[00:01.300 --> 00:03.220]  Hope you're having a great conference so far.
[00:04.120 --> 00:10.240]  On behalf of the many organizers, many volunteers, it's been a true pleasure to be involved with this conference.
[00:12.320 --> 00:17.860]  Our Saturday keynote, someone very special who needs no introduction, Woz.
[00:39.980 --> 00:40.900]  Delighted to be here.
[00:41.040 --> 00:42.140]  This is the right place for me.
[00:42.340 --> 00:48.480]  I brought a Hacker T-shirt with me that had binary numbers with your hand with number four on the front, but oh well.
[00:49.780 --> 00:55.680]  You know, I'm kind of sorry I missed the lockpick session because it reminded me of a neat lockpick experience I had this year at my company.
[00:56.760 --> 01:00.320]  Somehow the alarm went off and the key to set... everybody was... the right people were gone.
[01:00.460 --> 01:03.060]  The key to unlock it was in a locked cabinet.
[01:03.580 --> 01:05.180]  How are we going to unlock this cabinet?
[01:05.280 --> 01:06.760]  I said, oh, give me a paperclip.
[01:07.420 --> 01:11.900]  So I took a paperclip and sit there with the screwdriver and first try, I got it.
[01:12.040 --> 01:12.380]  Yeah!
[01:14.560 --> 01:19.300]  And then I discovered it had been unlocked and I had just locked it.
[01:20.860 --> 01:23.520]  And then I sat there for half an hour and I couldn't get it open.
[01:25.800 --> 01:27.220]  Oh well, what would life be?
[01:28.080 --> 01:32.340]  First of all, anyone here from Homeland Security Division, raise your hand.
[01:32.340 --> 01:35.580]  Or any other three-letter agency?
[01:37.320 --> 01:37.720]  Okay.
[01:39.320 --> 01:51.260]  You know, you go through life and if you're accomplished and you're successful, you can kind of go into a world and be around a lot of people that are CEOs and, you know, live an established life and, you know, good strict rules and we got it made.
[01:51.360 --> 01:53.420]  But for me, it was a lot different.
[01:53.680 --> 01:56.780]  Never really even wanted any of the success and all that.
[01:56.780 --> 01:58.440]  I just wanted to design neat computers.
[01:58.760 --> 02:02.340]  So for me, I've chosen that I'd much rather be around people like all of you.
[02:02.560 --> 02:03.660]  The people in my life.
[02:03.800 --> 02:04.700]  Interesting people.
[02:07.520 --> 02:14.560]  You know, obviously we're a threat to everybody who's got money because we have so much of their money now because we're, you know, we know how to get it, right?
[02:15.960 --> 02:20.240]  And, you know, when you die, when you die, how are you going to value your life?
[02:20.540 --> 02:21.860]  Did you live it?
[02:21.920 --> 02:22.900]  Did you have a fun life?
[02:23.080 --> 02:31.560]  You know, you could say, well, I achieved this and I have this going on and I'm trying to get this division of my company in shape and I have these clothes and title and salary and money and houses.
[02:32.480 --> 02:37.140]  Or did you have a ton of laughs every day with your friends and walk around telling jokes and we're happy?
[02:37.340 --> 02:39.120]  Who had the better life, really?
[02:39.700 --> 02:40.740]  So that's us.
[02:43.860 --> 02:46.920]  Somebody today, I was, yeah, talking to Cheshire and his great phone number.
[02:46.980 --> 02:48.820]  I'm a collector of neat phone numbers.
[02:49.100 --> 02:54.080]  It really started with a thing I had called dial-a-joke and you needed good numbers so you didn't get 2,000 wrong calls a day.
[02:54.720 --> 02:59.460]  And one of the numbers I had was 2-2-1-1-1-1-1.
[03:00.420 --> 03:00.860]  Why?
[03:01.100 --> 03:03.280]  A lot of us in this room were the kind of purists.
[03:03.500 --> 03:12.840]  2-2-1-1-1-1-1, by the rules of assigning phone numbers back then, that was the shortest distance you could dial on a dial phone, if dial phones still existed.
[03:13.200 --> 03:16.020]  So it's kind of like a purism why it was so much better.
[03:16.120 --> 03:19.540]  You could get no other number that only had 2-2s and 5-1s.
[03:20.040 --> 03:26.540]  I got a million calls on it all the time and they hung up until one day I was booking a flight, which turned out to be Pan Am.
[03:28.200 --> 03:32.220]  So the next time I got a call and I heard them start, I said, hello, and they started hanging up.
[03:32.300 --> 03:33.320]  I said, oh, you calling Pan Am?
[03:34.000 --> 03:35.780]  And the lady said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[03:35.900 --> 03:38.400]  I said, well, we're on our lunch break, so what can I do for you?
[03:39.440 --> 03:40.760]  Booked my first flight that day.
[03:42.980 --> 03:52.280]  After about a couple of weeks, I figured, uh-oh, the police are going to be, you know, triggered onto this and looking for who's getting people to go to the San Jose airport at 3 in the morning to catch flights that don't exist.
[03:52.480 --> 03:56.060]  So I started always telling people at the end of the call, I'm just joking.
[03:56.860 --> 03:58.960]  You know how hard it is to get people to believe that?
[03:59.160 --> 04:02.520]  They chuckle, they chuckle, and then they say, okay, how much is it for the ticket?
[04:03.180 --> 04:04.160]  No, I'm just joking.
[04:05.000 --> 04:07.160]  So I started trying to stretch it out.
[04:07.320 --> 04:09.560]  Sometimes what we do is a little psychological game.
[04:10.260 --> 04:13.320]  How much can you get people to buy into?
[04:13.480 --> 04:14.500]  How far can you deceive them?
[04:14.680 --> 04:18.340]  So I started playing this game of the grasshopper special had the lowest flights.
[04:18.380 --> 04:24.060]  If you go through our lesser-used airports, and I would make up places like Billings, Montana, Moscow, Idaho, Amarillo, Texas.
[04:24.260 --> 04:29.200]  If you bounce around all these cities and get to your destination in five hops, your flight can be cheaper.
[04:29.580 --> 04:29.700]  Oh.
[04:30.980 --> 04:36.660]  And one day, so one day I told this guy, you go to Las Vegas, and you go up to our booth and roll the dice.
[04:36.660 --> 04:38.520]  If you get a seven, the next leg is free.
[04:39.400 --> 04:40.780]  And he bought into it.
[04:43.220 --> 04:46.760]  I started trying to sell propeller service flights 30 hours to London.
[04:46.920 --> 04:47.740]  The guy wouldn't take it.
[04:47.860 --> 04:50.100]  But I did sell a 20-hour flight to New York.
[04:52.300 --> 04:54.940]  And so, you know, and we're...
[04:54.940 --> 04:58.080]  And I got an awful lot of my good phone number stories.
[04:58.080 --> 04:58.960]  The one I liked the best.
[04:59.140 --> 05:00.460]  Well, my 88888888.
[05:00.500 --> 05:03.800]  But I used to get calls on the phone I use at night, and it was somehow the...
