I mean, for all those projects, from third grade all the way to eighth grade, I just learned things gradually, figuring out how to put electronic devices together without so much as cracking a book. We even pulled a few together.Īnd thanks to all those science projects, I acquired a central ability that was to help me through my entire career: patience. We talked electronics, we talked about music we liked, and we traded stories about pranks we’d pulled. We even pulled a few together.īill was right-we two Steves did have a lot in common. Bill was right-we two Steves did have a lot in common. Steve and I got close right away, even though he was still in high school, remember, and lived about a mile away in Los Altos. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy. Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away. I remember Steve and I just sat on the sidewalk in front of Bill’s house for the longest time, just sharing stories-mostly about pranks we’d pulled, and also what kind of electronic designs we’d done. So one day-it was daytime, I remember-Bill called Steve and had him come over to his house. He likes to do pranks like you do, and he’s also into building electronics like you are.” But one day Bill told me, “Hey, there’s someone you should meet. I was four years ahead of him in school so I didn’t know him he was closer to Bill Fernandez’s age. Examples of that teamwork are all over this story. What one of us found difficult, the other often accomplished pretty handily. Our introverted and extroverted personalities (guess who’s which) really helped us in those days. A year later I would meet Steve Jobs, who showed me how brave he was by scoring free chips just by calling sales reps. I never had the courage to ask chip companies for free samples of what were then expensive chips. It was designed to calculate bomb trajectories for the military during World War II. The ENIAC- which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer-was the first true computer by most people’s definition. But what I saw was an article about the ENIAC and a picture of it. Back then, back in 1960, writing about computers wasn’t common at all. I found this article about computers in one of the old engineering journals my dad had hanging around. At about this time, there was another lucky accident.

Steve wozniak book