Once we finished the design, the bunch of us rode our bikes down to Sunnyvale Electronics, the local store and hangout for kids like us. We bought all this neat stuff, the microphones and the buzzers and the switches, you name it.
The next thing we did was connect the wire between all the houses. There were these wooden fences that separated all the houses on our short little street, and we just went along the fence in broad daylight, stringing this wire along and stapling it in. You know, it's possible that putting staples into wire would short it out. We were so lucky that didn't happen. And we stapled that wire all the way up the block—from one of my friends' houses to mine, and then I set up my switch box, drilled some holes in it, mounted some switches, and you know what? It worked! So then we had a house-to-house secret intercom system so we could talk to each other in the middle of the night.
We were about eleven or twelve then, so I'm not trying to convince you this was a professional modern engineering system, but it really worked. It was just a tremendous success for me.
In the beginning, we used it to call each other, I guess it was just so cool to be able to talk to each other. We'd call each other up and say things like, "Hey, this is cool! Can you hear me?" Or, "Hey, press your call button, let's see if it works." Or, "Try my buzzer out, give me a call." That was about the first week or two, and after that we started using it as a way to sneak out at night.
It didn't ring in this case, it had to quietly buzz, and it had to work on lights. So Bill Werner or one of the other guys would signal me, or I would signal one of them, and we had a code that would mean different things. I can't tell you how many nights I woke up to that buzzer or a light thinking: Oh boy, we're going out tonight!
We were a group of kids who loved climbing out our windows and sneaking out at night. Maybe it was just to talk, or go out and ride bikes, or sometimes it was to toilet-paper people's houses. Usually girls' houses. Ha. We'd go out in the middle of the night and say things to each other like, "Does anyone know anyone who has a house we should toilet-paper tonight?" To tell you the truth, I never had any idea who we should toilet-paper—I never thought like that—but the other guys usually had someone in mind.
And then we would go to the all-night store and try to buy, like, twenty-five rolls of toilet paper. I remember the clerk saying, "Hey, why do I get the feeling that this isn't to be used for its intended purpose?" I laughed and told him that we all had diarrhea. And he sold it to us.
Chapter 2
The Logic Game
I did a lot of reading at night when I was a kid, and one of my absolute favorites was the Tom Swift Jr. series. I would just eat up those books so quickly; new issues would come out a couple of times a month and I'd devour them. I don't think it would be exaggerating at all to say he was truly my hero.
Now, Tom Swift Jr. was this kid—a teenager, actually—older than me but still a kid like me. So I looked up to him. And he was also a scientist/engineer who got to build things in a laboratory. Anything Tom wanted he could build, and he had his dad to help him with tilings. He'd go in and hook wires together and make contraptions at a company he and his dad owned. So Tom had his own company, he had his own modes of travel, and he had his best friend named Bud Barclay. Anyway, in my opinion, Tom Swift Jr. had the perfect life. And whenever there was a crisis on Earth, any kind of conflict that needed handling, he sprang into action. Say the authorities on Earth had detected some alien energy source and the only way to hold it back would be with a plasma field. Well, Tom Swift Jr. would build a plasma field. He could build a submarine if he wanted to. There was no limit to what he could build. I remember once he built a spaceship to win a race around the Earth to get the money to do something good—you know, something good for the planet and all the people on it.
That was the kind of thing I wanted to do—build something that would end up allowing me to do something really good for people. I wanted to be a do-gooder from the start, just like Tom Swift Jr. was.
Well, my mom set a curfew at 9 p.m. every night. But after she turned the lights out, I used the light from this little streetlight outside my window to read. It hit my floor in one certain space. I would put the Tom Swift Jr. book down there on the floor where the light shone in, then put my head over the edge of the bed so I could read it late, late into the night. I wanted to be just like Tom Swift Jr.
And like Tom Swift Jr., I did work with my dad a lot on projects. In fact, my very first project—the crystal radio I built when I was six—was really all because of my dad. It took me a very long
My Hero
Tom Swift Jr. was the hero of a whole series of children's adven-
ture novels published by the same people (Stratemeyer Publishing) that did the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys titles.
James Lawrence, who said he had a deep interest in science and technology, was the author of most of the titles. I mentioned Bud Barclay already, Tom Swift Jr.'s best friend, but the stories had other elements in common. Anyone who's read them may remember dastardly spies from Eastern European countries like "Brungaria," and an amazingly capable element called "Tomasite," which could make anything atomic-powered.
One famous plot—I believe it was in book 22—involved scientifically regenerated dinosaurs. That was decades before
Jurassic Park.
time in my life to appreciate the influence he had on me. He started when I was really young, helping me with these kinds of projects.
• o •
My dad's and my relationship was always pretty much about electronics. Later, it became about what I did as an engineer working at Hewlett-Packard on calculators, or on the first computers I built at Apple. But first, for years and years, it was all about what Dad did in engineering. I watched, listened, and worked with him. It was about how fast he could show me things and how fast I could learn them.
Dad was always helping me put science projects together, as far back as I can remember. When I was six, he gave me that crystal radio kit I mentioned. It was just a little project where you take a penny, scrape it off a little, put a wire on the penny, and touch it with some earphones. Sure enough, we did that and heard a radio station. Which one, I couldn't tell you, but we heard voices, real voices, and it was just so darned exciting. I distinctly remember feeling something big had happened, that suddenly I was way ahead—accelerated—above any of the other little kids my age. And you know what? That was the same way I felt years later when I figured out how resistors and lightbulbs worked.
