iWoz

iWoz is Steve Wozniak’s autobiography, detailing his story in his own words, from early tinkering with electronics in his home, to college and his first job, all the way to singlehandedly creating the world’s first desktop computer, the Apple I and founding what would become the most valuable company in the world.

When Stephen Gary Wozniak was born (1950), computers already existed, but not nearly the way you know them today. Back then, a single computer would fill an entire room, cost millions of dollars and in general wasn’t available to the public.

To be passionate about computers meant to be passionate first and foremost about electronics – and Steve grew up in the exact right environment for that.

His father Francis worked at an electronics company, Electronic Data Systems in Los Angeles, at the time, and would sometimes take him to work, where he could play with various electronic parts. Because of his father’s job, the Wozniak home was also packed with resistors, cables and all kinds of gadgets, making it the perfect space to tinker around. Of course Francis didn’t just let Wozniak find it all out himself, explaining the basics of physics to him in a way children could understand, including kid-friendly diagrams and stories of inventors like Thomas Edison.

Woz also adopted most of the values that would shape his later way in life during this time, such as honesty, fairness, kindness and a sense of humor.

If I had to guess (and I’m totally making this up) I’d say 80% of who we are is shaped in our childhood home. Your childhood matters, whether you like it or not, so it’s best to embrace it and make the best of what you’ve got.

Winning science competition after science competition in high school, pursuing a degree in engineering in college was only the next logical step for him. He enrolled at the Colorado University in 1968, where the computer science program taught only FORTRAN, one of the first basic programming languages. Because that wasn’t enough for him, Woz started teaching himself and experimenting with six other programming languages. However, thanks to his knack for pranks, his activities cost the computer science department a lot of money (five times their budget, to be exact) and they also weren’t too fond of him for hacking the university computer system – so he was put on probation. He transferred in 1969, but without the funds to build his own computer, he kept teaching himself by re-designing existing computers to be more efficient on paper, until he finally had enough money and parts while taking a gap year, working at Tenet, a small computer company. Eventually, he managed to build…