ODD Couple

The Two Steves

Woz

While a student in McCollum’s class, Jobs became friends with a graduate who was the teacher’s all-time favorite and a school legend for his wizardry in the class. Stephen Wozniak, whose younger brother had been on a swim team with Jobs, was almost five years older than Jobs and far more knowledgable about electronics.But emotionally and socially he was still a high school geek.

Like Jobs, Wozniak learned a lot at his father’s knee. But their lessons were different. Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who, when fixing up cars, knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on parts. Francis Wozniak, known as Jerry, was a brilliant engineering graduate from Cal Tech, where he had quarterbacked the football team, who became a rocket scientist at Lockheed. He exalted engineering and looked down on those in business, marketing, and sales. “I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world,” Steve Wozniak later recalled. “It takes society to a new level.”

One of Steve Wozniak’s first memorize was going to his father’s workplace on a weekend and being shown electronic parts, with his dad “putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them.” He watched with fascination as his father tried to get a waveform line on a video screen to stay flat so he could show that one of his circuit designs was working properly. “I could see that whatever my dad was doing, it was important and good.” Woz, as he was known even then, would ask about the resistors and transistors lying around the house, and his father would pull out a blackboard to illustrate what they did. “He would explain what a resistor was by going all the way back to atoms and electrons. He explained how resistors worked when I was in second grade, not by equations but by having me picture it.”

Woz’s father taught him something else that became ingrained in his childlike, socially awkward personality: Never lie. “My dad believe in honesty. Extreme honesty,. That’s the biggest thing he taught me. I never lie, even to this day.” (the only partial exception was in the service of a good practical joke.) In addition, he imbued his son with an aversion to extreme ambition, which set Woz apart from Jobs, At an Apple product launch event in 2010, forty years after they met, Woz reflected on their differences. “My father told me, ‘You always want to be in the middle, ’” he said, “I didn’t want to be up with the high-level people like Steve. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I want to be. I was too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.”

By fourth grade Wozniak became, as he put it, one of the “electronics kids.” He had a easier time making eye contact with a transistor than with a girl, and he developed a chunky and stooped look of a guy who spent most of his time hunched over circuit boards. At the same age, when Jobs was puzzling over a carbon microphone that his dad couldn’t explain, Wozniak was using transistors to build an intercom system featuring amplifiers, relays, lights , and buzzers that connected the kid’s bedroom of six houses in the neighborhood. And at an age when Jobs was building Heathkits, Wozniak was assembling a transmitter and receiver from Hallicrafters, the most sophisticated radios available.

Woz spent a lot of time at home reading his father’s electronics journals, and he became enthralled by stories about new computers, such as the powerful ENIAC. Because Boolean algebra came naturally to him, he marveled at how simple, rather than complex, the calculator that included one hundred transistors, two hundred diode, and two hundred resistors on ten circuit boards. It won top prize in a local contest run by the Air Force, even though the competitors included students through twelfth grade.

Woz became more of a loner when the boys his age began going out with girls and partying, endeavors that he found far more complex than designing circuits.”Where before I was popular and riding bikes and everything, suddenly I was socially shut out,” he recalled. “It seemed like nobody spoke to me for the longest time.” He found an outlet by playing juvenile pranks. In twelfth grade he built an electronic metronome-one of those tick-tick-tick devices that keep time in music class-and realized it sounded like a bomb. So he took the labels off some big batteries, taped them together, and put it in a school locker; he rigged it to start ticking faster when the locker opened. Later that dat he got called to the principal’s office. HE thought it was because he had won, yet again, the school’s top math prize. Instead he was confronted by the police. The principal had been summoned when the device was found, bravely ran onto football field clutching it to his chest, and pulled the wires off. Woz tried and failed to suppress his laughter. He actually got sent to the juvenile detention center, where he spent the night. It was a memorable experience. He taught the other prisoners how to disconnect the wires leading to the ceiling fans and connect them to the bars so people got shocked by touching them.

Getting shocked was badge of honer for Woz. he prided himself on being a hardware engineer, which meant that random shocks were routine. “Hardware guys will play this game, but software guys are too chicken,” he noted.