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 I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 thing, 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 1025 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.borderschess.org/KTsimple.htm—is an actual instruction guide so you can learn how to do it and blow other people’s minds! Good luck.
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 and 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?
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.
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 minimum 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.