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
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
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