iWoz (9 page)

Another program worked with Fibonacci numbers. These are numbers that go in a sequence like 1,2, 3, 5, 8,13,21,34 ... Each Fibonacci number is the sum of the two numbers preceding it. So it's a never-ending sequence. All of my seven programs did this— calculated numbers in these long, ridiculously long, sequences.

Some programs have loops and don't stop running because there is a bug, or a problem, with a program. That is called an infinite loop, which I told you about in connection with the chess game I did back in high school. Anyway, the Computer Center automatically kicked off any program that ran more than 64 seconds. So I figured out that all my computers could print out 60 pages in under 64 seconds, and that's why I wrote each program to print out only 60 pages all numbered page 1, page 2, etc. The next time I ran the program, it would print the next 60 pages (beginning at 61), and so on. I wrote all my programs so they would punch some cards I could use the next time so the programs could pick up where they left off.

I would walk over to the Computer Center every morning and drop my seven programs off. Then, around noon, I would pick up my outputs and resubmit the programs. Then I would come back in the evening and resubmit them. I would get three runs a day times 60 pages times seven programs piling up in my dorm room. Mike, my roommate, started getting a little upset at all the space it was taking up. It was really piling up: reams and reams, feet and feet of computer paper, all stacking up in my dorm room.

Then, one afternoon, I got to the Computer Center for an afternoon run and they didn't have my programs there. There was a note there saying I should see my professor right away.

I went to see him in his office. He said, "Okay, sit down." He started a tape recorder—he punched a button and started recording us. I remember I got a bit scared.

"You've been running these programs on your own," he said.

And I said, "Yes. We were in a programming class. I was learn- ing programming. I ran them under my own student number. I didn't try to hide the fact I was running them."

"This had nothing to do with our class," he said.

"It was FORTRAN," I told him.

"This is not the FORTRAN we teach," he said. And he was right. Because I had gone way into the manuals to find little

What Is FORTRAN?

FORTRAN is a computer language developed in the 1950s and still heavily used for scientific computing and numerical computation half a century later. The name comes from the words "Formula Translation." As a compiled language, it is typically faster and more powerful than an interpreted language such as BASIC.

tricks of mathematical symbols. I had gone way beyond simple programming, and we both knew it.

He said it took him a long time studying my programs to figure out what they did, but he finally figured them out. He said: "Are you trying to get me?"

Get him? I didn't know what he meant by that. I guess he felt threatened by the unrest happening in relation to the Vietnam War. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was big on that campus. But I was totally apolitical except for registering once to be in the University Republicans Club! I mean, I was just a mild, meek engineering student and would never be involved in anything politically subversive.

"Out to get you?" I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.

Well, he picked up the phone and called someone at the Computer Center. "These programs . . . Mr. Wozniak should be billed for this computer time."

Then I found out what I'd done. I'd run my class five times over its annual budget for computer time. I didn't even realize there were budgets. I thought if you're in a computer class, you get computer time. That was logical to assume. But now I realized I ran up a whole lot of money on his account, and my best guess is he was using me to get out of it. I didn't think they would actually charge me, a student. A freshman. But I was scared because the amount he was talking about was in the thousands of dollars—many times the out-of-state tuition money.

So that's how it became very clear to me, at the end of that school year, that I was not going to make it an issue with my parents and try to go back to Colorado. I was on probation for computer abuse. I wouldn't let my parents find out. I didn't want them to get billed this huge amount of money. So that's how I decided to go to De Anza Community College the next year, instead of going back to Colorado like all my friends.

What really bothers me when I think of this now is, they shouldn't have charged me. They should've praised me for doing these brilliant programs all on my own.

And I did get an A-plus in that class.

• o •

Now I was back home and attending De Anza Community College. I spent a lot of time designing and redesigning computers on paper, which is what I'd been doing in high school. Like when I took the manuals of popular minicomputers at the time (the pizza-box-sized, rack-mounted computers from Varian, Hewlett- Packard, Digital Equipment, and other companies in 1969 and 1970) and redesigned them, over and over, on paper so they would take fewer chips and run more efficiently.

By the time I finished at De Anza, I had literally designed and redesigned some of the best-known computers in the world. I'd become an expert on designing them, no question, because I'd redesigned their prototypes so many dozens of times. I'd done everything but build them. There was no doubt in my mind that if I ever did build them, I could get them to work. I was this virtual expert—and yes, I mean that in the software sense of the word "virtual." I never built those computers, but I was so entranced by and familiar with their innards that I easily could have taken any one of them apart and rebuilt it so that the computer would be cheaper, better, and more efficient.

I never had the courage to ask chip companies for free samples of what were then expensive chips. A year later I would meet Steve Jobs, who showed me how brave he was by scoring free chips just by calling sales reps. I could never do that. Our intro- verted and extroverted personalities (guess who's which) really helped us in those days. What one of us found difficult, the other often accomplished pretty handily. Examples of that teamwork are all over this story.

• o •

Once, at De Anza, my quantum physics teacher said, "Wozniak. That's an unusual name. I knew a Wozniak once. There was a Wozniak who went to Caltech."

"My father," I said, "he went to Caltech."

"Well, this one was a great football player."

That was my father, I told him. He was the team's quarterback.

"Yes," the teacher said. "We would never go to football games, but at Caltech, you had to go just to watch Jerry Wozniak. He was famous."

