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By Root 458 0

of 1976 was sixteen and fifteen-year-old Chris Espinosa. Wigginton had written some small programs for Call Computer and had encountered Wozniak and his dumb terminal, being more impressed by the latter than the former. Wigginton’s father was a Lockheed engineer and the family home was in Sunnyvale. With a tongue that could be rough but with sunny, ice-cream looks, Wigginton had his share of growing pains. “I was strung out on drugs at junior high school.” He watched while one of his acquaintances, a drug pusher, was arrested for murdering a slow-paying client who had been stuffed down a sewer. Wigginton was thirteen when he found a less dangerous diversion after encountering computers at a Homestead High School summer class where a Teletype terminal was linked to a computer at Hewlett-Packard. “Once I hit computers that was the end.” Transferred by his parents to a private high school in San Jose, he became engrossed by computers. In his freshman year he organized a computer class and in his sophomore year taught BASIC to students two years his senior. He was nicknamed Computer Randy and when, embarrassed at having no date for the junior prom he tried to escape the clutches of a ticket seller, he was told to invite a computer. Wigginton found that Wozniak, who had endured similar taunts, was far more sympathetic. Wozniak provided parts and guidance and helped Wigginton, whose chunky soldering iron was giving him trouble, build his first piece of hardware, an Apple.

The Homestead summer computer course proved as infectious for Chris Espinosa as it had for Wigginton. “Once we were armed with elementary knowledge we knew more than the teacher.” Espinosa had been raised in Los Angeles where he attended nine different schools in eight years but was caught in the Cupertino mill when his father started attending law classes at the University of Santa Clara. “Cupertino was a completely different atmosphere. In Los Angeles most of my friends grew up to be thieves, musicians, or drug addicts. In Cupertino I had new friends who were intelligent, academically inclined, middle-class and fairly progressive.” During junior high school Espinosa was a student spokesman at town meetings that were convened to discuss plans to turn an orchard into a shopping mall. Thanks to an interest in public transportation, he also became a thorn in the side of the Santa Clara Transit District, arguing at public meetings in favor of an expansion of the local bus service and touting the merits of light railways. He took to riding buses for hours—“To me, the bus service was a large, intricate system”—and used them to visit Byte Shops where he learned how to program an Apple. Yet like Wigginton, who introduced him to Wozniak, Espinosa was too young to drive to Homebrew meetings. Since neither the tentacles of the bus system nor the inclination of their parents extended to the darker fringes of Palo Alto on Wednesday evenings, Wigginton and Espinosa were chauffeured to Homebrew meetings by Wozniak.

The two teenagers became Wozniak’s acolytes. Espinosa persuaded Wozniak to give a computer to Homestead High School and displayed his bright, jaunty sense of humor by installing it in a box labeled IBM. On trips to Homebrew, they piled into Wozniak’s car, making space on a backseat covered with magazines, newspapers, and hamburger wrappers and joking that the fungus growing on the upholstery was known, in botanical circles, as the Woz Effect. Espinosa, being of slighter build, carted books and manuals into meetings while Wigginton had the unenviable task of carrying Wozniak’s nineteen-inch Sears color television. Wozniak carried the new computer in a wooden case designed and built by Wigginton’s brother. After the meetings the trio adjourned to a local Denny’s for more shoptalk. At one of the Homebrew sessions Jobs quizzed Espinosa, who was displaying his prowess by demonstrating the color, and offered him a job in exchange for a row of 4K memory chips which were the most sought-after parts for the Apple. Espinosa accepted but recalled, “Jobs never came through