Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [22]
This was the first large computer—the first mainframe—that Wozniak had ever seen. Over the course of the year Wozniak and Baum were provided with tips and hints and fragments of an education. The men at Sylvania introduced Wozniak to a compiler, the software that turns commands entered in a computer language formed of ordinary letters and numbers into a binary machine code that the computer can digest. Wozniak was surprised. “I didn’t know the compiler was a program. I figured a compiler was a piece of hardware and I kept pointing at boxes asking, ‘Is that the compiler?’” The Sylvania programmers also solved the difficulty he had experienced in designing a calculator capable of multiplying large numbers. But the two teenagers preferred programming to instruction.
They wrote programs in the computer language FORTRAN, punched them onto thin cards and fed them into the card reader. They used the computer to raise numbers to many powers and watched the printer laboriously type out the results. They searched for prime numbers and calculated square roots to dozens of places. They also collaborated on a program to make a knight hop around a chessboard, landing on a different square with every move. The first time they ran the program, nothing happened. The computer sat bone idle while the air conditioner hummed and whirred. They rewrote the program, instructing the computer to report progress after the knight completed every move. It reported the first couple of dozen quite quickly and then started to slow and finally stopped.
One of the Sylvania programmers told the pair about a mathematical shortcut to estimate how long the program would take before it offered an answer for the knight’s pilgrimage. Wozniak tried the procedure and found the answer disconcerting: “I calculated it would take ten to the twenty-fifth years to find a single solution. I wasn’t going to wait.” After Wozniak had spent a few months at Sylvania, McCollum allowed him to give a talk on computers to one of the Homestead electronics classes: “It was a fine lecture. There was only one thing wrong. He should have given it to a sophomore class at college.”
The visits to Sylvania, the privilege of being allowed to use a computer, and the tidbits dropped by the programmers not only formed the highlight of Wozniak’s week but also spawned other activities. Along with Baum, he started to drift toward the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center whose purpose was far more rigorous than its unfortunate acronym, SLAC, might have suggested. The pair’s interest didn’t lie in the electrons fired down a two-mile-long concrete streak that ran like a skewer below Interstate 280 and toward the fields around Woodside. They headed instead for the SLAC administration buildings that sat on a hillside overlooking Palo Alto and Stanford University’s Hoover Tower. There they wandered around the computer room and inspected SLAC’s IBM 360, a mainframe computer that formed the keystone of the IBM line in the late sixties. They were allowed to use one of SLAC’s card punchers to prepare programs they later ran on the smaller IBM computer at Sylvania.
But the library was the main lure. The pair spent Saturday and Sunday afternoons browsing through the stacks, reading magazines and scouring computer manuals. Few places around the Peninsula had richer pickings. The SLAC librarians subscribed to magazines that were broadsheets for programmers and engineers: Datamation, Computerworld, EDM, and Computer Design. Most of the magazines contained survey cards inviting readers to check boxes alongside the names of companies they wanted to receive information from. Pretty soon the Wozniak mailbox started to bulge with heavy envelopes that contained brochures, product descriptions, and manuals of some of the newer computers. The envelopes bore names like Digital Equipment Corporation,