The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 91

Also, though Gates did not appreciate it at the time, the widespread pirating of Microsoft BASIC helped his fledgling company in the long run. By spreading so fast, Microsoft BASIC became a standard, and other computer makers had to license it. When National Semiconductor came out with a new microprocessor, for example, it needed a BASIC and decided to license Microsoft’s because everyone was using it. “We made Microsoft the standard,” said Felsenstein, “and he called us thieves for doing so.”⁸⁰

At the end of 1978 Gates and Allen moved their company from Albuquerque back home to the Seattle area. Just before they left, one of the twelve staffers won a free photo shoot from a local studio, so they posed for what would become a historic photograph, with Allen and most of the others looking like refugees from a hippie commune and Gates sitting up front looking like a Cub Scout. On his drive up the California coast, Gates was slapped with three speeding tickets, two from the same policeman.⁸¹

APPLE

Among those in Gordon French’s garage at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club was a socially awkward young hardware engineer named Steve Wozniak, who had dropped out of college and was working at Hewlett-Packard’s calculator division in the Silicon Valley town of Cupertino. A friend had shown him the flyer—“Are you building your own computer?”—and he worked up the courage to attend. “That night turned out to be one of the most important nights of my life,” he declared.⁸²

Wozniak’s father was a Lockheed engineer who loved explaining electronics. “One of my first memories is his taking me to his workplace on a weekend and showing me a few electronic parts, putting them on a table with me so I got to play with them,” Wozniak recalled. There were usually stray transistors and resistors lying around the house, and when Steve would ask, “What’s that?” his father would start from the beginning and explain how electrons and protons worked. “He pulled out a blackboard from time to time, and he would answer anything and make diagrams for it,” Wozniak said. “He taught me how to make an and gate and an or gate out of parts he got—parts called diodes and resistors. And he showed me how they needed a transistor in between to amplify the signal and connect the output of one gate to the input of the other. To this very moment, that is the way every single digital device on the planet works at its most basic level.” It was a striking example of the imprint a parent can make, especially back in the days when parents knew how radios worked and could show their kids how to test the vacuum tubes and replace the one that had burned out.

Wozniak made a crystal radio using scraped pennies when he was in second grade, a multihouse intercom system for the kids in his neighborhood when he was in fifth grade, a Hallicrafters shortwave radio when he was in sixth grade (he and his dad earned ham licenses together), and later that year taught himself how to apply Boolean algebra to electronic circuit design and demonstrate it with a machine that never lost at tic-tac-toe.

By the time he was in high school, Wozniak was applying his electronic wizardry to pranks. In one case he built a metronome attached to stripped batteries that looked like a bomb. When his principal discovered it ticking in a locker, he rushed it onto the playground away from the kids and called the bomb squad. Wozniak had to spend one night in the local house of detention, where he taught his fellow inmates to remove the wires on the ceiling fan and touch them to the iron bars in order to shock the jailer when he came to open the door. Although he had learned to code well, he was at heart a hardware engineer, unlike more refined software jockeys such as Gates. At one point he built a roulette-like game where players put their fingers in slots and when the ball landed one of them got shocked. “Hardware guys will play this game, but software guys are always way too chicken,” he said.

Like others, he combined a love of technology with a hippie outlook, although he could not quite pull off the counterculture lifestyle. “I would wear this little Indian headband, and I wore my hair really long and grew a beard,” he recalled. “From the neck up, I looked like Jesus Christ. But from the neck down, I still wore the clothes of a regular kid, a kid engineer. Pants. Collared shirt. I never did have the weird hippie clothes.”

For fun, he would study the manuals of the office computers made by Hewlett-Packard and DEC and then try to redesign them using fewer chips. “I have no idea why this became the pastime of my life,” he admitted. “I did it all alone in my room with my door shut. It was like a private hobby.” It was not an activity that made him the life of the party, so he became pretty much a loner, but that talent to save chips served him well when he decided to build a computer of his own. He did so using only twenty chips, compared to the hundreds in most real computers. A friend who lived down the block joined him for the soldering, and because they drank so much Cragmont cream soda, it was dubbed the Cream Soda Computer. There was no screen or keyboard; instructions were fed in by punch card, and answers were conveyed by flashing lights on the front.

The friend introduced Wozniak to a kid who lived a few blocks away and shared their interest in electronics. Steve Jobs was almost five years younger and still at Homestead High, which Wozniak had attended. They sat on the sidewalk swapping tales about pranks they had pulled, Bob Dylan songs they liked, and electronic designs they had made. “Typically, it was really hard for me to explain to people the kind of design stuff I worked on, but Steve got it right away,” Wozniak said. “I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.” Jobs was similarly impressed. “Woz was the first person I’d met who knew more electronics than I did,” he later said, stretching his own expertise.

Their greatest escapade, which laid the foundation for the computer partnership they would form, involved what was known as a Blue Box. In the fall of 1971, Wozniak read an article in Esquire describing how “phone phreaks” had created a device that emitted just the right tone chirps to fool the Bell System and cadge free long-distance calls. Before he even finished reading the article, he called Jobs, who was just beginning his senior year at Homestead High, and read parts of it aloud to him. It was a Sunday, but they knew how to sneak into a library at Stanford that might have the Bell System Technical Journal, which the Esquire article said included all the frequencies for the signal tones. After rummaging through the stacks, Wozniak finally found the journal. “I was practically shaking, with goose bumps and everything,” he recalled. “It was such a Eureka moment.” They drove to Sunnyvale Electronics to buy the parts they needed, soldered them together, and tested it with a frequency counter that Jobs had made as a school project. But it was an analog device, and they couldn’t get it to produce tones that were precise and consistent enough.

Wozniak realized he would need to build a digital version, using a circuit with transistors. That fall was one of his infrequent semesters of dropping into college, and he was spending it at Berkeley. With help from a music student in his dorm, he had one built by Thanksgiving. “I have never designed a circuit I was prouder of,” he said. “I still think it was incredible.” They tested it by calling the Vatican, with Wozniak pretending to be Henry Kissinger needing to speak to the pope; it took a while, but the officials at the Vatican finally realized it was a prank before they woke up the pontiff.

Wozniak had devised an ingenious gadget, but by partnering with Jobs he was able to do much more: create a commercial enterprise. “Hey, let’s sell these,” Jobs suggested one day. It was a pattern that would lead to one of the most storied partnerships of the digital age, up there with Allen & Gates and Noyce & Moore. Wozniak would come up with some clever feat of engineering, and Jobs would find a way to polish and package it and sell it at a premium. “I got together the rest of the components, like the casing and power supply and keypads, and figured out how we could price it,” Jobs said of the Blue Box. Using $40 worth of parts for each Blue Box, they produced a hundred that they sold for $150 apiece. The escapade ended after they got ripped off at gunpoint trying to sell one in a pizza parlor, but from the seeds of the adventure a company would be born. “If it hadn’t been for the Blue Boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple,” Jobs later reflected. “Woz and I learned how to work together.” Wozniak agreed: “It gave us a taste of what we could do with my engineering skills and his vision.”