Steve Wozniak Cofounder of Apple Computer Speaking to Our Members at the FLGISA Conference

Is I try to be logical and my position is correct on stage's left because most people are going to go question answer question answer, so you want it on your left. The question and the answer on the right. That's I came up with that one long time ago. Matters.

These days or those days?

I love your approach. That's true comedian stuff. I love comedian methods. Um, yeah, way back when, I mean, I was just kind of lucky and lucky all the way. You think, oh, did I come up sort of even wanting to start the current digital age? No, I didn't want to start a company. No, I wanted other engineers to look over my shoulder at my designs on paper and which pieces of lumber, which chips I used connected what way. That was so amazing, ahead of the world. We really got known more for being very different for a computer, being something a person could own and could usefully. That basically the paradigm of you're typing on a keyboard with a video display. That wasn't how computers were created before that. Everybody was trying to go back to the old methods and you have this processor and you have all these buses of wires and switches. Switch up is one, down is zero. Switch in a bunch of ones and zeros that push a button and they go into memory and that was how all computers started up till then and other people were trying to start low-cost computers based on microprocessors but I had built that computer 5 years before, got publicity in a newspaper and all that, and you could flip the switches and push some ones and zeros into memory and even run a little program. And that's kind of beyond that human. You want things that are human. I worked for Hewlett-Packard and we had taken what used to be a slide rule. I was a slide rule geek in my high school by far. And we turned it into a handheld scientific calculator. I was designing those. And that's sort of human because you press a five button and a five pops up in the display. There's a little program watching what you're doing. You press a six, a six pops up in the display. These are human type things compared to flipping a bunch of switches and pushing buttons just to barely get it started up to the point that maybe not affordable by a human being. You could actually type program in some way. And what happened was I had this little step. First of all, in 8th grade I got the award for the best electronics project in the Bay Area Science Fair all the way up to 12th graders. And I got that award in 8th grade. I was way ahead in the old analog electronics because I was so mathematical. I was getting all the math awards in my schools and that went along with the electronics. My father was an engineer, electrical engineer. I loved watching him work. My siblings didn't turn out to be engineers. But I had moved up this curve of teaching myself with no books.

I had moved up this curve of teaching myself with no books. There were nothing in a bookstore. I looked in all the scientific bookstores. Anything on how computers are made, how you design computers, nothing. But I stumbled onto a journal here and a manual there and I said, 'Oh my gosh, I learned about logic and little gates that are little pieces of lumber and how they could be wired together.' And I eventually started designing every little mini computer that was coming out around 1970. All these many computers from IBM, from Digital Equipment, from Data General, from Varian Corporation, from Hewlett-Packard. I would sit down every weekend and get a fresh manual, think and think and think and work on paper for two days straight to come up with my design for what chips, what lumber will make this particular computer architecture. And I had my favorites and basically I came along lines of how do you make things simpler with fewer parts? And I'd go to sleep dreaming about a way to save a chip or two and wake up with solutions. So I was advanced in the analog world first, the old world of radio and television. I had a ham radio license at 10 years old. You had to study all these formulas for how electrons flow through different materials. And now I was digital too. And that combination helped a lot. So input output was the biggest expense. I could design what was called a processor. These chips, these 70 chips will build this processor that some company makes a computer on. And that was one thing and you know it's microprocessor now. But I could do that, but input output: how do I get anything into the computer and how do I get anything out of it? Flipping switches gets it in. Little lights gets it out. Lights on is a one, light off is a zero. And then I saw a Pong in a bowling alley. Oh my god, a television can be an output device. I could have been a television engineer. I knew television very well how it worked. And I unscrewed my back of my TV and pulled it off and probed around with electronic equipment and found where the TV signal was. I knew what it looked like and I knew how to put my own signal into the TV. Now I have an output device for free. Everybody owns a TV, so it's free. And the next, the input was very tough. But finally going into work every day at 6:00 a.m. to look through manuals of parts that might add up to my dream in life. I told my dad, I'll have a computer someday, a 4K Data General Nova computer. Data General Nova because it had a unique architecture that wasn't like the other computers. And 4K, you needed 4K bytes of memory to have a language that you can enter a program. Otherwise, you couldn't do programming languages. My dad said, 'It costs as much as a house.' I said, 'I'll live in an apartment.' I had made up my mind inside your inner core. It's like when I told him when I was in sixth grade, he said, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' I said, 'Electrical engineer like you. That's what I'm going to be.' And second, I want to be a fifth grade teacher like Miss Scrack. 'Cause she had given me such a great time and respect in fifth grade. Little did I know until much later in life that in fourth grade we were tested for IQ and mine was 200 plus and they wanted me to move up in classes. I wanted to stay with my friends. I didn't know it. So I didn't know this but the teachers and parents knew it. Anyway, I'm going through school and well, now I'm up designing my own little computers, but I saw the output device with my TV and I found in a manual a keyboard, low-level keyboard, not even uppercase, not even lower case, I mean, and you could buy it for $60. It's like $600 today. Imagine a little kid with nothing.