[05:03.800 --> 05:14.440]  If you forgot to dial one before the free 888 numbers, which eventually came into existence, if you dialed the service called Bored Housewives, you'd get my phone in bed at 2 in the morning.
[05:16.240 --> 05:17.640]  So, what do you do?
[05:17.800 --> 05:22.360]  When a person calls you, and they're off on a different tangent than reality.
[05:22.520 --> 05:26.480]  They think they have called Bored Housewives, but they've really called Steve Wozniak.
[05:26.620 --> 05:27.360]  Well, what do you do?
[05:27.440 --> 05:29.360]  Their mind, to me, is in a creative state.
[05:31.300 --> 05:33.600]  Their mind has invented a story to me.
[05:33.600 --> 05:36.480]  And I want to see how far that creative state...
[05:36.480 --> 05:38.560]  You don't ever want to inhibit creativity, right?
[05:39.200 --> 05:41.220]  So, the word to use is yes.
[05:41.560 --> 05:42.540]  Whatever they say.
[05:43.200 --> 05:44.000]  You know, wrong numbers.
[05:44.200 --> 05:45.460]  Oh, I'm just a paramedic.
[05:45.560 --> 05:46.460]  I picked up this phone.
[05:46.760 --> 05:48.220]  Oh, is it a Bronco?
[05:48.400 --> 05:48.640]  Yeah.
[05:48.860 --> 05:49.700]  Is it a white Bronco?
[05:49.860 --> 05:50.260]  Yes.
[05:50.580 --> 05:51.520]  Is it by the reservoir?
[05:51.680 --> 05:52.000]  Yes.
[05:52.600 --> 05:53.360]  Where are you going?
[05:53.460 --> 05:53.880]  I don't know.
[05:54.180 --> 05:55.220]  I better hang up now.
[05:55.320 --> 05:56.240]  It's too much time on this call.
[05:58.020 --> 06:00.380]  So, you know, I don't know.
[06:00.460 --> 06:03.560]  There's a lot of people that don't really grow up with kind of a...
[06:03.600 --> 06:07.760]  It's a humor that might be at somebody else's disadvantage in small ways.
[06:08.260 --> 06:09.080]  And I forget.
[06:09.200 --> 06:10.100]  There is a name for this.
[06:10.440 --> 06:15.600]  But those of us who've been down the paths we've been down, have an inborn curiosity.
[06:15.760 --> 06:16.920]  Really, it starts when we're babies.
[06:17.040 --> 06:17.860]  You take any baby.
[06:17.940 --> 06:18.500]  They're all hackers.
[06:18.980 --> 06:21.660]  Every baby is trying to push its way out of the crib.
[06:21.860 --> 06:27.600]  You know, crawling around, looking at every door, every cabinet, and trying to open it or touch things and knock them over.
[06:27.800 --> 06:28.760]  So, they're all babies.
[06:28.800 --> 06:34.500]  And they kind of get taught by people what the rules are, where you can go, where you can't.
[06:34.620 --> 06:35.960]  What's the shape of your maze?
[06:36.780 --> 06:41.880]  But somehow, God or nature, whoever makes us, has made us that way from the start.
[06:42.640 --> 06:45.760]  And a lot of us like to get pleasure from the unexpected.
[06:46.260 --> 06:47.580]  Well, what is a joke?
[06:47.840 --> 06:51.620]  Everyone grows up with jokes in every culture, and that's the biggest element of humor.
[06:51.620 --> 06:59.280]  You tell a story along one line, and the punchline is something you didn't expect, a different story that fit the words.
[06:59.580 --> 07:02.400]  And getting pleasure from the unexpected isn't that unusual.
[07:02.620 --> 07:05.280]  But like I said, there are some people that cannot laugh at jokes.
[07:05.860 --> 07:08.620]  Matter of fact, there are some people that hear a joke, and they think it's the truth.
[07:10.700 --> 07:15.460]  We have dreams so often that we're trying to do the things that aren't supposed to be possible.
[07:15.460 --> 07:23.180]  Who would have thought in 1971 that if you put some tones into your own home phone, you could dial anywhere in the world?
[07:23.580 --> 07:26.840]  In 1971, you couldn't reach the world.
[07:27.080 --> 07:33.980]  I mean, it was so expensive, nobody had much of the community outside their own local community, except maybe ham radio operators.
[07:35.680 --> 07:36.240]  Okay.
[07:37.740 --> 07:44.840]  But another thing is, you know, there's this element of what we're doing has some kind of learning, educational value.
[07:44.840 --> 07:47.580]  And it's largely because we're always trying to do the best.
[07:47.720 --> 07:49.360]  We're trying to outdo some other people.
[07:49.560 --> 07:57.360]  We're trying to find slip-ups they had in their code or things that they didn't think would work this way on a phone company.
[07:57.540 --> 07:58.880]  Searching and searching and searching.
[07:59.080 --> 08:02.660]  But it's really a way of saying, I did something more than someone else.
[08:02.740 --> 08:04.060]  I did the unexpected.
[08:04.380 --> 08:07.240]  So it's a way that we can somehow boast and socialize.
[08:07.420 --> 08:16.200]  I met someone who was a psychology student once that taught me that, well, there's a group of people that sort of I was in that category while I was in college.
[08:16.860 --> 08:22.420]  And they're kind of like socially backwards and out antisocial a bit.
[08:23.580 --> 08:25.000]  They don't communicate well.
[08:25.180 --> 08:27.980]  And to communicate it comes out as antisocial behavior.
[08:28.280 --> 08:30.180]  Little pranks and that sort of thing.
[08:30.540 --> 08:34.980]  And somehow that's a way of touching other people and having a back and forth communication.
[08:34.980 --> 08:36.940]  And it substitutes for the normal.
[08:37.640 --> 08:40.440]  And, you know, sometimes I think, gosh, I was so shy and quiet.
[08:40.660 --> 08:48.360]  And sometimes by designing something good or doing something unexpected, all of a sudden I'd have people that would talk to me.
[08:48.460 --> 08:50.480]  And it would open up my shell.
[08:50.600 --> 08:51.660]  And I'd have something to talk about.
[08:51.880 --> 08:53.380]  Maybe it was too techy at the time.
[08:53.460 --> 08:57.110]  But we really wouldn't have today's technology.
[08:57.720 --> 08:59.000]  The computers, the internet.
[08:59.140 --> 09:05.980]  We wouldn't be this advanced in the world if it weren't for basically people doing what's called hacking and what we hackers like to do.
[09:06.300 --> 09:08.600]  And, you know, play around and see how far we can get.
[09:08.900 --> 09:21.580]  It turns out that almost every major advance and really new thing that's startling, you talk to the people that invented it in later life and they all go back to their stories with blue boxes and their stories of, you know, other kinds of electronic pranks and fun.
[09:21.680 --> 09:26.740]  And almost none of them were like kind of a serious business student, accountant type personality.
[09:27.420 --> 09:30.580]  So, really, we'd be... who knows how far backwards we'd be.
[09:32.020 --> 09:39.580]  Well, you know, when I think back to my own self as a hacker, it's like all of the things that would motivate it, you know.
[09:39.740 --> 09:41.760]  Nobody is really going to define what is a hacker.
