iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    • o •
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 tiling, 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