$600. That was the most expensive thing I bought on the way to the computers. And a club started up and I was interested in clubs. It was an electronics club and I had built a little terminal where I could type on my keyboard and see something on the display. It was called the Arpanet. Arpanet had six computers. Today it's the internet. How many computers on it? Started with six universities: MIT, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara and others. And I could dial this number up in Palo Alto, which was a toll call from Sunnyvale, if you could ever believe that. Two close cities in Silicon Valley. It was a toll call, but I could dial it up and send data over a modem I built and I could type to one of six computers and it could type back to my TV. And then I could log in as a guest 'cause I didn't have accounts. And I could read files and run programs. And that was a neat thing. And I went to this club and the club that I thought it was going to be for people who had video terminals like I'd created a really great one, and it was for all these people talking about little computer kits you can buy. The Altair 8800 was on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine and that's what they were all interested in, this little micro computer. So I took home a data sheet that night for the microprocessor and I said, 'Oh my gosh, this is just like those processors I used to design in high school, one after another.' And I said, 'Oh, I'm in business.' 'Cause all I had to do was take my little terminal that talked to a far away computer. And I just built a few chips onto my electronics board, my motherboard. One was a microprocessor for the brains. The other was the correct kind of memory. It was low cost. The most expensive thing in these little people trying to start up low-cost computers was the memory. They were using the wrong kind that was four times as expensive as what we now know as DRAM, dynamic RAM. And so I built this little computer. I'd go down to the club. I started writing a BASIC. Bill Gates had come out with his BASIC for the Intel microprocessor. I chose the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor because it was only 20 bucks. When you don't have money, you make some really good decisions. It was the best one too from a programming point of view. And so I would go into the club and I would be starting to type. I Bill Gates BASIC. I said if you're going to get computers into the home, I knew I was designing some great stuff. You got to have a programming language. You got to have BASIC 'cause there's a book called 101 Games in BASIC. Games is what was going to get the early computers into homes. So I started writing my own BASIC and I'd go down to the club and type things and they'd see it on the display. I was very shy back then. I never once raised my hand and spoke in the main meeting, but after the meeting, you could put stuff on a table and show it off. And when people asked me questions, I could answer them. And here I was with this little computer. I passed out my designs to everyone for free. No copyright notes, public domain, open source, everything.