[09:41.980 --> 09:42.720]  Where does it come from?
[09:42.880 --> 09:47.540]  But there are psychological studies of what can motivate you.
[09:47.760 --> 09:54.400]  As a teacher, you find out that it's much less important, the words that you use, than if you can inspire the kids to want to learn.
[09:54.400 --> 09:55.960]  Make it interesting to them.
[09:56.080 --> 09:56.620]  Make it fun.
[09:56.860 --> 09:57.820]  Make them smile.
[09:58.220 --> 09:59.380]  Make them, you know, give them praise.
[09:59.580 --> 10:02.880]  They'll go back to the books and spend more time studying than they would have.
[10:02.980 --> 10:05.880]  And if you want to learn, you'll learn more than if you don't want to learn.
[10:06.060 --> 10:10.500]  That's much more important is to motivate a student than to communicate content and information.
[10:11.120 --> 10:17.560]  But as, you know, as hackers working on our projects, we're motivated very much by humor.
[10:17.560 --> 10:18.700]  Somebody laughs.
[10:18.940 --> 10:19.900]  We made somebody laugh.
[10:20.120 --> 10:21.220]  I don't know what it is.
[10:21.380 --> 10:24.520]  I don't know why laughter is good, you know, for a lot of us.
[10:24.920 --> 10:31.660]  We get the prestige of being able to boast about what we were able to accomplish that other people didn't know about, that it was possible in the world.
[10:33.380 --> 10:36.340]  Obviously doing the best and very often trying to be perfect.
[10:36.340 --> 10:40.840]  It was like the early phrase hackers that came from the model railroad club and at MIT.
[10:41.140 --> 10:52.240]  It was looking over a type of code and rewriting it and everybody took a hand at it, rewrote it one hair better, and it was somehow simpler or somehow everyone would look at it and say that is the perfect code.
[10:52.540 --> 10:55.180]  Want to get it a little better than any other human could do.
[10:55.500 --> 10:57.820]  We're obviously not motivated by money.
[10:57.980 --> 10:59.700]  I don't really see a lot of money in this room.
[11:01.560 --> 11:02.480]  Well, you know what?
[11:03.100 --> 11:04.460]  No, I gave mine away.
[11:04.620 --> 11:04.960]  Trust me.
[11:06.380 --> 11:08.440]  Because, you know, I didn't do this stuff for money.
[11:09.420 --> 11:10.260]  And it's the truth.
[11:11.480 --> 11:12.820]  It turns out that...
[11:16.940 --> 11:18.100]  I'll get into that.
[11:18.200 --> 11:19.060]  I'll get into that.
[11:19.240 --> 11:22.260]  I mean, you know, I'll even get into the start of Apple in that regard.
[11:22.660 --> 11:33.380]  But the funny thing is there's a lot of society says that money causes technological advancement and causes change that improves people's lives.
[11:33.940 --> 11:42.240]  But really, you know, it's somebody being motivated the right way on the inside, wanting to solve these big problems that really come up with the great inventions and the great steps forward.
[11:43.180 --> 11:54.240]  And we have a system, a system of business models that work and tax laws that protect it and other, you know, laws that, you know, you can't...
[11:54.240 --> 11:59.400]  I mean, you start a business and you can't even let your employees be free and pay their own way to hotels.
[11:59.400 --> 12:00.920]  I mean, it gets so complicated.
[12:01.140 --> 12:03.340]  But it turns out we have a system that's all based on money.
[12:04.020 --> 12:14.660]  And here we are trying to develop technologies of our own or whatever we can get our hands on, figure out something that's ours and not theirs, and create it a way into a system maybe.
[12:15.140 --> 12:21.060]  If we're creating something without money, yeah, we're a threat to the people that say that it takes money to do it.
[12:21.060 --> 12:22.620]  Yeah, we're terrorists.
[12:23.100 --> 12:23.940]  We're terrorists.
[12:24.140 --> 12:27.340]  We're a threat to the normal way of making products with money.
[12:27.520 --> 12:32.600]  We're a threat to the financial models of the Western, you know, culture.
[12:33.260 --> 12:35.500]  Because we don't do what we do for riches.
[12:40.110 --> 12:53.000]  Well, when I was young, my dad was probably the most important influence in my life, and he'd gone to Caltech, and he would tell at the dinner table sometimes some of the pranks that they had done at Caltech.
[12:53.380 --> 12:58.380]  You know, and some of these pranks involved electronics and computers and some didn't, but they were...
[12:58.380 --> 12:58.960]  You know what?
[12:59.060 --> 13:00.720]  I sat there and I didn't...
[13:00.720 --> 13:03.320]  He didn't instruct me, here's how you do pranks.
[13:03.460 --> 13:06.380]  I heard the stories and it was fun, and I laughed.
[13:06.660 --> 13:11.500]  And that laughter inside, I told myself, I am going to be a prankster.
[13:11.500 --> 13:14.160]  I am going to do pranks like that in my life.
[13:14.580 --> 13:15.520]  Didn't have to tell anyone.
[13:15.660 --> 13:16.800]  It's kind of like my son.
[13:17.120 --> 13:23.700]  The early days of video games, he sat down with the early Nintendos and played them very young, and one time he came to me and he says, you know...
[13:23.700 --> 13:25.460]  You ask him, what do you think you're going to be in your life?
[13:25.640 --> 13:26.600]  What do you want to be in your life?
[13:26.660 --> 13:28.680]  He says, I don't know, but I'm going to be a game player.
[13:29.760 --> 13:34.820]  So it's kind of like, you know, you make these little commitments to yourself that you're going to do and how you're going to be.
[13:34.980 --> 13:39.380]  And some of us manage to live up to those youthful ideals our whole lives.
[13:43.230 --> 13:48.480]  Well, you know, what really pisses me off is when I try to tell a joke and then somebody thinks it's real.
[13:48.880 --> 13:57.900]  One of the first ones I tried, I took a little sign to a convention or a political event and it said, Ham radio operators of Sarah's school unanimously support Richard Nixon for governor.
[13:58.080 --> 13:59.220]  It was a joke.
[13:59.400 --> 14:02.580]  I was the only ham radio operator in sixth grade.
[14:03.680 --> 14:05.120]  The flashbulbs all went off.
[14:05.380 --> 14:07.920]  They put my picture on the front page of the San Jose Mercury.
[14:08.460 --> 14:12.560]  The press treated it and they said, a school group, representing a school group.
[14:12.840 --> 14:14.420]  You know, how did they get it so wrong?
[14:16.080 --> 14:20.060]  So, I'm glad for those of us who kind of, you know, know where things are at when need be.
[14:24.100 --> 14:26.420]  Well, one of the things...
[14:28.260 --> 14:31.460]  Okay, I've had a lot of different occupations, so I've got to think of what path to go here.
[14:31.780 --> 14:33.840]  In sixth grade, I did build a ham radio.
[14:34.140 --> 14:37.480]  Back in those days, you didn't just buy it and learn a set of rules to use it, like today.
[14:37.920 --> 14:44.060]  You actually got tubes and capacitors and resistors and sockets and pieces of metal and cabinets.