You know, I think my dad was the one good quarterback Caltech ever had. He even got scouted by the Los Angeles Rams, though I don't think he was good enough to play pro. Still, it was neat to hear from a physics teacher that he remembered my dad for his football. It made me feel like I shared a history with him. The teacher once even brought me a Caltech paper from back in those days with a picture of my dad in his uniform.

I didn't get along with all the teachers, though. I was taking an advanced-level math class, and the teacher caught me not paying attention. (I was trying to figure out how to write a FORTRAN compiler in machine language for the Data General Nova.)

I was just at the first line where you have to enter something and store it in memory when he said: "You've got so much potential, Wozniak. If only you'd just put yourself into this material."

It stung me the way he said that in front of the whole class. That wasn't necessary. I just wanted to sit in class and do whatever it was I felt like doing. Maybe I was bored, I don't know. I was the sort of person who read the book, took the test, and got good grades in subjects like math.

• o •

It was also at De Anza that I got this mental turnaround on politics. I started seriously thinking about whether the Vietnam War was right or wrong. Who was it helping, and did we have any place there?

Back in high school, I was for the war. My father told me our country was the greatest in the world, and my thinking was like his: that we had to stand up for democracy versus communism; and the reasons why, stemming from our Constitution. I had never thought deeply about political issues aside from that, and I was really for my country, right or wrong. I mean, I was for my country the same way you root for your school's team, right or wrong. At the University of Colorado, the University Republicans Club was one of the only two clubs I joined (the other was the Amateur Radio Club).

But 1 started to wonder why so many people were protesting the war so visibly. A lot of academics and journalists were talking about the history of the Vietnamese people and had explanations for why the U.S. position was wrong. It was a civil war, involving treaties, agreements, and a history that didn't affect the United States one whit. The trouble is, I could find no intelligent academic reasoning coming from the pro-war side, just the constant refrain that we were doing good. They could only say that we were there protecting democracy.

One of my biggest problems was that South Vietnam, which we were supposedly protecting, wasn't even close to a democracy. It was more like a corrupt dictatorship. How could we ever stand up for a dictatorship? I started seeing that there was a lot more truth on the side of the people against the war.

The people against the war were also talking about how good peace was compared to war. Sure, the world can't live in perfect peace and harmony, but it's a good ideal. I had come to learn of Jesus, from my friend Randy Adair in college, that he always tried to find ways toward peace. Although I'm not a Christian per se, and don't belong to any religion, what Jesus the historical figure stood for were things I stood for, and those stories Randy told me about him struck a chord with me emotionally. I didn't believe in violence or hurting people.

At De Anza, I thought deeply about the war. I considered myself to be athletic and brave. But would I shoot a bullet at another human being? I remember sitting alone at the white Formica table in my bedroom, coming to the conclusion that I could let someone shoot at me, but I couldn't shoot back.

I thought, What if I'm in Vietnam and I'm shooting at some guy? He's just like me, that guy. He sits down just like I do. He plays cards and he eats pizza, or the equivalent of it, just like normal people I know. He has a family. Why would I want to hurt this person? He might have his reasons for being where he is in the world—and Vietnam had its reason—but none of these reasons ever touched me in California.

From that standpoint, I could see how this war could be a pretty dangerous one for me. Because I was morally and truthfully a conscientious objector in every sense. But the military only counted you as one if you were in a church (which made you exempt from conflict duties), and I had no church. I had no religion. I just had my own logic.

So I wasn't a conscientious objector, I just objected to my personally having to kill or hurt anyone.

Chapter 5
Cream Soda Days

When I was about nineteen, I read the Pentagon Papers and learned what was really going on in Vietnam. As a result, I started to have some major conflicting feelings and some nasty fights with my dad.

By then he was drinking heavily, and he wasn't the greatest opponent to argue with. But I had a new truth that replaced the old one even more strongly. I started to believe in peace. And I began to realize how far governments would go in order to get people to believe them.

For one thing, the Pentagon Papers showed what the CIA and the Pentagon people truly knew, and that the president was being carefully coached to put words together and lie to the American people. He was saying the opposite of the truth to trick the American people into thinking they should actually support the war. For instance, the papers got right down to the Gulf of Tonkin incident—which never happened the way the government said it did. The papers also said how, in every battle, the public was always told that ten times as many Viet Cong as Americans died, despite the fact that we had no way to count them. And most Americans believed this crap. The Pentagon Papers documented this deliberate deception.

Learning about that was one of the hardest things I had to deal with in my life. You see, I just wasn't raised to believe that a democracy like ours would spread these kinds of lies. Why was the United States government treating the American people as the enemy and purposely duping them? It made no sense to me.

And the worst thing that came after that, for me, wasn't the Vietnam War itself, but the pain and stress it caused people. That's because, as I was becoming an adult, I started gaining a new ethic—a profound care for the happiness and welfare of people. I was just starting to figure out that the secret to life— and this is still true for me—is to find a way to be happy and satisfied with your life and also to make other people happy and satisfied with their lives.

Even in high school, where I believed in truth with a capital T, I was willing to change my beliefs if someone came along to show

The Gulf of Tonkin

Not everyone reading this is going to remember this incident, but finding out about it was instrumental in changing my own feelings about the Vietnam War.