But now I had actually built something, something they didn't have, a little electronics thing I had done and none of them were able to do. I told other kids in the first grade, "I built a crystal radio," but no one knew what I was talking about. None of them. I felt at that moment a kind of glimmer that I might have a lead in things like this from then on. Does that sound crazy? But after building that little crystal radio and telling everyone about it, I knew I had done something most people would think was hard and few kids my age had done. And I was only six. I thought: Okay. That's done. What else can I do?
It's funny, because ever since that crystal radio project when I
was six, I've spent a lot of time trying to explain my designs and inventions to people who didn't know what I was talking about. So this has happened and keeps happening to me over and over. Even now.
• o •
All through elementary school and through eighth grade, I was building project after electronic project. There were lots of things I worked on with Dad; he was my single greatest influence.
In the fifth grade, I read a book called
SOS at Midnight
. The hero of the book was a ham radio operator, and all his friends were ham radio operators. I remember how they sent each other messages with the ham radio and when, after the main guy got kidnapped, he was able to beat the kidnappers by cleverly rewiring the TV a little and sending out a signal to his friends. The story was okay—it was just a story. But what really got me was the fact that there were people who used these ham radios to speak to each other long distance—city to city, even state to state. Now, this was a time when it was hard for me to imagine even making a long-distance phone call you could actually afford. Ham radio was the most effective way to reach out to people in faraway places without leaving home—and cheaply. This was something that much later led to my phone phreaking (using special tones to make free long-distance calls) and then to my use of the ARPANET, which later evolved into the Internet we have today.
The other thing—the special thing—was on the last page of
SOS at Midnight
. It said how to become a ham radio operator. It said you can become a ham radio operator at any age. All you had to do was contact the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) for more information.
I went to school the next day and told my buddy on safety patrol, "I'm going to get a ham radio license!" I was really boasting, because no one back then knew what I was talking about.
Ham Radio Making a Difference
To this day, ham radio is popular all around the world. It's a hobby. Ham radio amateurs use their two-way radios to talk to each other, share information, and just have fun.
But it's more than a hobby. From the start, ham radio operators performed a public service in protecting the airwaves from radio pirates, and being extremely ethical about how they used public airways.
Many ham radio operators from the early days have gone on to make significant contributions to society. There is a lot of practical applicability in the building and use of ham radio. I'm a good example.
Ham radios were pretty obscure. But this kid I told, he said, "Oh, you know, there's this guy down the street, Mr. Giles, and he's teaching a class on this. Are you in it?" So this was really lucky. I remember being astounded. It turned out that on Wednesday nights Mr. Giles—who actually was a ham radio operator—had these classes I could take. I learned Morse code there, I learned some of the electronics calculations I needed, I learned what frequencies ham radio operators were allowed to use. Basically, I got to learn all the stuff that was going to be on the test you had to take to be a licensed ham radio operator. My dad saw what I was doing, and he got his license with me. We both took the test and passed when I was in the sixth grade. And for that Christmas, I got kits to build a Hallicrafters transmitter and a Halli- crafters receiver. In today's money, it probably cost a couple thousand dollars. That's a lot of money to spend on a sixth grader. And building the radio transmitter and receiver was a lot of work! You had to unpackage hundreds of parts. I had to learn to solder for that, too. In fact, I soldered together the whole
A Little More About the Transistor
The transistor will likely go down as one of the greatest inventions in modern history, ranking right up there with the car, the telephone, and Gutenberg's printing press. William Shockley and his team at Bell Labs invented the transistor in 1947.
Put most simply, a transistor is a tiny electronic device to control the flow of electricity. But a transistor is more than that. It has two key abilities: the first is to amplify an electric signal, and the other is to switch on or off (1 or 0), letting current through or blocking it as necessary.
Transistors are in practically all modern electronics these days, from musical birthday cards, to your car, to your personal computer. Since 1947—and this is what has made the computer revolution possible—it has become cheaper and cheaper to pack more transistors onto a computer chip every year. (This is known as Moore's Law, which Intel founder Gordon Moore defined in the 1960s. He said that every year manufacturing would get so good that double the number of transistors would be able to fit on a chip for the same price.)
A simple logic gate comprises about twenty transistors, compared to an advanced computer chip in a modern (circa 2006) computer, which can include as many as a billion transistors.
thing. We also had to go up on the roof and string antennas of a certain length, to be right for the signals I needed. This was the beginning of learning the kinds of things I would need later to design and assemble computer boards like the one that later became the Apple I.
I loved my transmitter and receiver. They were such standouts in ham radio quality—these days, I even see these models featured in radio museums and collectors' magazines. I didn't really get into talking to the other ham radio operators—they were so much older than me and we really didn't have anything except for the ham radios in common. So after building it, I have to admit the whole thing got a little boring. But this experience was a major one. For one thing, I'm fairly sure I was one of the youngest ham radio operators in the country. That was huge for me. But even more importantly, I learned all about the process of getting a ham radio license—what I needed to know, what I needed to build the equipment—and then I built the radio. It gave me a lot of confidence for doing all kinds of other projects later on.
So my dad ended up being a key influence here, too. I mean, he even got his ham radio license with me—studying with me and taking and passing the test! The thing is, he never really tried to lead me in any direction or push me into electrical engineering. But whenever I got interested in something he was right there, always ready to show me on his blackboard how something worked. He was always ready to teach me something.