Return to the Little Kingdom (7 page)

For instance, during his senior year at Homestead High School Wozniak salvaged some cylinders from an old battery that looked deceptively like sticks of dynamite. He fastened an oscillator to the cylinders and placed the combination in a friend’s locker with some telltale wires trailing from the door. Before long the tick-tick-tick of the oscillator attracted attention and not much later the school principal, Warren Bryld, was risking his life as he clutched the device and dashed for the empty air of the football field. “I just pulled the wires out and phoned the police. I was promptly chewed out for being a jackass.” The perpetrator was tracked down quickly enough, though Wozniak, on his way to the principal’s office, thought he was about to be congratulated for winning a math contest. Instead he found himself in the hands of the local constabulary and heading for a night’s stay in San Jose’s Juvenile Hall. The following morning Margaret Wozniak wasn’t appeased by the sight of her son and yelled at the wardens: “Why haven’t you tattooed a number across his chest?” Wozniak’s sister, Leslie, an editor of the school newspaper, told him that space was being held for an exposé of conditions at the Juvenile Hall. When Wozniak returned to Homestead—chastened, embarrassed, but with no charges filed against him—he was given a standing ovation by his classmates.

 

On occasion students sought John McCollum’s help with a temperamental oscillator and he usually gave practical advice. But McCollum taught his pupils about electronics, not computers. The Homestead students who were interested in computers in the late 1960s were not just the smallest minority in the school but could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Electronics and computers were masculine pursuits, though most boys considered it a rather odd pastime. So the peculiar interests bridged differences of age and grade and drew the loners together. They shuttled their private diversions—what really amounted to obsessions—between their homes and the schoolroom.

At Homestead, Wozniak began to spend his homeroom classes staring through thick spectacles and scribbling circuit diagrams in pencil on yellow writing tablets. His sister said, “I felt sorry for him at high school. He was lonely. He suffered because of his nature and because he didn’t fit in. He was always made fun of. I always felt that I wanted to protect him.” But Wozniak, unlike his sister, did not feel trapped by the provincial attitudes of Sunnyvale or restricted by the dress code at Homestead. He was immensely suspicious of marijuana and other drugs, had no difficulty accepting warnings about their perils, and told his parents when he spotted some telltale seeds in his sister’s bedroom. His mother recognized her son’s inclinations: “He was very square at high school. . . . He wasn’t too much with the girls.” Wozniak was Mister Straight.

Left to his own devices he collected the electronics awards in his last two years of high school and was president of the electronics and math clubs. Wozniak began to design circuits for a machine that could perform additions and subtractions, and gradually he began to add features to the machine. He managed to figure out how to cope with the more complicated problems posed by multiplications, divisions, and even square roots. Allen Baum, two years younger than Wozniak, was puzzled by the squiggles and lines. “I asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘Designing computers.’ I was impressed as hell.”

Baum, a lean boy with dark hair and soft brown eyes, had lived in suburban New Jersey until he was thirteen. Then his family moved to California where his father, Elmer, started to work at the Stanford Research Institute. He later realized: “I would have been totally stunted in New Jersey. I always assumed I’d be an engineer and I always assumed the time would come when I’d learn about electronics.” He trailed around the cool SRI computer room viewing the machines with a skeptical eye until his father showed him how to operate the terminal: “Within an hour, Allen was doing things I couldn’t do.”

Unlike Wozniak, Baum had not competed in science fairs, but he shared his interest in the theory and design of computers. When Wozniak persuaded McCollum to find a place where he could learn something more about computers, Baum was included in all the plans. Through a friend McCollum arranged for his two students to spend every Wednesday afternoon in the computer room at GTE Sylvania, a company that made electronic devices for the military. For an entire school year, the two teenagers made weekly trips to the reception desk at Sylvania’s Mountain View headquarters.