[14:44.300 --> 14:47.960]  And you put everything together according to hundreds of pages of instruction.
[14:48.180 --> 14:49.520]  You built it yourself.
[14:49.780 --> 14:51.460]  You knew the value of it.
[14:51.520 --> 14:52.940]  You saw a finished product.
[14:53.000 --> 14:55.100]  You used a finished product in the end.
[14:55.100 --> 15:01.900]  You had built it yourself, autonomously, on your own schedule, and that was very motivational.
[15:03.360 --> 15:05.960]  And a lot of what we do, you know, we know the value.
[15:06.100 --> 15:11.260]  When you're working for a company on their computer, you know who owns the computer and what your limits are.
[15:11.420 --> 15:12.740]  And it's not yours.
[15:12.960 --> 15:16.600]  And so, a lot of us grew up with wanting our own computer for that reason.
[15:17.100 --> 15:19.800]  In sixth grade, I got my first transistor radio.
[15:20.340 --> 15:21.660]  This was so unbelievable.
[15:21.820 --> 15:24.060]  In 1961, I could hear all those songs.
[15:24.300 --> 15:29.920]  All the hit songs of 1961 to this day are, you know, the center of my core.
[15:30.600 --> 15:31.940]  You know, Lion Sleeps Tonight, even.
[15:32.860 --> 15:37.420]  So, I got my transistor radio, and I was talking to my dad, who worked at Lockheed, on missiles.
[15:37.620 --> 15:43.240]  And he was showing me how they were putting transistors in tighter and tighter configurations to have less weight.
[15:43.240 --> 15:44.740]  Because weight matters for missiles.
[15:44.960 --> 15:46.080]  It costs money.
[15:46.340 --> 15:48.220]  And he said they were going to come out with chips.
[15:48.480 --> 15:53.260]  And chips were going to have more than one transistor on them to get it even smaller and lighter.
[15:53.480 --> 15:54.840]  And I said, oh, wow.
[15:55.000 --> 15:57.380]  So, they're going to make even better transistor radios.
[15:57.600 --> 16:02.060]  I said, they're going to develop this technology for human beings to listen to better radios.
[16:02.200 --> 16:07.280]  And he said, no, they really developed a technology for the military and the government who can afford it.
[16:07.360 --> 16:11.280]  And then what trickles out comes to human beings and consumer electronics.
[16:11.800 --> 16:13.320]  And that kind of always bothered me.
[16:13.440 --> 16:20.740]  I always kind of wanted the needs of a normal human being, living a life in a house, doing normal fun things with friends to kind of drive the world.
[16:20.740 --> 16:24.000]  And I sort of learned that, well, there's a different part of the world you don't see when you're young.
[16:25.120 --> 16:28.140]  Dad asked me about that time, what are you going to be when you grow up?
[16:28.880 --> 16:30.860]  I said, first, I'm going to be an engineer like you.
[16:31.680 --> 16:32.940]  Because I was good in math already.
[16:33.160 --> 16:36.360]  And second, I said, I'm going to be a fifth grade teacher like Ms. Skrack.
[16:36.360 --> 16:46.940]  Because everybody remembers the teacher that saw your potential and respected you for being good at something and really, you know, made you feel like this teacher cared and was going to be a big part of your future.
[16:47.720 --> 16:50.920]  And my dad had been good to teach me the value of education.
[16:51.840 --> 16:56.760]  That we, the younger generation, the older generation has a really screwed up world.
[16:57.220 --> 17:00.580]  And it doesn't work right and people don't get along and there's a lot of problems in it.
[17:00.760 --> 17:03.300]  We, the younger generation, are going to study in school.
[17:03.300 --> 17:06.900]  And we're going to be, we're going to come out and we're going to make a better world when we grow up.
[17:07.420 --> 17:12.900]  Well, it may not have worked out that way, but I still pass that message on to every young person that is close to me, including my own kids.
[17:14.360 --> 17:22.380]  As I got into, by the time I got to high school, I was real good and accomplished, knowledgeable at computers and logic and building things like that.
[17:23.060 --> 17:26.680]  And I was down, my electronics teacher did something really good.
[17:26.680 --> 17:34.270]  He said, Steve knows all the electronics in school, and he found a way to get me to work at a company in town, programming a computer.
[17:34.540 --> 17:36.240]  We didn't have computers in high school.
[17:36.460 --> 17:38.140]  I got to program a computer.
[17:38.360 --> 17:39.960]  This was like the imaginary word.
[17:40.180 --> 17:43.200]  I didn't know there were jobs in computers, that a person could ever do it.
[17:43.290 --> 17:45.510]  This was like the most amazing miracle in a lifetime.
[17:46.580 --> 17:53.940]  First program I wrote was the Knight's Gambit, where you try to jump a knight across a chessboard and hit every square exactly once.
[17:54.480 --> 17:57.420]  I have a computer, a million things a second.
[17:57.800 --> 18:00.200]  I'm a human being, I can do about one thing a second, maybe.
[18:00.770 --> 18:05.480]  So I wrote this program, and the lights on the computer flickered and flickered and flickered and flickered, and nothing happened.
[18:06.740 --> 18:08.770]  Uh-oh, did I go through a learning?
[18:08.940 --> 18:09.530]  Well, the next...
[18:09.530 --> 18:17.200]  I finally started printing out chessboards, and I saw that the programming was working exactly as I wanted to, but it was going to take 10 to the 25th years to get a solution.
[18:19.340 --> 18:25.530]  Just because something's fast doesn't mean it can compete with the human mind that can come up with a good approach or algorithm.
[18:27.480 --> 18:31.160]  I started... I ran across my first computer manual down at Sylvania.
[18:31.340 --> 18:35.540]  I saw it on a table, and it said, it said, small computer manual, PDP-8.
[18:35.680 --> 18:37.060]  Many of you in the room might remember that one.
[18:37.700 --> 18:38.620]  Oh, my gosh.
[18:39.060 --> 18:45.080]  I was so intrigued that there was actually a book within eyesight of me about a computer and what it was.
[18:45.340 --> 18:46.580]  And somebody said, you want it?
[18:46.660 --> 18:47.270]  You can have it.
[18:47.660 --> 18:49.840]  I took that book home and studied it.
[18:50.270 --> 18:52.320]  By then, I had books of the first chips.
[18:52.460 --> 18:56.770]  Now, the first chips had, like, one gate on a chip.
[18:57.010 --> 19:00.010]  One AND gate or one OR gate on a chip.
[19:00.140 --> 19:03.040]  And the chip cost 50 bucks, which is probably 500 bucks today.
[19:03.400 --> 19:05.790]  These things were not for humans, like me.
[19:05.790 --> 19:09.720]  But they... I had the manuals, and they were at least virtual.
[19:10.060 --> 19:14.790]  So I sat down and started trying to design my version of this computer, the PDP-8.
[19:16.380 --> 19:18.940]  And after a while, there were better... I designed it.
[19:19.100 --> 19:20.440]  And it was crude, lousy design.
[19:20.790 --> 19:23.340]  After a while, I had a weekend free and designed it a little better.
