The early years of Steve Watts

Wozniak was born in San Jose, California, USA. His father is a Polish-American engineer who works in the missile department of Lockheed Corporation. Woz received his father's step-by-step electronics enlightenment training since he was a child, so he showed his talent in mathematical logic earlier than other schoolchildren of the same age. He obtained a U.S. amateur radio license at the age of 13, assembled a Hayleycrafts radio transceiver by himself, and became an American One of the youngest hams. As a schoolboy, Woz was a constant winner in science exhibitions. At the age of 15, he successfully assembled an addition and subtraction machine expressed in binary. When he was 18 years old, his electronics teacher introduced Woz to work at Sylvania Computer Company, where he learned how to write the FORTRAN programming language. Working at a computer company gave Woz the opportunity to come into contact with computer operating manuals that contained the internal structure of minicomputers, and he began to practice tracing computer designs on paper.

Wozniak has many nicknames, such as The Woz, Wonderful Wizard of Woz and iWoz, a product borrowed from Apple. name). WoZ's name is also the abbreviation of "Wheels of Zeus", the company founded by Wozniak. He is reserved and does not take pride in his celebrity status. He has written a personal biography "iWoz: I It's Woz."

Woz has always liked to play pranks, such as using an electronic metronome to make fake bomb timing sounds to scare classmates and teachers, or making TV jammers to disrupt class, which often got him into trouble. After graduating from high school, Wozniak entered the University of Colorado. During his freshman year, he executed seven loop programs on the computer in the computer center, causing the printer to continuously print numerical reports and consuming five times the class's annual computer budget. Therefore, he was convicted of computer misuse by the school. He was placed on probation. In order to hide the incident from his family, he complied with his father's original wish in his sophomore year and transferred back to De Anza Community College, which was closer to home. Woz attended De Anza Community College for only one year, taking a break during the summer of his sophomore year to work as a programmer at Tenet Computer Company. In the summer of 1970, company executives helped Woz get about 20 computer chips to help him make his paper computer dream come true. Woz put the chips together in the garage of his neighbor Bill Fernandez's house. The two sipped cream soda pops while they worked. After the assembly was completed, they named the computer the "Cream Soda Computer."

The characteristic of Cream Soda computers is that when almost all computers were still using magnetic core memory, Woz was the first to use random access memory chips that were relatively easy to install. At that time, ordinary computers easily cost several hundred A behemoth of a chip, Woz adheres to the spirit of small but beautiful, using a small number of chips to piece together the basic functions of the computer. Also because of the Cream Soda Computer, and through Fernandez's introduction, Woz met Steve Jobs, another important character in his life, and the two quickly became familiar with each other. Later, a visiting newspaper reporter accidentally stepped on the power cord of the Cream Soda Computer, causing a short circuit, ending its short life. In 1971, Woz entered his junior year at Berkeley University. The day before enrolling, he accidentally read an article about "phone phreaks" from Esquire magazine. The description in it was that you could make free calls. He was fascinated by the "Blue Box" machine equipment. That afternoon, he and Jobs sneaked into the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Science and Technology Library to find the relevant frequency files. After returning home, the two teamed up to make the blue box. The first finished product was not successful. .

After school started, Woz redesigned the blue box based on electronic concepts. He used a crystal oscillator to ensure frequency accuracy, and redirected the weak electronic signals dissipated from the input end of the chip to a transistor amplifier, making a set of components You can do three things at the same time, not just two things: output and input. Woz admitted that this was his most unconventional and proud circuit design, and this electronic blue box lived up to his expectations and worked successfully. Later, Jobs and Woz once illegally peddled blue boxes.

Soon after, Woz contacted the radio station KKUP in Cupertino, California, and met John Draper, the phone phreak in the magazine article. Later that day, Woz and Jobs broke down on the highway. They walked to a nearby gas station and used the blue box to call a friend for help. Unexpectedly, they were interrogated by the police. Woz lied that the blue box was an electronic music synthesizer. He escaped, but when he drove back to Berkeley that night, he hit the guardrail due to fatigue and was in a car accident. Woz's car was therefore written off.

Woz, who likes to play pranks, often uses the blue box to play tricks on the operator. The most famous one was when Woz pretended to be US Secretary of State Kissinger and called the Pope on behalf of US President Richard Nixon. The pope was resting, and Woz's trick was subsequently revealed. In June 1972, after Woz finished his junior year at Berkeley, in order to raise tuition for his senior year and buy a new car, he took another break from school and joined Electroglas Technology Company as an electronics technician. Six months later, through the introduction of his old friend Allen Baum, Wozniak realized his long-cherished wish and switched to Hewlett-Packard as a calculator engineer. Woz later worked at Hewlett-Packard for four years. Energetic, he still carried out his own electronic project plans in private, such as setting up a "telephone joke" service using an answering machine. The result was very popular and overwhelming, although Woz burned a lot of money on this service, but also met his first wife Alice (Alice Robertson).

Woz also often helps friends design customized electronic devices. For example, at the request of his boss Stan Mintz, he designed a home electronic pinball machine that can The scores are displayed with sound effects accompaniment. He also participated in the design of the electronic part of the first hotel movie playback system in history, which allowed hotel staff to play videos in the computer room and then used filters to control signal transmission.

One day, Woz saw Atari's "Bump Pinball" video game machine in a bowling alley. He was shocked. After thinking about it, he began to study how to display characters on the TV. He used an oscilloscope to find the correct position where the image signal was input into the TV, and completed the design of the bumper pinball machine with 28 chips. The entire game was connected by hardware lines, and he wrote a program in the programmable read-only memory. , as long as the little white ball is not hit, a four-letter curse will pop up on the screen. Later, Woz went to Jobs, who was working at Atari at the time, to show the homemade game to the company's engineers, which impressed Atari's second-largest figure, Alan Acorn.

A few months later (1975), Jobs called and told Atari founder Nolan Bushnell that he had set a challenge to design a single-player pinball machine in four days. , let the bricks bounce the small white ball back to the racket. Although no game at that time could be completed in a short time, Woz still accepted the challenge. He and Jobs worked hard for four days and nights, and finally used 45 chips to complete the game. A game that would later be known as "Brick Breaker".