couldn't.

My project had a function, a real function that was useful. You could input numbers, add or subtract one, and see your answer.

This Adder/Subtractor was about a foot square. I had a plastic board filled with holes and store-bought connectors I could plug down into the holes to form connection points. I plugged the connectors in where needed and soldered transistors and other parts to them.

I had ten little switches to represent Os and Is, and another set of switches to represent more than 0s and Is. So if you wanted to add 3 plus 2, on one row you would have to toggle the right-most two switches (which is equivalent to 0000000011, the binary number representing 3) on the top row. Then, to represent 2,1 had to toggle the next to last switch to the right on the bottom row. In binary, that is 0000000010. The answer would show up in lights, the lights I had attached. In this example, two lights would be on—representing 0000000101, which represents 5. This would all be assuming that you had the Adder/Subtractor-. in "add" mode instead of "subtract" mode. What was impressive about this was that I knew so many levels of electronics, logic, binary number theory, soldering, and all the experiences of my life so far just added up. I could explain to judges how binary numbers worked, how you added and subtracted them, and then I could explain how gates were made of diodes and transistors. I would then show the right combination of gates that made a one-bit adder (something that could only add 0 and 1). I could show them a simple modification I did that could do subtraction as well. I also told the judges how I'd solved a nonworking problem in the electronics of a gate, switching from resistors to diodes. That's real electronics know-how.

On the one board were ten Adder/Subtractor circuits side by

side handling carries and borrows (remember arithmetic) so you could add or subtract larger numbers—any number up to 1,023.

But here's the thing. I took it down to the Bay Area Science Fair one night, to set it up before the day of judging. Some people showed me where to put it and asked me if I'd like to tell them about it. I told them no, figuring that I'd just tell them the story on judging day. By then Id gotten kind of shy. Looking back, I think I may have turned down the judges without knowing it.

When I showed up on judging day, all the projects already had their awards. The judging had already happened somehow! I had an honorable mention, and there were three exhibits that had higher awards than mine. I saw them and remember thinking they were trivial compared to mine, so what happened? I then looked in the fair brochure and those three projects were all from the school district that was putting on the fair.

I thought, Hey, I've been cheated. But that night, I showed the machine and talked to lots of people—including, I'm sure, the real judges—and it seemed like they really understood how big my project was. I mean, it was great and I knew it and eveiyone knew it. I was able to explain how I'd used logic equations and gates and how I'd combined gates and transistors with binary number (Is and Os) arithmetic to get the whole thing working.

After that, the Air Force gave me its top award for an electronics project for the Bay Area Science Fair, even though I was only in eighth grade and the fair went up to twelfth grade. As part of the award, they gave me a tour of the U.S. Strategic Air Command Facility at Travis Air Force Base. And they gave me a flight in a noncommercial jet, my first-ever flight in any plane. I think I might have caught my love for flying then.

When I look back, that Adder/Subtractor was such a key project in my getting to be the engineer who ended up building the first personal computer. This project was a first step to that. It

was a large project, for one thing, involving more than one hundred transistors, two hundred diodes, and two hundred resistors, plus relays and switches. And it performed a function that was useful: addition and subtraction.

And thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. I'm serious. Patience is usually so underrated. I mean, for all those projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book. Sometimes I think, Man, I lucked out. It seems like I was just pointed in such a lucky direction in life, this early learning of how to do things one tiny little step at a time. I learned to not worry so much about the outcome, but to concentrate on the step I was on and to try to do it as perfectly as I could when I was doing it.

Not everyone gets this in today's engineering community, you know. Throughout my career at Apple and other places, you always find a lot of geeks who try to reach levels without doing the in-between ones first, and it won't work. It never does. That's just cognitive development, plain and simple. You can't teach somebody two cognitive steps above from where you are—and knowing that helped me with my own children as well as with the fifth graders I taught later on. I kept telling them, like a mantra: One step at a time.

Chapter 3
Learning by Accident

Throughout most of elementary school, I was a little shy, but at least I had a lot of friends and was really athletic. I was the de facto leader of the Electronics Kids because I already knew so much of the stuff we needed to build the things we wanted to build. This was a close group in the neighborhood, and that was great. I loved being able to excel at things, and having people recognize me for that. Not out of ego, really, just a drive to be the best.