[19:23.510 --> 19:25.140]  And then some better chips came out.
[19:25.800 --> 19:27.010]  Designed it again a little better.
[19:27.300 --> 19:31.660]  Now another mini computer came out, and I got the manual for it and designed that one.
[19:31.800 --> 19:44.440]  And it became my hobby of every few weeks, I would just sit down on paper, and do my own design for all the various mini-computers from Digital Equipment, Varianne, Hewlett-Packard, and Digital and DEC and Data General.
[19:44.620 --> 19:46.200]  And you would know all the names of the companies.
[19:46.580 --> 19:48.530]  And it became a love of mine.
[19:48.600 --> 19:50.200]  Where do you get computer manuals, though?
[19:50.340 --> 19:51.880]  There were no computer stores back then.
[19:51.940 --> 19:52.560]  There were no places.
[19:52.770 --> 19:55.030]  There were no microprocessors or anything like that, either.
[19:56.400 --> 20:02.290]  A friend of mine and I would drive up on Sundays to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC.
[20:02.740 --> 20:05.320]  Because a lot of smart people work at SLAC.
[20:05.920 --> 20:09.100]  And wherever smart people work, doors are unlocked.
[20:10.950 --> 20:16.030]  And we would go around the back and eventually climb stairs and find a door that was unlocked.
[20:16.380 --> 20:17.880]  We'd go into the main building.
[20:17.880 --> 20:19.270]  We knew where the library was.
[20:19.360 --> 20:19.720]  Go in there.
[20:19.840 --> 20:22.200]  And I could read computer manuals, magazines.
[20:22.740 --> 20:24.040]  Read computer magazines.
[20:24.270 --> 20:39.820]  And very often in those magazines in the late 60s, there'd be a card in the back that you could fill in with your name and address, send the card, and they'd send you a computer manual in the mail describing the architecture and instructions and everything of that particular mini-computer.
[20:40.560 --> 20:42.460]  Of course, mini-computers weren't human yet.
[20:42.510 --> 20:51.240]  They were just rectangular boxes that looked like an airplane cockpit that would scare anybody, but, you know, most of us in this room might not be scared, but it would scare most people.
[20:51.580 --> 20:52.620]  Kind of intimidating.
[20:54.160 --> 20:56.030]  But that became the love of my life.
[20:56.220 --> 20:59.800]  Finally, a computer got introduced called the Nova.
[21:00.420 --> 21:00.770]  Okay?
[21:00.840 --> 21:02.800]  And I was getting very good at these designs.
[21:03.060 --> 21:14.200]  What I did is every time I wanted to do something for fun on my own, well, I don't know, I didn't go miniature golfing usually and didn't have a lot of the other things to do, I'd sit down and design a computer again.
[21:14.920 --> 21:18.140]  How do you design the same computer over and over and over?
[21:18.580 --> 21:20.060]  You have to have a goal.
[21:20.300 --> 21:24.920]  So my goal became, I'm going to try to design it better than I did before.
[21:25.860 --> 21:27.160]  Use fewer chips.
[21:27.700 --> 21:28.790]  Use fewer wires.
[21:29.060 --> 21:37.380]  And I got to where I got extremely good at these designs, to where I could design them in half the number of chips the companies that built the computers used.
[21:37.800 --> 21:40.140]  And that's what happens when you compete with yourself.
[21:40.340 --> 21:42.420]  The goal, the reward is in your own head.
[21:42.420 --> 21:44.160]  You know you've accomplished something.
[21:44.420 --> 21:53.420]  The reward isn't extrinsic where people can see you got a good salary, a good suit, a good title, a job, you know, all the things of prestige that people can see.
[21:53.760 --> 21:54.060]  No.
[21:54.240 --> 21:57.620]  You just know in your head that you did something you wanted to do and you did it well.
[21:58.060 --> 21:59.960]  Does that describe a lot of what we do here?
[22:00.120 --> 22:00.520]  Of course.
[22:01.760 --> 22:05.460]  I sat down to design this Data General Nova and it took...
[22:05.460 --> 22:06.860]  It was a strange instruction.
[22:07.040 --> 22:09.180]  Instead of 50 instructions, it had one instruction.
[22:09.440 --> 22:15.660]  And the one instruction broke 16 bits into a chunk of two bits and a chunk of two bits and a chunk of three bits and a chunk of one bit and a chunk of two bits.
[22:15.840 --> 22:16.800]  And they all had meaning.
[22:17.620 --> 22:20.260]  Well, I thought, this is a very, very strange computer.
[22:20.460 --> 22:22.960]  It is so unlike the ones before.
[22:23.540 --> 22:27.860]  And after a few months, I had a free weekend and sat down to design the Data General Nova.
[22:27.860 --> 22:42.240]  And I found out that my instruction register had 16 bits, and two wires went over to this chip for a selection, and three wires went over to that chip to choose an operation, and two for another selection, and one more for a carry, and two for a shift.
[22:42.460 --> 22:45.480]  And I said, oh my gosh, I didn't have to put any circuitry in.
[22:45.620 --> 22:47.020]  I didn't have to put any smarts in.
[22:47.180 --> 22:49.840]  The design of the computer matched the chips.
[22:49.980 --> 22:51.440]  It was a one-on-one perfection.
[22:51.820 --> 22:55.240]  And the design came out to half as many chips as all the other mini computers.
[22:55.900 --> 22:57.120]  Half as many chips.
[22:57.520 --> 23:00.540]  A startling discovery about how to do things well.
[23:00.880 --> 23:21.540]  So when we're working very hard at something we want to achieve, you know, crack some code, find a mistake, find a way to use it, very often we force ourselves with such incredible hard labor no company could ever buy to come up with methods that are cleaner and purer and better than existed before of doing things in the world,
[23:21.620 --> 23:22.120]  techniques.
[23:23.560 --> 23:26.500]  Headed off to the University of Colorado my first year.
[23:27.320 --> 23:30.000]  And I built a little TV jammer.
[23:30.400 --> 23:31.760]  A little device in my hand.
[23:31.860 --> 23:33.700]  Bought the fastest transistor at Radio Shack.
[23:33.760 --> 23:34.580]  A nine-volt battery.
[23:35.100 --> 23:37.100]  And I could... I'd go over to... There was...
[23:37.100 --> 23:39.920]  The only color TV was in the basement at a girl's dorm.
[23:40.100 --> 23:42.140]  So everybody would go to there to watch color TV.
[23:42.420 --> 23:48.060]  And I'd sit in the back row and tune the jammer in, and it would fuzz up the picture a little.
[23:48.060 --> 23:51.800]  It didn't quite... quite blow away the color TV signal.
[23:52.420 --> 24:00.400]  So the first time I ever did this, my friend in the front row, no planning or anything, he knew I had a jammer, whacked the TV.
[24:01.240 --> 24:03.120]  And the picture... I made the picture go perfect.
[24:04.300 --> 24:07.540]  And I sat there, you know, kind of smirking for a little while in the back.
[24:07.540 --> 24:08.340]  It's dark, you know.
[24:08.520 --> 24:11.400]  And so after a while I jammed it again, and my friend hit it, and it went perfect.
