Free iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith

Randy didn't get up to whack the TV. So someone else did. I was hoping that would happen! Someone else whacked it, and I made it so the TV worked. Ha! A whole audience of guinea pigs. I couldn't have wished for more. Over a period of about two weeks, I went there every night to watch people whack the TV. When that didn't work, they'd start to fine- tune it—in those days, TVs came with tuning controls—and I would quietly work the TV Jammer so that if they tuned it just right, the TV worked again.
After a while, I made it so that if someone touched the tuner and adjusted it to fix the picture, it would work. But then when they pulled their hand away, the screen would go bad again. Until they put their hand back on the tuning control, that is. I was like an entertainer. A puppeteer—with live puppets under my control.
Then the people got this superstition about how it mattered where your body was. I remember one time there were three people trying to fix the TV. By this time I would wait for some interesting thing they would do to fix the picture so I could trick them into thinking they had done it. One of the three guys had his hand in the middle of the TV screen. He was standing with one foot up on a chair. Seeing his hand accidentally rest in the middle of the TV screen, I took my cue and fixed the picture. One of the three guys announced, Hey, the picture's good. They relaxed. When the guy in front pulled his hand back, I made the picture go bad again.
The guy in back of the TV turning the dials on the back of the
TV said, "Let's all try to get our bodies where they were and maybe it will work again!"
A few seconds later, the guy in front rested his hand back on the middle of the screen and I did it again, fixed the picture. He tested it by pulling his hand away—I made the picture go bad— and then putting it back on the screen—and I made it go good again.
Then I noticed Mm take his foot off the chair and put it down on the floor. Again, I ruined the picture. When he put his foot back on the chair, he looked so startled when the picture went clear again. God, was I good to pull this off without ever getting caught.
He turned to the other students in the room and loudly announced, "Grounding effect." He had to have been an engineering student to have known a word like that back then.
The dozen or so students stayed for the second half hour of Mission Impossible with the guy's hand over the middle of the TV! And TVs were pretty small back then.
The only trouble is, I'd gone too far. For the next few weeks, virtually no one showed up in that TV room. They had had enough.
    • o •
Later in the year, they all came back again. So again I would play with this game, and just have so much fun. Sometimes people would have to pound the TV as hard as they could on top. Other times, there had to be three people on the TV at once— one pounding, one tuning, and one turning the color dial on the back that adjusted how much red, green, and blue the picture had. After that, they needed more than me to get the picture back! So a repairman had to be called.
After the repairman came, I heard someone at the TV mention that he'd said it was an antenna problem. I jammed the TV again, so what did they do? Of course, someone picked up the twin-lead
antenna wire and lifted it up over his head. I made the screen go good. He put it down and I made the screen go bad again. Up, good ... down, bad. And after a while, I made it so he had to hold up the antenna higher and higher. This guy's trying to watch the last five minutes of some show, and he's stretched out to the ceiling, it was hilarious.
Except for Randy, I never told anyone else about it the whole year. I found it just amazing that at no time did anyone suspect that a human was toying with them. They never caught on! It was so funny. I couldn't make up a story this good. The only time I regretted using the TV Jammer in the TV room was during a daytime watching of the Kentucky Derby.