Steve Wozniak

Wozniak couldn't stop laughing in the principal's office.

The prank earned him a night in juvenile detention, where he taught the other inmates how to remove wires from the ceiling fan to shock the carts.

The pranks would continue for the rest of his life, only he'd be much better at not getting caught.

But Steve's real obsession was happening alone, behind closed doors.

In his senior year, he discovered something that would change his life, the small computer handbook.

It described a mini-computer, and Wozniak spent sleepless nights studying it, figuring out how to build his own version.

He started designing computers on paper.

It was really messy at first, full of errors.

But it was the start of something incredible.

Soon he was collecting manuals for every mini computer being made.

His ritual never varied.

He wrote, because I could never afford the parts to build any of my computer designs, all I could do was design them on paper.

Typically, once I started a design, I'd stay up very late one or more nights in a row, sprawled on my bedroom floor with papers all around and a Coke can nearby.

Since I could never build my designs, all I could do was try and beat my own designs by redesigning them even better using fewer parts.

I was competing with myself and developed tricks that certainly would never be describable or put in books.

I had a hunch after a year or so that nobody else could do the sorts of design tricks I'd come up with to save parts.

I was now designing computers with half the number of chips the actual company had in their own design, but only on paper.

The constraint of not being able to afford the chips fueled the competition with himself.

He became obsessive about doing more with less, but he told no one.

After high school, short on money, he needed work and access to real computers.