iWoz (6 page)

Well, I sat in the chair in the office waiting for the vice principal to come in, and all of a sudden this police officer walks in the door carrying a box with wires coming out of it. And I just thought, Oh my god, they called the bomb demolition squad! Then they called me into a room and a cop said, "Look, your buddy told us everything." I figured the guy who told them was this guy I knew, Jerry, who was the only friend I'd told about the plan. But no, I later found out it was a mistake on my own part that got me caught. I realized many years later that they meant they had actually heard it from Bill Werner, whose locker they found it in. Turns out they'd hauled him out of a final—he looked at the design and said, "Oh, I know those components. Woz did it." Well, that's what I get for using some of the same parts Mr. Taylor, who lived next door to me, paid Electronics Kids like me and Bill Werner with when we worked in his yard.

So I could've denied it at that point, when I still thought it was Jerry who told them, and in fact, we all had an agreement that none of us involved in a prank would ever tell on the other ones. But anyway, I knew I was in big trouble, and finally they sat me down with the principal, and the vice principal, the counselor,

the dean, and two police officers. And the principal starts telling me how the English teacher, Mr. Stottlemeier, had heard a ticking sound in the locker. The principal, Mr. Bryld, told me how he opened the locker, clutched the device to his chest, and then ran all the way out to the football field and dismantled it!

I started laughing, even though I was trying not to, so then I tried to cough to cover it up. But I couldn't even do that, because I knew I had rigged the metronome with a switched resistor to start ticking faster when someone opened up the locker door.

I'll tell you, laughing about that—and how could I not laugh— well, it didn't fix the problem any. They debated for a while what to do with me, and decided to send me to juvenile hall—that's right, juvie!—for a night. Just one night.

The principal was terribly upset because there had been some actual bomb threats at the school a few weeks earlier. This wasn't a bomb. It was a metronome, a joke. But I still had to go to juvie that one night, and I did make some good use of my time while I was there. I thought: Well, what do they always say about prisoners in prisons? That they teach each other crimes. So I did my fair share. I pointed out to all these big tough guys in juvie how to remove the electrical wires on the ceiling fan. I said, "Take those wires off and touch them to the bars when the jailer comes to open the bars and he'll get shocked!" I sure had a fun time there. All those guys in there treated me really nice. This is way, way before it was cool to be a nerd, of course.

• o •

Later, much later, I found a group where being a nerd was cooler. In the mid-1970s, a couple of years before we started Apple, I joined a club called the Homebrew Computer Club. I loved this group and attended almost every meeting from the time they started meeting in Gordon French's garage in Menlo Park every other Wednesday from 1975 up until 1977, the year we incorporated Apple. These people had the same dream I

had—to learn how to build a computer everyone could afford and use. These were my kind of people. Their prime focus was a build-it-yourself device called the Altair (which could be expanded into a usable computer with a huge amount of money) and the things you could do with it. And they used to have an hour or more of random announcements (called the "random- access period") where anyone who had anything to say could say it if they just raised their hand.

I had a lot to say, but I was unable to raise my hand or say a thing. I used to just sit on the edge of my chair listening to them tell every rumor in the industry about what technologies were coming out next. I was that shy. I was in the back row just like I had been in junior high school.

I finally ended up having to get up and show everybody two real computers I'd built. (One of these became the foundation for the Apple I designs.) And as soon as people saw what I had done, and that it was really impressive, suddenly we all had something to talk about.

From elementary school on, even up to starting Apple and beyond, I used my clever designs as an easier, more comfortable way to communicate with others. I believe all of us humans have an internal need to socialize. In my case it came out mainly by doing impressive things like electronics and incredibly showy and clever things like pranks.

It was probably the shyness thing that in the sixth grade and afterward put me on the hunt for electronics journals. That way, I could read about electronics stuff without having to actually walk up to someone and ask questions. I was too shy to even go to a library and ask for a book on computers called
Computers.
And because I was way too shy to learn the ordinary way, I ended up getting what was to me the most important knowledge in the world accidentally.

• o •

Then, in high school, a lot changed again. Most of it had to do with an electronics teacher I had named Mr. McCollum. He had a huge, huge influence on me.

Now, Mr. McCollum was an interesting guy. For one tiling, he was a military guy before he was a teacher, which meant he could tell a lot of jokes, even off-color jokes. So he related well to his students. Keep in mind that back then, the students in an electronics class were mostly low-performing students. Electronics was like a vocational course. There were only a few electronics students who, like me, were taking top classes in other areas. And remember that I was a math whiz. I won the math award from my junior high graduation and had won some yearly math awards from my high school, too.

Combine math and electronics and you know what you get? It's called engineering.

Mr. McCollum would stand there in front of us doing calculations on this big yellow slide rule. He would do more calculations on that slide rule than we even did in chemistry; the course was that intensive. And Mr. McCollum wrote that course himself. He wrote handouts that went in a logical order—you know, step by step, going up the electronics ladder. You learn one thing about resistors, then a more complicated thing, then you learn faster, then you put them together. It was such a good way to teach electronics that I used it later when I taught my own computer classes in later life.

And Mr. McCollum had the most amazing collection of electronics equipment, really advanced stuff. It was all test equipment I could never afford on my own, and it was better than what even most college-level labs had then. Mr. McCollum had been resourceful and had gotten the school to buy less expensive electronics kits in the few first years of Homestead High School. As his students learned electronics, they built the kits of equipment to take them further. Now, by my senior year, we had pretty complete labs.

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 10
²⁵
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?