embrace of the Cupertino School District.
THE CREAM SODA COMPUTER
W hen 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,
THE CREAM SODA COMPUTER
W hen 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,
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