Steve Wozniak

What else can I do?'

By sixth grade, he'd found his hero, Tom Swift Jr., a fictional boy inventor who built submarines and spaceships, solving global crises with cutting-edge technology."

Steve would lie on his bedroom floor each night imagining himself as Tom Swift, building machines that would change the world.

One day in 1960, flipping through his father's engineering journal, 10-year-old Wozniak found an article about Enoch, the world's first computer.

A room-sized monster with thousands of vacuum tubes.

But what captivated him was a single paragraph of boolean algebra.

building thinking into machines using only ones and zeros.

What happened next, Wozniak called the dream.

He realized that computers might soon fit in your house.

Not yet, but soon.

That vision became the driving force behind everything.

The math was simple, so simple a high schooler could learn it.

He started drawing logic gates obsessively, staying up all night, half moons with dots, triangles with circles.

These symbols became his alphabet.

He was obsessed.

He decided to build a machine for the science fair that could never lose at tic-tac-toe.

He programmed it to know every possible move, every possible outcome.

But the night before the science fair, the transistors blew up in smoke.

Wozniak was competitive.

He loved to win, but he also realized something.