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the lessons he had learned while messing around with kits and designing the tic-tac-toe board. But there were other aspects that he found entirely foreign. For the first time he came up against the idea that electronic calculating machines could provide solutions to problems of logic. He began to explore the algebra of logic and learned that switches—which could be only on or off—could be used to represent statements—which could be only true or false. He became familiar with the binary numbering system—a series of 1s and 0s—that had been developed to represent electronically two voltage levels in a circuit.

The diagram for a One Bit Adder-Subtracter was very limited. It could cope with only one bit, one binary digit, at a time. Wozniak wanted something more powerful that would be able to add and subtract far larger numbers so he expanded the idea to a more complicated device that he called The Ten Bit Parallel Adder-Subtracter. This was capable of simultaneously dealing with ten bits at a time. He designed the necessary circuits by himself and laid out dozens of transistors and diodes and capacitors on a “bread board”—a laminated sheet drilled with a regular pattern of holes. The board was about the size of a picture book and was attached to a wooden frame. Two rows of switches lined the bottom of the board. One entered numbers into the adder, the other into the subtracter, and the result was displayed—again in binary form—in a row of small lights. Wozniak had, to all intents and purposes, built a simple version of what engineers called an arithmetic logic unit, a machine that was capable of coping with arithmetic problems. The machine could operate on the instructions, or program, that were entered by hand through the switches. It could add or subtract numbers but couldn’t do anything else.

When the machine was complete, he carted it off to the Cupertino School District Science Fair where it took the first prize. Later it took third place in the Bay Area Science Fair even though Wozniak was competing against older challengers. To compensate for the disappointment of finishing third, he was rewarded with his first trip in an airplane—a whirl over California’s Alameda Naval Air Station.

“It’ll make the greatest flight simulator in the world,” Schweer said.

Half a dozen managers from the Crocker Bank sat around a large L-shaped table, sipped coffee from bone-china cups, and watched a white screen unroll from the ceiling. They might have been in an interior designer’s idea of a Hollywood dressing room for a movie star who happened to be a computer. The table rested on aluminum cylinders, and potted ferns dappled the purple rug with triangular shadows. Framed sketches hung on the wall and mirrors ran like a modern brocade around the top of the walls. Dan’l Lewin, an Apple marketing manager with a smooth, square jaw, neatly knotted tie, and freshly pressed blue suit, let the screen unroll. He pressed a concealed button and a pair of maroon slats, which ran along two walls of the hexagonal room, hummed sideways. Spotlights shone over the backs of some chairs onto two smooth counters that held six Lisa computers.

Lewin had been playing corporate guide for several months and had shepherded similar groups from dozens of large companies into the same room and through the same script and tour. Though Apple mimicked the movie industry and called these daylong sessions “sneak previews,” they were plotted as carefully as story-boards. They were aimed at persuading visitors from Fortune500 companies to order scores of Lisa computers and at quelling suspicions that Apple was a flimsy company unable to support what it hoped to sell. Most of the visiting groups had been a mixture of longtime computer-operations managers with a professional distrust of desk-top computers, and amateurs whose passion for computers had been kindled by the smaller machines. All the visitors to the sneak room signed forms binding them to secrecy, but Lewin readily admitted, “By the time we announce Lisa, everybody who is important will already have seen