And Steve Jobs wasn't in town. Didn't know it existed. But other people actually took my designs and built my computer on their own. And I helped a couple others build it. So that was just such a step ahead. They're looking over my shoulder and I'm typing into a machine. My terminal that I type on and see displays on the TV was the computer and part of the computer memory pot showed up on the screen. It was so many one great step after another after another. Color was a big one. When I was designing games, I loved games. And after Pong, I wound up getting in Atari was starting the arcade game industry and they wanted to hire me for good salary. I said, 'No way. I'm going to be an engineer forever for life at Hewlett-Packard where engineers are respected. You can stay an engineer. You don't have to go into management.' I was non-political. I would never vote. Came from the Vietnam War. And upper level management to me was a little like politics. You had to make decisions. So I'll just be an engineer forever. I'm great at hardware design, software design, and I'll never leave Hewlett-Packard. And so then Steve Jobs came into town and he came to a club meeting and there's a movie that shows him dragging me from a geeky little basement to the club to show off my computer. What? He'd never been to the club. That movie was that movie with Ashton Kutcher, which is so phony. And I was now a hero. So I took Steve Jobs

to see it. That's where he said, 'Oh, he saw the interest in my style of computer, keyboard, and a video display.' And he said, 'We should start a company.' I said, 'Well, I'll never risk my job at Hewlett-Packard.' So I went down with the idea and proposed it to Hewlett-Packard. Show him what it cost, what my computer was, the personal computer. They turned me down five times where I worked, the right division, Hewlett-Packard, turned me down five times. Circulated my description to every single Hewlett-Packard division. They all turned it down. So I got a sign off from a VP and just on the side, moonlighting. Steve and I had a company and we had to do it. That's the only way we can do it. So that takes us quite a ways up there. But I was going to have my own computer whenever it was possible regardless of what was going to follow. Steve Jobs wanted to be important and he didn't. We went to the same high school but he didn't have the same teachers I had, so he kind of was in the lower level. You know what is academic? I don't call that intelligence ever. So Steve was interesting to listen to and he was so motivating, wanted to be somebody important. And now he had big money come in from my computer from an investor, the one who really made our industry, you wouldn't know his name, Mike Markkula, a lot.

He was a third equal partner of Steve and I at Apple and he's the one who had business experience and he knew, here's who you hire, here's what the roles and responsibilities are, here's how you establish things, here's how you account for your money and all this. And he invested in us and he really ran the company, told Steve Jobs what our roles were and what we would do. And he knew business and I really believed in him.

No, this is fantastic. Best wish you all do ever. But before I was so shy, I did not want to ever have to talk to a press ever. And eventually the business side of the company, Steve Jobs was so interested in having a business. Mike Markkula was all the marketing expertise, hiring accountant groups and operation groups to build the machines. And this was the Apple 2 computer. And while I was down at Atari, I thought, wouldn't it be neat if this new arcade industry, if arcade games were color, not just black and white? And in my head, I'd been four days and nights without sleep designing Breakout for Atari. And I went back to my analog electronics, a TV engineer style. We put a wire into the TV and color was a sine wave that went up and down at exactly the right frequency, exactly the right time. It would be a red dot on a TV and for a little later in time it'd be a blue dot. And I thought about that and then my head said, 'What if I just took a number from my memory, my computer memory, 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1. If I took four little bits and put them on that wire into the TV, the TV would see a signal go up. One is up, zero's down, positive, negative. And if I put that signal in right out of the computer for free, no electronics to massage it, intermix red and blue and green sine waves and all, if I just put it right into the TV, every TV, I knew how TVs were designed. They would look at it and interpret it as color. They would see the rising signals at the right speed. They would take it as color. Oh my gosh. I filed that in my memory. And that was the key to the Apple 2. The Apple 2 computer, although it was called a computer, it was the first time arcade games were color. And it was also the first time ever arcade games were software. At Atari when I was there, they'd have like 150 chips in a new game and hook a thousand wires together, get all the signals right, and it would take usually half a man a year at least to get a new game prototype. And now in my Apple 2 computer, it was software in a simple language like BASIC. You told it what color to set, where to plot a point, or where to draw a line. And it was that easy that a 9-year-old kid could make a decent game for that age. 1975 in one night.

