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household the older son had a weak immune system. When Stephen was in fifth grade he was given a kit for a voltmeter. He followed the instructions, used a soldering iron to fasten the wires, and successfully assembled the device. Stephen showed more interest in electronics than either his sister or his younger brother, Mark, who observed, “My father started him very early. I didn’t get any of that kind of support.”
    Most of the neighbors on the Wozniak block were engineers. One neighbor who bought a home on the tract the same year as the Wozniaks never bothered to have his yard landscaped, but some of the local children discovered that he had run a surplus electronics store and would trade odd jobs for electronic parts. They weeded or scraped down some paintwork, kept note of the hours, and swapped their labor for parts. A couple of houses in the other direction was someone who specialized in radios, transceivers, and direction finders left over from World War II and the Korean conflict. One of Stephen Wozniak’s neighborhood friends, Bill Fernandez, said, “There was always somebody around who could answer questions about electronics.” The children learned to discriminate between the men’s specialties. Some were good on theory, some favored explaining things in math, while others had a practical bent and relied on rules of thumb.
    One man offered lessons to people who wanted to obtain ham-radio licenses. When Stephen Wozniak was in sixth grade he took the operator’s exam, built a 100-watt ham radio, and began tapping out his code letters. At one point electronics and politics merged. For when Richard Nixon was engaged in his 1962 California gubernatorial race Margaret Wozniak arranged for her son to offer Nixon the support of all the ham-radio operators at Cupertino’s Serra School. Even though Stephen was the school’s only bona fide operator, the ploy worked. Nixon and a stubby, crewcut. Wozniak appeared together in a photograph on the front page of the San Jose Mercury .
    Wozniak found ham radios more entertaining when they were modified and connected to friends’ houses. He rigged up wires attached to speakers to send Morse code from one house to another and discovered with his friends that if they talked into the speakers they could hear each other: “We didn’t know why but from that day we were into house-to-house intercoms.”
    At about the same time, Stephen entered a tic-tac-toe game in Cupertino Junior High School’s science fair. He and his father calculated an electronic simulation of the paper game and worked out combinations in which man battled machine. Stephen figured out designs for the electric circuits that would duplicate the moves while his father secured a supply of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and diodes from a friend. To his mother’s irritation Stephen assembled the game on the kitchen table. He hammered nails into a sheet of plywood to form electrical connections and laid out all the smaller parts. On the flip side of the board he installed a collection of red and white light bulbs and at the bottom he arranged a row of switches that would allow a player to select a move.
     
    A couple of years after completing the tic-tac-toe game Wozniak spotted an intriguing diagram in a book about computers. This was a machine called a One Bit Adder-Subtracter which would do what its name suggested: add or subtract numbers. Wozniak could follow some of the technical discussion from the lessons he had learned while messing around with kits and designing the tic-tac-toe board. But there were other aspects that he found entirely foreign. For the first time he came up against the idea that electronic calculating machines could provide solutions to problems of logic. He began to explore the algebra of logic and learned that switches—which could be only on or off—could be used to represent statements—which could be only true or false. He became familiar with the binary numbering