Steve Wozniak
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Their fathers worked at Fairchild Semiconductor or other companies sprouting up along the valley.
They had access to transistors when most of America was still using vacuum tubes.
They had spools of telephone wire donated?
by friendly utility workers.
They had fathers who could explain it all at dinner.
Steve became their unofficial leader, painfully shy, zero charisma.
But when the electronics kids decided to build a house-to-house intercom, Steve designed it.
He strung wire along wooden fences, connected their bedrooms.
After dark, they'd signal each other while their parents slept.
But Wozniak wanted more.
He didn't want to build what others had.
He wanted to create what no one else had thought of yet.
This obsession started early.
At six, his father gave him a crystal radio kit.
When voices came through the earphones, something shifted inside him.
I had actually built something, he'd later write, something they didn't have.
He told his classmates about it, and he explained how it worked.
They had no idea what he was talking about.
None of them could do what he'd done.
He liked that feeling, but he quickly moved on to the next thing, writing, "'Okay, that's done.