A kid that knew BASIC. That's all you needed to know. And that was a huge, huge change. And that machine with color in it, the Apple 2 computer, was the only source of profits for Apple for the first 10 years. As we moved up the Fortune 100 chart, we only made money off the Apple 2 computer. Apple 3 failed for marketing reasons. The Lisa failed because Steve Jobs didn't know how much it would cost. Didn't wait till it was affordable. And the Macintosh was our biggest failure of all. Built a factory that to build 80,000 a month and we were only selling 500. Stock of a Fortune 100 company drops in half in a week. Time to save your company.

I started Apple with three years of college in electrical engineering, computer science. Didn't need more. I knew everything about computers. But after about 12 years later, I had an airplane crash. I was piloting it and we all came out of it. But after 5 weeks of this amnesia where you don't know, time's passing. I called up Steve Jobs. I fin talked myself out of that amnesia. Called up Steve Jobs and I said, 'This is my last chance to go back and get my college degree.' And the Macintosh group's in really good shape. I was on the Macintosh team. And I went so I went back to Berkeley as a psychology major. My name was well known. So my Berkeley diploma now says Rocky Raccoon Clark. That's who I was.

Um, so I forget what the question was, but

Okay. So I wanted to be a psychology major partly because I figured the classes you take there might get you closer to a teaching credential. I still believed I want to be a fifth grade teacher and it still didn't quite get there. But eventually I had kids and they were in the school and I was like the school mom type. And I said I'll just start teaching one fourth grader who had dropped out of school and just having this big huge expensive Mongolian computer in her home was interesting enough to her that she'd spend 2 hours hand typing a little report instead of 20 minutes just scribbling it out. And she was special. She felt special and she totally dropped out of school. She got back into school and by the time she got to college, she always made the dean's list every quarter. So that success with her, I said, 'Okay, this summer I'm going to start teaching a few and I handpicked six of them.'

And I started out screwdriver, unscrew this here, I can put this in there. And then I didn't want to teach how to be a computer geek like myself. I want to teach them how to use for all the subjects in life, the subjects in school, how do you apply the computer to display things, timelines and all that or whatever it is if it's history, you know. And that's the way I taught, but I was teaching on the side. This was summer. Then the next school year, okay, I'll take the entire fifth grade class. There's a public school in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Lexington School, one classroom per grade. So I took the entire fifth grade and man, I'll tell you, I made those classes so fun. You could do a lot of fun things with a computer, especially by the time you get up to networks and make things go off. But I had a rule: if you could ever get into somebody else's computer on the network and mess it up, fine, as long as you can return it exactly. And so one day I was in class and an old girl, Bianca, I think, said, 'Steve, where's my control panels are gone? My system folder's gone. Somebody hid it.' I looked over in the class and there was Daniel Lee typing away, laughing, smiling. But they never once violated that rule in eight years of teaching. No, we had so much fun, but we learned so much about computers. I don't know, it's just something I feel really good about. I taught at the school. I taught in an office in town and I taught in my garage different years.

Well, we'd go down to Fry's and I would give each of the students you can buy one educational program and one fun program. And that was just how we ran it. And Fry's back then you could get a six-pack of Coke, one per person for a dollar. Okay. So I took 20 students down. They need you to get us that six-pack of Coke and a bunch of our chaperones. I had helping teachers and we came back. We had stacks and stacks of coats when you entered our office building.

