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By Root 470 0

became synonymous with Sunnyvale. As the missile division grew during the late fifties it changed the scale of business in the Santa Clara Valley, more or less turned Sunnyvale into a company town, and helped propel the community toward the fringes of mystery. Lockheed came to be talked about as a place where the subjects of science fiction had been reduced to everyday occupations. Lockheed was woven into the weft of the national space program and, in Sunnyvale, aspects of Discoverer, Explorer, Mercury, and Gemini came to be as familiar as the names of some of the astronauts. It would have been easy to believe that H.G. Wells worked in Lockheed’s public-relations department, batting out bulletins on a never-ending source of marvels.

There were rumors of a laboratory that would simulate conditions in space, of a tape recorder small enough to be held in the palm of the hand, and of “Hotshot,” the strongest wind tunnel in private industry. Teams of Lockheed engineers were investigating a special fuel cell to power spacecraft, and were drawing up plans for a prefabricated, four-hundred-ton manned space platform shaped like the wheel of fortune. There were also more sinister rumors. Some Lockheed engineers were known to be working on an intermediate-range ballistic missile known as the “super-secret Polaris” and a “sky spy,” a “super-super” secret earth satellite armed with a television camera that could peep at the Russians. The company proudly disclosed that its space-communications laboratory picked up seven minutes of the first journey of an Explorer satellite and also boasted that its dish-shaped radio telescope could monitor twenty satellites simultaneously. There were other reports of an astonishing electronic computer installed at Lockheed that was supposed to have the intelligence of a human but could also play a sly game of tic-tac-toe.

So when in 1958 Jerry Wozniak began working at Lockheed, he was joining a company that, at least so it seemed to the outside world, had large ideas. A meaty man with a thick neck and large forearms, Wozniak had been strong enough to play offensive tailback on the football team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena where he studied electrical engineering. After about a year working as a junior engineer at a small company in San Francisco he had quit and together with a partner spent twelve months designing a stacking, packing, and counting machine for raw materials like asbestos sheeting. But the pair had run out of money before completing a prototype, leading Wozniak to conclude: “It was probably a good technical idea but we didn’t understand what it took to put a business together.”

After graduating from Cal Tech, Wozniak had married. His wife, Margaret, had grown up on a small farm in Washington State and had spent a college vacation working as a journeyman electrician during World War II at the Kaiser shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, installing wiring on baby flattops as they rose on the ways. Eventually her parents had sold their spread and moved to the warmth of Los Angeles. “California,” Margaret Wozniak had thought. “That was the greatest place in the world.” But with the failure of Jerry’s business fling and the arrival of their first son, Stephen, in August 1950, the Wozniaks were drawn back into the grip of corporations. For several years they traveled around the Southern California aerospace industry, which had been grafted onto the tumbling tricks of the early aviators. And like thousands of other families, the Wozniaks soon associated towns like Burbank, Culver City, and San Diego with companies like Lockheed, Hughes Aircraft, Northrop, and McDonnell Douglas. For a time Jerry Wozniak worked as a weapons designer in San Diego, later helped build autopilots for Lear in Santa Monica, and bought his first house in the San Fernando Valley before the guiding lights at Lockheed decided to form a division in Sunnyvale.

While his children spent months playing in cardboard houses made out of Bekins moving cartons, Jerry Wozniak grew accustomed to the rhythm