[24:11.400 --> 24:19.520]  And it got to the point that he'd have to hit it a little harder in different places to actually get the... to get it to work.
[24:19.660 --> 24:23.220]  And one time he didn't hit it, somebody else went up and started hitting it.
[24:23.820 --> 24:26.980]  This was like, I should have gotten my degree in psychology.
[24:29.880 --> 24:34.820]  A lot of, you know, a lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, and getting them to do strange things.
[24:34.820 --> 24:43.340]  So I sat there for the next two weeks, and they would always station one person to sit in a chair by the TV, watching it backwards.
[24:43.740 --> 24:46.920]  And that person's job was to fix it when it went bad.
[24:47.080 --> 24:49.640]  And maybe he would go up and tune the fine tuning.
[24:49.880 --> 24:51.640]  Remember the days when TVs had fine tuning?
[24:51.980 --> 24:53.780]  Tune the fine tuning, perfect.
[24:54.000 --> 24:55.440]  Pull his hand away, it goes bad.
[24:56.200 --> 24:58.580]  So I had fun playing with people's bodies.
[24:59.260 --> 25:04.840]  And people are a lot better to teach faster, I think, than rats are, from my experience.
[25:07.060 --> 25:12.240]  One of my most fun times there was one time I noticed three people working on the TV set.
[25:12.460 --> 25:14.860]  One of them had his hand on the middle of the screen.
[25:15.020 --> 25:16.300]  We were watching Mission Impossible.
[25:16.900 --> 25:19.600]  And his foot was up in the air on a chair, resting on a chair.
[25:20.140 --> 25:21.620]  So I made the picture go perfect.
[25:22.440 --> 25:24.320]  And then somebody said, okay, it's good now.
[25:24.560 --> 25:25.800]  So everybody relaxed.
[25:25.800 --> 25:28.460]  And the picture went bad when he took his hand off the screen.
[25:29.300 --> 25:31.580]  And somebody said, wait a minute, where were your bodies?
[25:31.760 --> 25:32.880]  Remember where your bodies were?
[25:33.060 --> 25:36.280]  And eventually he put his hand back on the screen and it went good.
[25:36.620 --> 25:38.320]  And he pulled it off and it went bad.
[25:38.480 --> 25:43.960]  So with his hand on the screen, he now put his foot down from the chair onto the floor.
[25:44.300 --> 25:45.520]  And the picture went bad.
[25:46.360 --> 25:49.440]  And he put his foot back up on the chair and it went good.
[25:49.660 --> 25:53.300]  And he turned around to the crowd and he announced it's a grounding effect.
[25:58.140 --> 26:03.500]  So we watched the last half of Mission Impossible, one half hour, with a hand on the middle of a TV screen.
[26:04.860 --> 26:05.380]  For real.
[26:07.000 --> 26:09.140]  Another time they said it's an antenna problem.
[26:09.680 --> 26:13.500]  So they lifted the twin lead antenna up in the air and it fixed it.
[26:13.860 --> 26:17.040]  You know, and then after a while it went bad so they lifted it a little higher.
[26:17.780 --> 26:20.680]  And it went bad so they found a chair and stood in a chair.
[26:21.100 --> 26:26.100]  I finally got it to where it would work if the guy was up on his tiptoes and not if he came down on his heels.
[26:28.880 --> 26:35.000]  And the only regret I ever had playing all those little pranks on people, you know, like, who would believe it?
[26:35.160 --> 26:40.980]  I never got caught once, but the only time I regretted was blanking out the end of the Kentucky Derby.
[26:41.860 --> 26:46.400]  All of a sudden, what you think were normal college students became animals.
[26:47.040 --> 26:51.240]  They started getting chairs and whacking that TV and just, they went nuts.
[26:51.680 --> 26:52.900]  And that scared me.
[26:53.040 --> 26:55.660]  That one, that one I would never want to confess to.
[26:58.540 --> 27:00.260]  So I loved technology.
[27:00.260 --> 27:01.140]  I loved computers.
[27:01.300 --> 27:04.340]  I took my first computer course at the University of Colorado.
[27:04.820 --> 27:07.640]  Computer classes weren't for undergraduates back then.
[27:07.780 --> 27:09.040]  Only a very few schools.
[27:09.480 --> 27:13.620]  But I was an engineering student, so I was allowed to take even graduate courses.
[27:13.840 --> 27:15.420]  And I took my first computer class.
[27:15.520 --> 27:22.760]  Very good class talking about compilers and operating systems and input and output devices and languages and everything.
[27:22.760 --> 27:24.340]  Incredible lucky course.
[27:24.620 --> 27:29.600]  And I got an A-plus in the course, but I got put on probation for computer abuse.
[27:31.400 --> 27:33.680]  Actually, they called it abuse of computer time.
[27:33.820 --> 27:37.740]  But it turns out that I was on a computer and I could finally program.
[27:37.740 --> 27:39.640]  And I loved to program so much.
[27:39.720 --> 27:42.800]  I thought, I am going to write every program I can in the world.
[27:42.800 --> 27:44.940]  I am just going to write program after program after program after program.
[27:45.100 --> 27:46.100]  And that was my life.
[27:46.200 --> 27:47.260]  That was all I wanted to do.
[27:47.460 --> 27:48.780]  Well, what do computers do?
[27:48.880 --> 27:49.900]  They calculate numbers.
[27:50.300 --> 27:51.020]  Where are numbers?
[27:51.380 --> 27:52.580]  Handbook of chemistry and physics.
[27:52.840 --> 27:57.600]  So I looked up a bunch of tables, you know, the Fibonacci numbers, the powers of two, inverse powers of two.
[27:57.680 --> 28:00.900]  I wrote seven programs that would calculate tables of numbers.
[28:00.900 --> 28:05.180]  I'd run seven programs and get seven sets of outputs of 60 pages.
[28:05.600 --> 28:08.360]  And seven sets of punch cards to stick back in my deck.
[28:08.480 --> 28:12.340]  So it would pick up on page 61, the next 60 pages, the next time.
[28:12.500 --> 28:18.900]  And I would run seven programs times three times a day, times 60 pages each, piling up reams and reams of output in my dorm room.
[28:19.160 --> 28:20.300]  And dorm rooms are kind of small.
[28:21.180 --> 28:23.160]  And I was just so proud of this.
[28:23.300 --> 28:25.520]  And then they stopped my programs from running.
[28:25.640 --> 28:26.760]  I had to go visit the professor.
[28:26.760 --> 28:31.020]  He turned on a tape recorder, talked like I was out to get him.
[28:32.020 --> 28:32.660]  What do you mean?
[28:32.700 --> 28:33.220]  I'm a student.
[28:33.780 --> 28:35.000]  And I'm running programs.
[28:35.200 --> 28:36.160]  This isn't our class.
[28:36.300 --> 28:37.280]  I said, it's Fortran.
[28:37.360 --> 28:38.080]  It's a Fortran class.
[28:38.200 --> 28:39.140]  It's not our Fortran.
[28:39.320 --> 28:41.480]  He called the computer department in front of me.
[28:41.700 --> 28:43.620]  It turned out I had run the budget five times over.