Well, the best thing we can do is, oh, within your organization, I was going to go back to school because all you can in school, you can just stop fighting it. Fighting. I mean, you get in a school and all these rules. You can't open this there. No, can't do that. Too many restrictions. Well, parents and teachers put those up. As far as what you do, yeah. One of the things is you've definitely got to notice and appreciate creativity, but it's usually you're on schedules and money and budgets and all that. And it's very hard to do even in a company like Apple. How do you encourage creativity? The first big thing is this manager hires that manager who agrees to do certain things by a certain date and hires people that maybe even other managers. You go up and down this chart and everybody's got to meet their quota and their deadline and that doesn't leave a lot of room for the unique inventors. There's engineers who are very competent at what they do. They're trained in engineering and then there's inventors that just want to think creatively outside the barriers. I had done that my whole life. I was lucky. It's a personality trait and by the time you're 18 to 23, your personality stops changing. But I had just come up that just wanted to you get an idea, go build something and show it off just for fun even. So that means sometimes if you do a great product that is really productive and makes you money, that's not as valuable to a lot of younger people and creative people as making something that really has no value, but it's just cool. So you got to have a mixture of that, but you got to recognize it within companies.

How do you spot the one person that might, if they let them go for a few months, might come up with the whole new product of yours that'll for a decade that would run a division of a company for a decade.

Yeah, it's hard to encourage that too because I was so shy nobody could even spot me and couldn't talk to me. I just did things and I could show them off. So that was one of the advantages of being creative.

Oh, all over the world that technology creativity is just spread everywhere and it's equal. Silicon Valley was just accidentally ahead of the curve because the inventor of the transistor, that's the main device that runs all your digital stuff. You now get a chip with 60 billion transistors and that's a powerful chip that can run a smartphone. But it started out with one transistor. The founder, the inventor of the transistor, got the Nobel Prize, moved from the east coast to Silicon Valley, Mountain View, Silicon Valley, and set up Shockley Labs. He couldn't build the complicated transistor he was trying but his engineers were all smart and now they learned how to make transistors. They split away eight of them, the notorious eight, and they formed a company called Fairchild. Fairchild started making transistors. There were other spin-offs and a lot more companies, like Signetics, they all split off. It was growing and then came chips.

I was so lucky to grow up in this area. My father worked for Lockheed and the missile, the space race and all that stuff. And he couldn't ever tell us what he did, but I know he was close to these industries that were evolving. And he would take me down to a company, you know, when I was like 8 years old and I would see, wow, all these clean rooms dressed really fancy and they're making a chip. I was at a show once he took me to and a guy held up a piece of cardboard with a bunch of drawings that looked like buildings connected with roads. The guy said, 'This is a chip with six transistors on it.' Six transistors. The most valuable gadget of my life, my six transistor radio. So I went home. I asked my dad, 'Does that mean we're going to have better radios now?' And he said, 'Well, no. These new technologies like chips only go to the super expensive, the big companies and the military, and never go to people.' I didn't tell my dad, but in the back of my head, I wanted to make these things that were so expensive and only for the real wealthy companies and people. I wanted to make them for normal average Joe people, appliances in the home. And that was when I was eight years old or seven maybe. Anyway, I was lucky to see all that happening as we went from I'd learned in the old analog electronic days. I learned about vacuum tubes, tubes that would heat electrons and run them through and make the old radios and televisions when I was young. And then we moved into transistors, small light versions of that. And then we moved into chips. And I was just following along what was going on. I didn't realize it, but the most important day of my life was finding a journal in the hall closet that explained some of the ones and zeros, how you add them and subtract them. And I was proud that I learned how to do it 'cause this wasn't in any schools, wasn't in any books. I was just proud to do things on my own independently. Being shy helps make you independent. And I'll just learn this stuff that nobody else is doing because then I feel good about myself. I do things that other people are doing. There's a million people doing the same thing and I'm just one of a million. No, I didn't personality-wise, I just didn't want to feel that way. So I did all this stuff that would never amount to anything. Learning how to eventually combine little logic elements, ANDs and ORs and NOTs, and eventually I learned how to design on paper those computers, the mini computers, and I would design one after another after another and got so good at it. I mean, I didn't even to work at Hewlett-Packard as an engineer. I didn't have to have a college degree. They just interviewed you. If you knew everything, you're in. I was very lucky.

