• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 458 0

didn’t become a teacher’s pet, wasn’t given access to the closely guarded stockroom, and dropped the course after a year. McCollum drew his own conclusions. “He had a different way of looking at things. I’d put him down as something of a loner. He would tend to be over by himself thinking.” On one occasion when McCollum couldn’t supply him with a part he needed, Jobs called the public-relations department of the supplier, Burroughs, in Detroit. McCollum objected. “I said, ‘You cannot call them collect.’ Steve said, ‘I don’t have the money for the phone call. They’ve got plenty of money.’”

But the whirl of electronics was certainly strong enough to intrigue Jobs. He made some trips to NASA’s flight simulator which had been built at Sunnyvale’s Moffett Field. He attended meetings of the school’s electronics club. Along with a few others he went to meetings of the Hewlett-Packard Explorer Group where company scientists gave lectures. There were talks on some of the features included in Hewlett-Packard’s latest calculators, developments in light-emitting diodes and laser inframetry. After one lecture Jobs buttonholed a scientist, wangled a tour of Hewlett-Packard’s holographic lab, and was given an old hologram. On another occasion he called the home of Bill Hewlett, one of the co-founders of Hewlett-Packard, and asked for some parts. Hewlett provided the parts and also gave Jobs the name of a person to contact for a summer job. So at the end of his high-school freshman year Jobs spent the summer working on an assembly line, helping to build Hewlett-Packard frequency counters. Spurred by the devices passing in front of his eyes at the factory, Jobs set about trying to design his own frequency counter but never completed the project.

The resistors, capacitors, and transistors that were used by Jobs and Wozniak came from the local electronics stores and mail-order firms. Jobs was at least as familiar as Wozniak with the quality and reputations of these outlets. As they both grew older, and as they graduated from bicycles to automobiles, their shopping choices expanded. Sunnyvale Electronics was one of the most convenient spots. Just off El Camino Real, it was sheeted with fake rock but its contents were more substantial. It stocked new parts, dozens of magazines and manuals, and also the eighteen-dollar walkie-talkies for which Wozniak saved his thirty-five-cent lunch money while at junior high school. They learned to avoid the Radio Shack outlets because they thought the parts were inferior. Radio Shack, with its garish neon signs, was a last resort, a place to be visited late at night when every other place was closed.

Sunnyvale Electronics, Radio Shack, and other stores like Solid State Music were dwarfed by Haltek, which occupied a block long, light-chocolate building in Mountain View across the freeway from three brobdingnagian hangars the navy had built in the 1930s to house airships. From the outside it looked like an army mess hall. Inside it was an electronic junkyard which, like all junkyards, was a cross between a graveyard and a maternity ward. The haggling at the front counter and the thick parts catalogs mounted in folders with steel spines gave some sense of supply and demand in the world of electronics. Some items, usually small and cheap parts, were brand new, but it usually took a few months for the latest parts to filter down to Haltek. However, the store also carried the electronic equivalent of dinosaur teeth: vacuum tubes. A customer certainly had to know what he was after and even the experienced rifler couldn’t always know whether a part was made in the United States or the Far East. It was the sort of place where electrical engineers stopping by after work would bump into youngsters perched on the top of metal steps rummaging for the perfect switch among a selection of cherry switches, push switches, alternating-action push switches, lighted-lever switches, push-pull switches, and slide switches.

Narrow aisles were shaded by wooden shelves mounted on metal frames that reached from a concrete floor