I was good at swimming and football and made the All-Stars in Little League, where the other kids told me I was the best pitcher and runner and hitter on my teams. In fifth grade 1 was the smartest student in my class, according to my teachers at least, and I was elected school student body vice president. Do I sound like I'm bragging? I know I do, but I don't mean to. I was just so proud of all that. All these activities built up my self-esteem, and that was an important part of my internal development.

But things changed in sixth grade. I wasn't so popular anymore. In fact, suddenly it was like I was invisible. All of a sudden, other kids didn't recognize me as much for my math and science skills, which really bothered me. I mean, that's what I was best at. This was a time when a lot of students start flirting and engaging

in all kinds of small talk that I didn't relate to. So I wasn't included. My natural shyness just made me bottom out in sixth grade. I really stopped enjoying school so much. Socially, I went straight to the bottom.

I think of the years after that, seventh and eighth grades especially, as terrible years. Where before I was popular and riding bikes and everything, suddenly I was socially shut out and not popular at all. It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the longest time. I was in the advanced classes and got good grades, but I didn't have much enjoyment doing it.

As an example, I remember few teachers from those bad years.

The only way I can explain it is that when kids that age start getting social, your position in the group starts getting important to a lot of people. I've watched this happen with my own kids and the kids I've taught. Who are the talkers? Who makes the decisions? Who rises to the top? And because I became so shy when I hit adolescence—well, I just went to the bottom. It was a tremendous shock for me. Except for the science projects, which still got me recognized by my teachers and grown-ups, I felt terribly awkward. I couldn't identify with other kids my age anymore. The way they spoke—I felt like I didn't know their language anymore. And I'd feel too scared to talk because I thought I'd say the wrong thing.

At the same time I was starting to feel advanced, science- and electronics-wise, I felt shunned by all these kids who suddenly, and for no reason I could understand, just couldn't accept me anymore. I did electronics when a lot of others started hanging out and partying and drinking and going to, well, I guess you would call them make-out parties.

This started in sixth grade, and in many ways, that shyness is still with me. Even today. I have friends who can just go up and talk to anybody. They're suave and make friends so easily. Small talk, they can do that. I can't possibly do that. I can give speeches

because I've had something like thirty years of experience doing it, and I have techniques I use to make it easier, techniques I gained gradually from having to do public speaking for many years. I just make lots of jokes to get everyone laughing. Or I build and show off some electronic device to get people talking to me about it.

Or—and maybe you know this about me—I break the ice and make people laugh by pulling pranks on them. I could write a whole book on those pranks alone, that's for sure.

• o •

I did a ton of pranks in junior high and high school. I got caught many times in junior high. The main thing I learned was that if you told a few others about a prank, the word spread and you got caught quickly. In high school I was careful in this regard. I made sure to keep my pranks quiet.

Once, for the benefit of everyone in my twelfth-grade driver's education class, I built an electronic siren—it sounded just like a real police siren—that I could start and stop, holding it under my chair in the dark during the movie that played as we drove in our simulators. I wanted to see if anyone braked and pulled over. I'd make it with tons of batteries so it would last a month or more and place it on top of the TVs that were in every classroom. (The TVs were up high, supported from and attached to the ceiling, so the teachers couldn't see my sirens.) The teachers would think the TV had a problem. It's hard to isolate where a very high pitch is coming from; I'd read that somewhere.

But later in the twelfth grade, I got caught again. Big-time.

I got the idea to build a little electronic metronome—you know, the thing that goes tick, tick, tick, to keep time when people take piano lessons. I built it, heard the ticking, and thought: Hey, this kind of sounds like a bomb. So I took some batteries, took the labels off the batteries so they looked like plain metal canisters, and I taped them together. And then I wrote in big letters on it: contact explosive.

I thought: Oh, this will be funny. I'll stick it in Bill Werner's locker. I just happened to know his locker code. Bill's locker was near mine so I put my so-called electronic metronome in. Now, this was in the morning before school, and after I put it in there, I could barely hear it ticking. Nobody was going to be tricked by this if they couldn't even hear it! I'm thinking: What a bummer and what a waste if this thing isn't going to work. But when I came out of my last final that day, my counselor walked up to me and said: "Steve, the vice principal wants to see you in his office." This was a bad sign. Then again, I thought maybe there was a chance I was getting the math award for a math contest I had recently competed in and that's why he wanted to see me. So I didn't know for sure if I was in trouble or not.