They signed the visitors’ book, clipped plastic badges to their shirts, waited for an escort, and padded off down the corridor, through the tight, metal door into the computer room where the drum and the hum of the IBM 1130 slowed conversations to full-bellied shouts. The white, tiled floor vibrated under the weight of the computer which occupied a cabinet the size of an eighteenth-century French wardrobe. There was a stern-looking keyboard that could be used to enter commands. Programs to produce items like the corporate payroll were punched on sheaves of thin, khaki cards that were fed into a card reader. Information needed by the computer was stored in rows of magnetic tapes, which lined the walls and resembled large tape recorders, while a noisy printer, like the ones used by telegraph companies, clattered out type.

This was the first large computer—the first mainframe—that Wozniak had ever seen. Over the course of the year Wozniak and Baum were provided with tips and hints and fragments of an education. The men at Sylvania introduced Wozniak to a compiler, the software that turns commands entered in a computer language formed of ordinary letters and numbers into a binary machine code that the computer can digest. Wozniak was surprised. “I didn’t know the compiler was a program. I figured a compiler was a piece of hardware and I kept pointing at boxes asking, ‘Is that the compiler?’” The Sylvania programmers also solved the difficulty he had experienced in designing a calculator capable of multiplying large numbers. But the two teenagers preferred programming to instruction.

They wrote programs in the computer language FORTRAN, punched them onto thin cards and fed them into the card reader. They used the computer to raise numbers to many powers and watched the printer laboriously type out the results. They searched for prime numbers and calculated square roots to dozens of places. They also collaborated on a program to make a knight hop around a chessboard, landing on a different square with every move. The first time they ran the program, nothing happened. The computer sat bone idle while the air conditioner hummed and whirred. They rewrote the program, instructing the computer to report progress after the knight completed every move. It reported the first couple of dozen quite quickly and then started to slow and finally stopped.

One of the Sylvania programmers told the pair about a mathematical shortcut to estimate how long the program would take before it offered an answer for the knight’s pilgrimage. Wozniak tried the procedure and found the answer disconcerting: “I calculated it would take ten to the twenty-fifth years to find a single solution. I wasn’t going to wait.” After Wozniak had spent a few months at Sylvania, McCollum allowed him to give a talk on computers to one of the Homestead electronics classes: “It was a fine lecture. There was only one thing wrong. He should have given it to a sophomore class at college.”

 

The visits to Sylvania, the privilege of being allowed to use a computer, and the tidbits dropped by the programmers not only formed the highlight of Wozniak’s week but also spawned other activities. Along with Baum, he started to drift toward the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center whose purpose was far more rigorous than its unfortunate acronym, SLAC, might have suggested. The pair’s interest didn’t lie in the electrons fired down a two-mile-long concrete streak that ran like a skewer below Interstate 280 and toward the fields around Woodside. They headed instead for the SLAC administration buildings that sat on a hillside overlooking Palo Alto and Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. There they wandered around the computer room and inspected SLAC’s IBM 360, a mainframe computer that formed the keystone of the IBM line in the late sixties. They were allowed to use one of SLAC’s card punchers to prepare programs they later ran on the smaller IBM computer at Sylvania.

But the library was the main lure. The pair spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons browsing through the stacks, reading magazines and scouring computer manuals. Few places around the Peninsula had richer pickings. The SLAC librarians subscribed to magazines that were broadsheets for programmers and engineers:
Datamation, Computerworld, EDM,
and
Computer Design
. Most of the magazines contained survey cards inviting readers to check boxes alongside the names of companies they wanted to receive information from. Pretty soon the Wozniak mailbox started to bulge with heavy envelopes that contained brochures, product descriptions, and manuals of some of the newer computers. The envelopes bore names like Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Scientific Data Systems, Data Mate, Honeywell, and Varian. Almost all these companies made minicomputers, scaled down versions of the room-sized mainframe machines.

