Steve Wozniak

But when the men around him were throwing around terms he'd never heard, Intel 8080, 8008, 4004, they were waving around a magazine with something called the Altair on the cover.

These weren't TV terminal people.

These were computer people.

Wozniak, an HP calculator designer who built games on the side, felt completely out of place.

I felt so out of it, Woz remembered.

Under my breath, I'm cursing Alan.

I don't belong here.

When the introductions came around, he mumbled something about working at HP on calculators.

He stayed only because he was too shy to leave.

But at the end, someone passed around data sheets for a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

Wozniak took one home, figuring he'd at least learn something from this awkward evening.

But that night changed everything.

Back in his apartment, Wozniak studied the data sheet.

The 8008 had instructions for adding and subtracting from memory.

Simple operations, but Wozniak knew exactly what they meant.

And then it hit him.

All those mini computers he'd designed on paper for years, they were just like this, except now the entire CPU is on a single chip instead of dozens of them.

The Altair everyone was excited about?

It was basically his cream soda computer from five years ago built with a microprocessor.

It was as if my whole life had been leading up to this point, Wozniak wrote.