[28:44.020 --> 28:45.720]  I didn't know they had budgets.
[28:46.400 --> 28:49.140]  I thought, you're a student, you run computer programs.
[28:49.380 --> 28:51.500]  So I got trapped up in this budget system.
[28:51.580 --> 28:53.960]  The professor said, Mr. Wozniak should pay it.
[28:54.580 --> 28:56.040]  And this was more than tuition.
[28:56.040 --> 28:59.540]  At the second most expensive out of state university in the country.
[28:59.760 --> 29:02.240]  So I didn't want my parents to know about that one.
[29:02.480 --> 29:04.040]  Didn't want to try and go back to that school.
[29:04.180 --> 29:06.860]  But actually, the professor was getting out of pain.
[29:07.420 --> 29:09.100]  But they wouldn't have really ever billed me.
[29:09.180 --> 29:10.220]  But I was scared and thought they would.
[29:10.480 --> 29:12.980]  So the next year, I went to De Anza College in Cupertino.
[29:13.520 --> 29:16.020]  And a friend of mine, I still wanted to program computers.
[29:16.200 --> 29:19.180]  I took courses that wouldn't even carry transfer credit to Berkeley.
[29:19.420 --> 29:24.140]  I just took courses on computers because I loved it and wanted to write better programs than anyone else in the class.
[29:24.140 --> 29:25.980]  And I did really well at that.
[29:26.300 --> 29:29.980]  A friend of mine came to me and said that he had a key to the computer room.
[29:30.340 --> 29:31.900]  That he had made a copy of.
[29:32.960 --> 29:35.300]  So we would go down to the campus at midnight.
[29:36.060 --> 29:37.020]  Unlock the doors.
[29:37.300 --> 29:38.160]  Larry would...
[29:38.160 --> 29:41.200]  He didn't program really, but he would start up the computer terminals.
[29:41.200 --> 29:45.100]  And we'd put a piece of blank paper on the terminal so it wouldn't leave a record for the school.
[29:45.580 --> 29:47.280]  It was an IBM 36040.
[29:47.440 --> 29:49.480]  And he would turn on the disk drives and turn on the printers.
[29:49.620 --> 29:51.340]  And this whole room of stuff comes on.
[29:51.420 --> 29:55.940]  And I would start running programs, cards through, you know, till 2, 3, 4 in the morning sometimes.
[29:57.120 --> 29:58.860]  And it was just one of those things you do.
[29:58.960 --> 30:01.020]  You've got to be near a computer no matter what.
[30:01.320 --> 30:01.900]  I don't know.
[30:01.960 --> 30:02.860]  We didn't hurt anyone.
[30:02.900 --> 30:04.040]  I don't know what we cost.
[30:06.560 --> 30:09.140]  But, you know, you kind of have...
[30:09.140 --> 30:11.060]  You know, the real solution was...
[30:11.060 --> 30:11.920]  It was this curiosity.
[30:11.920 --> 30:13.020]  How does the world work?
[30:13.020 --> 30:13.980]  Just like that little baby.
[30:15.680 --> 30:17.900]  By the time I got to Berkeley, I had a great year.
[30:17.940 --> 30:21.240]  I programmed computers for a year as a work to earn money for Berkeley.
[30:21.820 --> 30:25.280]  And now I got to go to school with a car for my third year of college.
[30:25.440 --> 30:30.620]  That was great to have a car and be the one to drive everybody to Tijuana on the weekends to buy firecrackers.
[30:35.440 --> 30:36.900]  I got some good stories, but not here.
[30:38.260 --> 30:44.920]  Well, pretty much it was funny at the end of the year to go up and down our hallway and just full of burn marks for the most part.
[30:45.020 --> 30:47.880]  And they never caught me for fireworks at school.
[30:47.880 --> 30:51.580]  But one time a guy up on the fourth floor above my room threw one out.
[30:52.960 --> 30:54.380]  And he threw him out the window.
[30:54.440 --> 30:55.640]  And he got caught.
[30:55.900 --> 30:58.460]  So they probably thought all of them were coming from him.
[30:58.940 --> 31:00.760]  It's like back in high school.
[31:01.000 --> 31:04.420]  Put a little M80 with a delayed fuse, a cigarette or something in a trash can.
[31:04.540 --> 31:07.520]  And out in the quad, it blew up.
[31:07.880 --> 31:09.520]  Oh man, the next day they were all upset.
[31:09.600 --> 31:12.800]  They shut the student quad in the student room for lunch.
[31:13.060 --> 31:17.380]  And another guy set off firecracker that day in the same trash can.
[31:17.860 --> 31:19.100]  Only he got caught.
[31:20.620 --> 31:27.240]  That was the first time my mind ever thought, if you're going to play a prank or something, it's better if it looks like someone else did it.
[31:27.860 --> 31:29.280]  Does anyone else ever do that?
[31:30.480 --> 31:31.920]  I would... no, no.
[31:34.960 --> 31:36.880]  So we learn things different ways.
[31:37.040 --> 31:45.240]  So anyway, actually back at University of Colorado with my TV jammer, I built one of them into a magic marker, real well disguised.
[31:45.240 --> 31:48.700]  And slid it into the rings of a little binder while I was taking notes.
[31:48.940 --> 31:52.020]  And at the start of class, I was in a class that had four TV sets.
[31:52.520 --> 31:55.420]  Only some upper class students got to watch the professor live.
[31:55.860 --> 32:00.900]  So I'm in there with the four TV sets thinking, hey, I'll just see if this jammer works for fun and jam it and unjam it.
[32:01.220 --> 32:04.860]  And I jammed the TVs and they didn't really jam very well because they were closed circuit.
[32:05.100 --> 32:07.680]  The TV right near me didn't really get jammed at all.
[32:07.680 --> 32:10.820]  The TV across the room got jammed the worst in different levels.
[32:11.280 --> 32:16.960]  All of a sudden, three older looking students stood up in the front of class and they started looking us over.
[32:17.600 --> 32:18.580]  Very small class.
[32:18.760 --> 32:19.680]  And I was scared.
[32:19.820 --> 32:22.300]  They said, whoever's got the transmitter on, turn it off.
[32:22.520 --> 32:23.140]  Yeah, right.
[32:23.220 --> 32:25.380]  I'm going to reach down to my magic marker and click it off.
[32:26.140 --> 32:28.760]  So I'm sitting there kind of scared through the whole class.
[32:28.900 --> 32:31.060]  They're watching us closely and trying to figure out who's got it.
[32:31.140 --> 32:33.700]  And I figured at the end of class, we walk out and I'm safe.
[32:34.400 --> 32:39.120]  Near the end of class, there was a guy sitting under the TV that was jammed the worst.
[32:39.580 --> 32:42.400]  And he started gathering his books up to leave a little early.
[32:43.000 --> 32:47.900]  So as he walked towards the door, I started twisting the picture in and out.
[32:48.220 --> 32:50.000]  In and out, you know, less and worse.
[32:50.640 --> 32:51.320]  Less and worse.
[32:51.500 --> 32:53.700]  And as he walked out the door, I made it go perfect.
