Free Return to the Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz

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.
    Meanwhile, he was learning, in a haphazard manner, much more about computer design. He read the Xerox copies of computer textbooks that Baum mailed from MIT and he still visited school science fairs. During one visit he spotted an enlightening entry. The item that grabbed his attention was a mechanical machine that stepped, in sequence, through several instructions. At each step it was wired to fire off particular signals. Wozniak made a copy of the writeup that accompanied the machine and took it home to read. He translated the concept into electronics and grasped the idea of a circuit that would step through many small operations in an ordained sequence before performing an instruction: “All of a sudden I understood sequencing steps. I knew immediately that I knew how to design computers and I hadn’t the day before. You just know it. As soon as a good concept clicks you just know that it got you there.”
    The self-taught lesson was of considerable help when Wozniak delved into the innards of Data General’s Nova minicomputer. Designed by a team of refugees from Digital Equipment Corporation, the Nova gained a reputation for clever and aggressive design. A fancy poster that the company mailed out was a sought-after item in the small world of camp followers. Wozniak and Baum both hung the poster among the parade of idols that decorated their bedroom walls and the former explained the attraction. “There was no other computer around that looked as if it could sit on a desk.”
    The Data General Supernova was a sixteen-bit machine—it handled sixteen binary digits at a time—and everything apart from the memory was mounted on a single laminated board. Over one hundred semiconductor chips were slotted into holes in the green board and linked by squiggly solder traces. The lines of solder were etched on what was called a printed circuit board that formed one of the basic building blocks of computers. The chips mounted on the “mother board” controlled the most important functions of the machine. Almost every aspect of the Data General computer provided some commentary on the progress of electronics. Though the computer’s arithmetic logic was far more sophisticated, it was still akin to the adder-subtracter Wozniak had designed when he was thirteen. But what had, in 1963, required a large board and hundreds of parts was contained on a sliver of silicon in 1970.
    Along with Baum, who spent his summer vacations in California, Wozniak started to design his own version of the Nova. He wrote to Data General asking for more information and received several hundred pages of internal company documents. The pair gathered data sheets on new chips made by Fairchild Semiconductor and Signetics, pored over the technical specifications, and selected the chips that suited their needs. They