Return to the Little Kingdom

by Michael Moritz

  For the Jobses, as for the Wozniaks, swimming was important. They first ferried Steven to swimming lessons when he was five and later enrolled him in a swim club called the Mountain View Dolphins. To pay for swimming lessons Clara Jobs spent her evenings babysitting for friends. Some years later, when he was old enough to become a member of the club swim team, Jobs met Mark Wozniak. Jobs, Wozniak recalled, was taunted and roughhoused by some of the other swimmers who liked to snap wet towels at him. “He was pretty much a crybaby. He’d lose a race and go off and cry. He didn’t quite fit in with everyone else. He wasn’t one of the guys.”

  Steven Jobs did, however, change schools and started attending Mountain View’s Crittenden Elementary School. The school drew children from the lower-income eastern fringes of Mountain View and had a reputation for attracting ruffians and fostering hooliganism. Local police were frequently summoned to break up fights and discipline children who jumped out of windows or threatened teachers. After a year, Steven Jobs, who found himself miserable and lonely, issued an ultimatum: He would refuse to return to school if it meant another year at Crittenden. Paul Jobs detected the firmness. “He said he just wouldn’t go. So we moved.” Once more the Jobses hopped another step down the Peninsula, attracted by the lure of the Palo Alto and Cupertino school districts. In Los Altos they bought a house with a gently raked roof, a large garage, and three bedrooms, all of which happened to sit within the curious embrace of the Cupertino School District.

  THE CREAM SODA COMPUTER

  When John McCollum arrived to teach electronics at Cupertino’s Homestead High School the day it opened in 1963, Classroom F-3 was almost empty. There was a cold concrete floor, cinder-block walls, some gray metal chairs, and on a swivel stand a television which carried the school’s closed-circuit announcements. The classroom and the rest of Homestead High School looked like a minimum-security prison and its boundaries were certainly well defined. The houses that McCollum could see through his classroom window were in Sunnyvale, but his blackboard hung in Cupertino. When Homestead opened, Classroom F-3 was so barren that even the most enterprising student would have had difficulty electrocuting himself. McCollum immediately made some changes.

  He hoisted a long, yellow slide rule above the blackboard, pinned the stars and stripes high on a wall, unrolled a bright poster that said SAFETY IS NO ACCIDENT and a bumper sticker that carried the exhortation FLY NAVY. A couple of long wooden laboratory benches were bolted to the floor and gradually covered with equipment. Rather than scrimp and save for a few new devices, McCollum used his wits. The shelves above the benches started to fill as Classroom F-3 became a well-stuffed wastepaper basket for nearby companies like Fairchild, Raytheon, and Hewlett-Packard. McCollum turned into a decorous alley cat prowling up and down the Santa Clara Valley looking for parts. He found his students sooner or later managed to destroy about one third of everything he brought into the classroom. “Onezees,” as electronic distributors disparagingly called on order for any quantity under fifty, would not do. McCollum, or rather his students, dealt in bulk.

  Fortunately, the electronics companies were selling to customers who were so finicky that they sometimes seemed to reject more parts than they bought. They would refuse to buy a transistor that had a blurred part number, or a resistor whose pins weren’t straight, or a capacitor with a small bubble baked in the paint. McCollum’s greatest coup came when Raytheon gave him nine thousand transistors (then going for sixteen dollars a piece), which a components-evaluation engineer at NASA considered too flimsy to packet to the moon. There were other substantial trophies and some came from a warehouse that Hewlett-Packard maintained in Palo Alto. It was Hewlett-Packard’s version of a Salvation Army store packed with used and surplus test equipment which high-school teachers were free to rummage through. McCollum paid regular visits and on a few occasions returned with expensive dual-trace oscilloscopes and frequency counters. Within a few years, and by the time Stephen Wozniak—and later Steven Jobs—enrolled in Electronics 1, Classroom F-3 had become a miniature parts warehouse. McCollum had accumulated as much test equipment as they had at nearby De Anza Community College, and compared to the hoard at Homestead, some of the electronics labs in neighboring high schools might as well have been in the Upper Volta.

  For some of the brighter students and for those who had been tutored at home, many of the projects assigned by McCollum were old hat. The formal theory was not. Electronics 1, 2, and 3 became Stephen Wozniak’s most important high-school class, fifty minutes a day, every day of the week. McCollum’s class also brought a definite divide between matters electrical and matters electronic. For the students this wasn’t a semantic difference; it was something that separated the men from the boys. Electrical devices were the stuff of play kits composed of batteries and switches and light bulbs. Electronics was an altogether higher calling that journeyed into the world of technology, the ethereal realms of physics, and was devoted to the peculiar behavior of the mighty and entirely invisible electron.

  Standing in front of the class, wearing a woolen cardigan, McCollum drummed home electronic theory. Stories and set speeches from the twenty years he had spent in the navy, before he retired in pique at a rule requiring infrequent pilots to fly with a backup, spilled out with such regularity that some students took to giving the old favorites code numbers. McCollum would fidget with his spectacles, placing them on his nose, removing them and tucking them into his shirt pocket behind the pens in the streaked plastic pouch. He started with theory and followed up with applications. The students were paraded through Ohm’s law, Watt’s law, basic circuitry, magnetism, and inductance. They found that if they paid attention the lessons stuck and that their teacher planted seeds that kept sprouting. They solved elementary equations, linked resistors in series and parallel, and watched capacitors charge up. They built power supplies and amplifiers and learned how to manipulate alternating and direct currents.

  McCollum was also the quality-assurance center. When students finished building radios, he disappeared into his stock-room, inserted some faulty parts and urged them to troubleshoot with their minds rather than their eyes. “You have got to be able to think it through,” he repeated. Keen students brought the devices they built in their bedrooms and garages for McCollum to scrutinize. He would jab loose parts with a screwdriver and wiggle the solder joints much like a rough dentist. On one occasion he criticized a knob on a power supply that Bill Fernandez had built because it behaved in the opposite manner to most knobs. Fernandez later said, “It was the first time I started to think about standards and human design.”

  To reveal the power of electricity McCollum became a showman. He chilled his students with tales of acid burning the faces of people who carelessly jump-started automobile engines. With a flourish he produced props from a locked desk drawer and demonstrated well-tried tricks. He indulged in the mundane and would rub a balloon against his sweater and hang it from the underside of the television. Or he would dim the lights and throw the switch on a Tesla coil that generated high-frequency currents. The class would be left watching one hundred thousand volts leap from the end of the coil and illuminate a fluorescent tube held close by. And on other days the students in Classroom F-3 would see flames crackling up the rods of a Jacob’s ladder. McCollum made his mission plain. “I try to dispel the mystery of electrons. You cannot see them, but you can see the effect of them.”

  Electronics was not, however, a purely intellectual quest. It was also a practical matter that with very little skill produced all manner of shrieks, sirens, ticks, and other noises calculated to amuse, irritate, and terrify. The same parts that built sturdy voltmeters and ohmeters could be turned to far more diverting purposes. From an early age Stephen Wozniak had a penchant for practical jokes and he usually managed to add a twist of his own. Throwing eggs in the dark at passing cars didn’t strike him as either entertaining or ingenious. But painting an egg black, attaching it to string hooked to lampposts on either side of the road, and
suspending it at a height calculated to smack a radiator grill was more his style. Electronics opened up a new realm for pranks.

  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.