That was cool. When we started Apple for 20 years, it was make good products, people get them, program them, run programs they can get on them. And it was years, you owned it, and nobody, there was no internet yet. Then came the internet. And that was the tragedy of all time. I'm sorry. It was really incredible to be able to talk to people far away. But eventually it led to different business models and every company that started up in technology wanted to corral you via the internet. So you have to get a subscription. Now you got 100 subscriptions and each one of them you signed a user agreement without even reading it that says that you may use my data, you may sell it all you want and you may track me and sell the data to trackers and there's nothing I can do about it. And that's what you're agreeing to. I'm starting to try to get rid of as many subscriptions as I can, not take new ones on. I just don't like signing to those things. So the technology grew and grew and grew, but it grew to the big companies like Flock manage things. They come out with world changing events. What I like about the vendors that are here at this show, they remind me a lot more of Apple, smaller, we're not trying to change the world and own you and that stuff. I feel like nowadays almost everything I have I don't own it. Somebody else owns it. I mean, just this month, Apple's starting to say they're going to have you can buy an iPhone or you can subscribe. And the subscription, I'm afraid, is going to go to eventually. All you can do is lease your smartphone. And you just don't own things as they are anyway now. And that disappoints me. I want to be the most private privacy flock. It's going to track you around. I mean, recently, I got a door lock and you put your finger up and it identifies you. You know what? We did that a long time ago. You got more power in a smartphone, smart watch than to identify all fingerprints. But oh no, you have to send it all through an internet service. You have to sign up and give away all your rights to everything. So I wouldn't do it. Thank god that door came with a metal key. So that's the only one we use. You get like that after a while. I was one of the founders of the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation that fights in court these ACLU type civil rights and privacy issues in courts. I don't know. When you're creative, you feel independent. I want to do things I think of and I don't want somebody else deciding what I'll do or how it'll work or where the money goes. I buy something nowadays. You buy something and they own the product. Might be a car, might be a Tesla. They own the product, make changes for you that you didn't want, and they own your money. What I thought when you purchase things, it was two ways. They get the money, you get the product. And those days, I'm disappointed to see them bypassing us so much. It makes us feel we don't have as much. But all the little vendors here, I like the fact they're just doing useful things for the local governments. So I hope they don't have too much tracking. [laughter] But that's individual tracking is one thing. Tracking a company or usage. There's ways to do it without being, there are some companies actually go out there and say you can get email or VPN from us and we are against tracking and we're making sure everything is secure. Proton's the best for that. But there are others that actually promote that way. Apple has for a long time had a reputation of not being a tracker like Google is. I mean, Google doesn't make their money on searches, they make it on advertising. Meta Facebook doesn't make it on giving you ways to communicate with friends, they make it on advertising. So that's what the world's become, more money there.

When Ray Kurzweil, very smart person, came out with his book on singularity, he noticed some exponential curves that start out low and then eventually they'll come up exponential for the amount of memory and the amount of processing that we can do electronically and that by 2034 or something it would equal the brain. Whoa. And then for about 3 years on stage, I was saying, 'Yeah, computers are going to get that intelligent. That will lead to it. They'll be like us. You just don't see it at first because exponential curves.' And we're going to be, the computers are going to be friends. They'll smile at us. And notice our facial representatives. They're going to be like people. And then I got into well companies that don't have any humans will do better economically. And economics tends to win. And it gets into negative areas and then I reversed. First of all, Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking came on saying the biggest threat to humanity is this singularity idea. Computers will get smart as a person. And so I look at AI that way now too. That AI you can ask it questions and get a lot of suggestions that will take you a human into exploring some good directions. The AI isn't a creator. It's not a creator yet. It just knows what's been studied, what's been. It can kind of repeat it, but can't. Now, everybody talks about AI should be regulated. Even the companies making AI say it's got to be regulated. Well, the trouble is regulation is just a word. And I've been saying for 3 years now how it should be regulated. Anything you get that came largely from AI, you should be told it's from AI. Second, you should be told which AI and what it was trained on so that you can sniff the wind and say, 'Do I want to trust this one or not?' Could it be biased a certain way? But then also, you should have attributions. All the greatest scientific literature is in journals, pure published journals. And as you read an article, there are little bullet points that will take you down. You click number five or you look at one sentence and it says five in blue. So you go down below and five is which article or research that statement came from. That's attribution. Give attribution to those who deserve it. And AI should do that. You should be able to click on any phrase in AI and see oh this came from page six of the New York Times on January 30. They won't do that because they're doing a lot of illegal things too for that. I like trust in life. Things that are honest are the most important things to me. Mainly people. Don't say something because it sounds good. Say it just because you know it. It is. Always tell the truth and seek the truth. And this AI gets so far away from it with hallucinations and I don't know, a lot of the recently an AI was found on its own to hack into a site and sometimes they've been destroying data. They just give them free reign and then they get rid of certain data. This is not the world I like. I like the world that's more certain. And I like to talk to humans. Good lord. Even ordering what you want for a meal here in this hotel. Give me a human for a couple things. I haven't even got one meal right yet. [laughter]

