Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [24]
Wozniak and Baum soon sorted out their favorite minicomputers and their bedroom bookshelves began to bulge with computer pamphlets. They started to differentiate among computers, between clever and clumsy designs. They appreciated abstruse features like the way in which some machines handled floating decimal points. Occasionally a name, or cosmetic appeal, tickled their fancy like the Skinny Mini which was named for its thin cabinet. Elmer Baum said, “After about three months I gave up. They were designing computers and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about.”
When Wozniak left high school for college he took his interests with him. He was rejected by his father’s alma mater, Cal Tech, and after a miserable day at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, he enrolled at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Jerry Wozniak viewed his son’s attempts to abandon California and join some high-school friends with suspicion. “Stephen wasn’t ready to leave home and go off to college at the same time.” One of the items packed into his suitcase was an oscillator that had been specially tuned to jam television reception. Wozniak started to interfere with closed-circuit lectures, provoking the professors to try to adjust the television set. He kept twiddling his oscillator until the teachers were in contortions, convinced that if they kept an arm or leg in the air the interference would disappear. He also managed to infuriate some classmates by jamming a transmission of the Kentucky Derby just as the horses were about to cross the line.
Wozniak’s life at Colorado revolved around the University’s Control Data computer, CDC 6400. He read the computer’s manuals, learned some more techniques in FORTRAN programming and also became familiar with another computer language, ALGOL. For the college administrators Wozniak was a nuisance who spent too much time hanging around the computer room and far too much time using the computer. He ran a couple of programs that spat out reams of paper saying: FUCK NIXON and GOOD SCRAP PAPER. “I was spending ten hours on computers for every hour of class.” Late-night bridge sessions and hundred-mile jaunts for hamburgers didn’t help his academic performance either. He was badgered by one of the deans and threatened with expulsion. Wozniak retaliated by hiring a lawyer to write a threatening letter but that hardly improved matters. At the end of his first year he left Colorado with a suitcase full of more-refined computer designs and a bundle of Fs, and returned to his parents’ home in Sunnyvale where he enrolled once more at De Anza Community College.
Home again, Wozniak was pulled back into the same small circle and the milieu of cosmetic rejects, data sheets and science fairs. He and Allen Baum took some of the same classes at De Anza while Elmer Baum also enrolled in a course that taught the programming language FORTRAN. After a few weeks he dropped out and his admiration for the skills of the younger pair increased. Wozniak ran afoul of more teachers as he toyed with computer designs during linear algebra lessons.
At the end of the year he and Baum accidentally found summer work. They were out looking for the local office of a minicomputer company when they strolled into the headquarters of Tenet, a small company that was trying to make computers for customers like the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The pair talked themselves into jobs as programmers and though Baum soon left to start his studies at MIT, Wozniak stuck it out and learned how to program a computer system that could serve many users simultaneously. He made the occasional jaunt to Los Angeles—“I wanted to marry my young cousin down there but she never liked me”—stayed at Tenet until it fell victim to the 1972 recession, and then registered for unemployment benefits.