Free Return to the Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz Page A

drew schematics—diagrams that illustrated how the chips would be linked—for a couple of different versions of the computer. One used chips made by Fairchild; the other used chips made by Signetics.
    Though Wozniak was the driving force, Baum was more than a cheerleader. He was familiar with every aspect of the design and would suggest how the maximum amount of power could be extracted from the chips. They concentrated on the digital electronics and shrugged off more humdrum concerns. Baum recalled: “We didn’t worry about things like the power supply.” At one stage the pair even considered building their own version of the computer, filled a folder with schematics, and wrote to companies asking for parts. Wozniak recalled: “Every computer I designed I intended to build. Getting the parts was the problem.”
    The rigor of designing several different versions of the Nova provided Wozniak with some illuminating lessons. To help his son understand some subleties, Jerry Wozniak arranged for him to meet the designer of a Fairchild semiconductor chip. The Fairchild engineer explained that the number of chips used in a design formed only one aspect of the final goal. He told Wozniak that the space occupied by the chips on a printed circuit board mattered just as much as the number of chips. Henceforth Wozniak focused on the twin objectives of combining as few chips as possible in the smallest amount of space.
    The experience with the Data General Nova prodded Wozniak toward a grander diversion. He decided to try to build his own computer. He managed to spur the interest of one of his neighborhood chums, Bill Fernandez, to help with the effort. They had known each other for several years and their fathers played golf together. Though several years younger than Wozniak, Fernandez with his tense, thin, ivory features had a broader range of interests. He became a member of the Bahai faith, studied aikido, and seemed like the sort of person who might have been at home in sixteenth-century Japan as the student of a samurai warrior. He too was lured by science fairs and one year had entered an electric lock that had flat switches nailed to a piece of plywood. He built sirens from oscillators and was, as he readily admitted, thorough and competent but not given to whim or impulse. He was fastidious, good with his hands, and had a knack for installing items like car radios.
    In his final year at McCollum’s electronics class, Fernandez had worked as a technician in NASA’s spacecraft-systems laboratory. There he built, tested, and modified circuits, learned about special soldering techniques, was taught how to dress leads properly, and was lectured on the perils of nicking wires. Fernandez carved out a corner of his parents’ garage to work on his hobby. He squeezed his own shelves and workbench between the family water heater and clothes dryer. “Space in the garage was a constant battle. They were saying I had a quarter of the garage when I only had a sixteenth.” But the Fernandez garage offered a sturdy place to build Wozniak’s machine.
    Wozniak knew what he wanted from his computer. “I wanted to design a machine that did something. On a TV you turn a knob and it does something. On a computer you push a button and some lights come on.” To build a machine that would blink, Wozniak and Fernandez started scavenging for parts from a bundle of semiconductor companies. Intel furnished them with eight memory chips each of which could store 256 bits. Intersil gave a couple of expensive chips that contained arithmetic logic units. They rounded up some switches from a batch of samples belonging to a salesman for a switch company, light-emitting diodes from a Monsanto engineer, and a metal frame from one of Hewlett-Packard’s scrap piles. The largest batch of parts came from a couple of applications engineers at Signetics. Wozniak and Fernandez spread their trophies out on the latter’s living-room floor and sorted out all the