Sure. I still do great pranks [laughter] all the time, believe me. Watch out. But, let's see. Oh, Steve Jobs and I. Well, there was one. I was in college by now and Steve was at the high school and he had this idea to where the students graduate, half of them come off by the two-story building. He wanted to drop a sheet down that says best wishes. We called it the Brazilian best wishes symbol. And we were painting a sheet over at a friend's house, Alan B's house, and his mother's a painter, and she kind of helped us get the shading right to look like a hen. She said, 'I know what this is for.' But they were really good parents and they were okay on it. [laughter] It was Alan B's parents. And we put it up there and we found out you can't just have a sheet and pull a cord and it falls down. And second, it's flapping around a little in the wind. And then we went a second night and we built a little car deal, two ramps and an axle between them that would roll down and pull the sheet over and didn't work. The third night I'm up there and Steve Jobs dropped out of it sort of. We signed it. Jobs, myself and Alan Bound. Alan Bound and I remember the third night we just took two different racks with a skate on each one and it would pull that sheet over real nicely, 40 lb fishing line, and we'd put little shoes on top of the sheet so it wouldn't blow around in the dates on and we tied them all to the rope so they'd never fall on a person's head. And the fourth night we really got it all totally working. And the next morning, like a day before graduation, in the morning the sign was down. Somebody had cut our little fishing line. And the next year at Berkeley, one person that came by my dorm room told me they were also in the quad, trying to fill it up with water for a senior prank. They were another group that was there. And Steve Jobs showed them where it was to cut and let it down. So that was close. Another one, Steve Jobs, a janitor told him where the main little shed out by the old football field where the main water switch was and then field by field there was switches for field by field. During graduation the kids sat in the bleachers and the parents were on the field. [laughter] And so our idea was okay, we'll just catch a little thing that we can pull and turn the sprinklers on the parents. [laughter] And we tested the idea at Cupertino High School for a football game during halftime and start sprinkling on the marching band and somebody ran over to the box that had the controls and turned it off. That gave me the idea, okay, well, we do it. We're going to epoxy the box shut. [laughter] I want to be a little clever. So we got a fellow folk freak from Berkeley named Grouch Joe. That was his freak name. Alan McKendrick was his real name. And he sort of claimed to know how to pick locks. Maybe easy locks. So I brought him down. He couldn't pick his way into the shed and I climbed up and I got something off the roof and I got into the shed but the wrong half of it. So we never pulled that prank off but I like to talk about it because maybe someday some kid will do it. [laughter] Yeah. And we played pranks on each other. We were just back then it was just Steve Jobs was a different person. I call it Steve Jobs zero. Just a fun person, prankster and everything. Much different than the Steve Jobs at Apple that you hear about.

I'd love to.

Wow.