 

Named after the short, narrow skirts made popular by London’s Carnaby Street, the minicomputers were usually no larger than a combination refrigerator-freezer for a family of six. The minicomputer makers, just like the companies that designed satellites and rockets, capitalized on the great shrinking world of electronics. As the semiconductor companies developed their manufacturing techniques, they squeezed more and more transistors onto single pieces of silicon. This made it possible for companies like Digital Equipment to produce computers that, even if they didn’t match the performance of a contemporary mainframe, were more powerful than some of the mainframes that had been made five years earlier. Every graph that appeared in the trade magazines and plotted price against performance showed the machines would become still cheaper and even more powerful.

But even though minicomputers were far smaller than mainframes, they still needed bulky attachments. Programs were entered on paper tape; the memory was formed out of dozens of small doughnut-shaped pieces of iron linked by wires and built into blocks that were the size of cigar boxes. Results of programs appeared on a Teletype printer. The handbooks and manuals revealed something of the complexity of trying to control the flow of millions of bits moving in all sorts of directions. Digital Electronics Corporation’s
Small Computer Handbook,
which the Sylvania analysts gave to Wozniak, became something of an industry classic because it revealed so much about the computer. It included detailed descriptions of the quirks of the central processing unit, provided directions about how the memory should be managed, presented ways of making connections with the Teletype machine, and provided flow charts to help with the writing and testing of programs.

The computer trade magazines were accompanied by a more specialized literature: the component magazines. At the end of the sixties these focused on the integrated circuits, the chips made by semiconductor companies like Fairchild, Signetics, Synertek, Intel, and Motorola. For Wozniak and Baum these magazines became almost as important as the computer magazines and computer manuals. Though no semiconductor company was making a single chip that performed like a computer, some did make chips that, with sufficient ingenuity, could be combined to act as a computer. The companies themselves released details of the features and performance of their new chips on what were called data sheets which were chockablock with technical information. These too became sought-after items. Designing a decent computer, a computer that approached that distant world, the state of the art, required intimate familiarity with the diagrams and details of the data sheets.

Though he pored over DEC’s
Small Computer Handbook,
the Varian 620i was the first minicomputer Wozniak subjected to close inspection. It was packed into a brown cabinet with rows of black and white switches on the front panel. For the first time, Wozniak tried to design his own version of a minicomputer with chips he selected: “I didn’t know how to make a complete computer but I understood what a computer was.” He began to understand the layers between the program that a user would type into a computer and the very heart of the machine. He focused on the heart and understood the idea of a set of precise instructions that formed a code to control the machine.

But if he had not mastered all the links of computer design, Wozniak had fastened onto the idea of using as few parts as possible. He was delighted when he discovered a way of combining or eliminating gates, the circuits that form the basis of digital logic. When chips contained circuits that would replace several gates they became the cause of jubilation. Wozniak began to concentrate on making parts perform as many functions as possible. “I started moving toward higher levels of integration.” Both Wozniak’s and Baum’s parents were startled by their sons’ progress. Like many other teenagers they were free from life’s dreary distractions and had the luxury of enough time to pursue their obsessions.

Wozniak and Baum soon sorted out their favorite minicomputers and their bedroom bookshelves began to bulge with computer pamphlets. They started to differentiate among computers, between clever and clumsy designs. They appreciated abstruse features like the way in which some machines handled floating decimal points. Occasionally a name, or cosmetic appeal, tickled their fancy like the Skinny Mini which was named for its thin cabinet. Elmer Baum said, “After about three months I gave up. They were designing computers and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.”

 

When Wozniak left high school for college he took his interests with him. He was rejected by his father’s alma mater, Cal Tech, and after a miserable day at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, he enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Jerry Wozniak viewed his son’s attempts to abandon California and join some high-school friends with suspicion. “Stephen wasn’t ready to leave home and go off to college at the same time.” One of the items packed into his suitcase was an oscillator that had been specially tuned to jam television reception. Wozniak started to interfere with closed-circuit lectures, provoking the professors to try to adjust the television set. He kept twiddling his oscillator until the teachers were in contortions, convinced that if they kept an arm or leg in the air the interference would disappear. He also managed to infuriate some classmates by jamming a transmission of the Kentucky Derby just as the horses were about to cross the line.