[32:53.880 --> 32:56.520]  And I saw one of those TA guys point like this.
[32:57.500 --> 32:59.700]  And later, I was telling the joke to a few friends.
[32:59.820 --> 33:03.000]  And one of those friends said he was sitting up near the front row and the TA said, there he goes.
[33:05.580 --> 33:07.220]  So, thank you.
[33:11.310 --> 33:11.790]  It's...
[33:12.550 --> 33:15.710]  I got another story like making somebody else look like they did it.
[33:16.010 --> 33:18.850]  So at Berkeley, I wound up with an incredible schedule.
[33:19.610 --> 33:20.090]  I was a junior.
[33:20.250 --> 33:25.530]  I took four graduate-level computer courses because that's what interested me the first quarter.
[33:25.910 --> 33:29.830]  And they were all, luckily, in the same room of the same building.
[33:31.490 --> 33:35.990]  And two of them were on Tuesday-Thursday, two of them were Monday-Wednesday, as classes will be.
[33:36.170 --> 33:38.030]  And they were all one right after the other.
[33:38.190 --> 33:43.870]  So I could go into this classroom, sit down in one seat, and go through two classes in the same seat each day.
[33:43.870 --> 33:48.290]  I even had the same seat in the same classroom on the Monday-Wednesdays and the Tuesday-Thursdays.
[33:48.570 --> 33:51.010]  And none of my classes started before noon.
[33:51.450 --> 33:54.510]  So I hope that was an agreeable schedule to anybody in the world.
[33:55.970 --> 33:58.510]  And there, kind of got into blue boxes.
[33:58.930 --> 34:03.390]  Two days before going to Berkeley, on a Saturday, I picked up a copy of...
[34:03.390 --> 34:06.330]  I never read Esquire magazine, but there it was on my parents' table.
[34:06.330 --> 34:11.310]  I picked it up and read the story, The Secrets of the Little Blue Box Fiction by Ron Rosenblum.
[34:12.730 --> 34:24.270]  And I read this thing, and I was only halfway through this incredible story of engineers and smart people like myself, hooking up wires and rewiring the networks of the phone... the phone network of America.
[34:24.510 --> 34:26.790]  And being smarter than all the engineers in the phone companies.
[34:26.970 --> 34:30.270]  And going around doing this stuff just because they were wild, crazy guys.
[34:30.610 --> 34:32.750]  And this was just an amazing, amazing story.
[34:32.750 --> 34:35.050]  So halfway through, I called my best friend, Steve Jobs.
[34:35.430 --> 34:37.570]  And I started reading him parts of the story.
[34:37.990 --> 34:46.190]  Especially where Captain... this guy, Captain Crunch, is sort of boasting about what he can do, but sort of saying that he doesn't do it because he knows he's being tapped.
[34:46.570 --> 34:50.150]  You know, and wanting to say, Ma Bell knows I don't do that anymore, but I could.
[34:51.670 --> 34:56.630]  And I said, you know, as I was reading it, I said to Steve, I said, this article doesn't read like fiction.
[34:56.890 --> 34:58.570]  It just reads too true.
[34:58.970 --> 35:02.270]  And as many of us in this room know, that article was 100% true.
[35:02.270 --> 35:05.850]  The closest image to exactly what the people said and what they were like.
[35:06.250 --> 35:07.570]  But it was called fiction.
[35:08.470 --> 35:09.870]  Well, Steve Jobs and I had a dilemma.
[35:10.150 --> 35:12.070]  How do we know if it's true or not?
[35:12.270 --> 35:14.490]  Is a one 700 and 900 hertz?
[35:14.590 --> 35:17.210]  And a two, you know, 700 and 1100 or whatever.
[35:17.370 --> 35:19.230]  You know, are these the right ones?
[35:19.310 --> 35:20.370]  They'd given a few examples.
[35:20.570 --> 35:23.250]  So we went down to Slack the next day, Sunday.
[35:23.970 --> 35:25.390]  Nothing, and it was, we got in.
[35:25.770 --> 35:27.910]  And we started going through all the books in the library.
[35:27.910 --> 35:31.310]  And finally, I was holding a blue book, CCITT.
[35:31.750 --> 35:34.030]  And there was a list of numbers and frequencies.
[35:34.290 --> 35:37.490]  And the ones that were in the Esquire article matched exactly.
[35:37.790 --> 35:39.470]  They hadn't even changed the frequencies.
[35:40.350 --> 35:41.710]  Steve and I looked at each other.
[35:41.810 --> 35:45.650]  And we sort of knew that this whole thing called phone freaking wasn't fiction.
[35:45.650 --> 35:46.390]  It was real.
[35:47.450 --> 35:51.090]  And we rushed home and quickly that day built a couple of oscillators.
[35:51.250 --> 35:53.790]  Didn't quite get enough quality to succeed with a phone call.
[35:54.130 --> 35:56.110]  We believed in telling our parents what we did.
[35:56.210 --> 35:57.610]  They just said, don't use our phones.
[35:58.490 --> 36:00.870]  So if we... and we were true to that.
[36:06.860 --> 36:12.960]  I had internal philosophy that if I believed something was somehow justified right enough for me to do, I could tell my parents.
[36:13.300 --> 36:15.500]  And good, it kept me from doing some really bad things.
[36:15.780 --> 36:21.480]  But I figured even in this blue box area, if I actually did it and got caught, I was young enough to get my wrist slapped.
[36:22.100 --> 36:26.100]  And that was the one time in my life I'd really be able to do something like this if it was real.
[36:26.660 --> 36:35.980]  Well, and oddly enough, by the time we actually finally got our first blue box call to work from Steve's house, we immediately drove up to Berkeley and never made another call from our own houses.
[36:36.140 --> 36:37.260]  We obeyed our parents' rule.
[36:38.840 --> 36:49.800]  So, you know, they were willing to let us have some of our fun and explore these new things we were into as long as we didn't quite do it, you know, in a way that would impinge them.
[36:52.040 --> 36:56.120]  Well, after a while, I had developed this blue box, and I'll get into...
[36:56.120 --> 37:00.140]  We managed to meet the unknown Captain Crunch back then, which was very lucky.
[37:00.280 --> 37:02.940]  But after that, Steve Jobs came and he said, let's sell them.
[37:03.600 --> 37:06.320]  Everything I ever invented in my life, he'd come and say, let's sell it.
[37:16.700 --> 37:18.300]  There's a few examples of that.
[37:19.460 --> 37:20.720]  There's a few examples of that.
[37:20.860 --> 37:24.140]  And it was funny because we would actually sell them door-to-door in the dorms.
[37:24.160 --> 37:26.640]  How do you sell something door-to-door in the dorms if it's illegal?
[37:26.960 --> 37:28.480]  You knock on the door, is Joe Franks there?
[37:29.140 --> 37:29.640]  Who's he?
[37:30.240 --> 37:31.880]  Oh, the guy that makes the free phone calls?
[37:32.280 --> 37:32.720]  Don't know.
[37:32.860 --> 37:34.840]  You start to scope the guy out, is he cool or not?
[37:34.940 --> 37:37.260]  And then you can pull something out of your pocket, one of these things.
[37:37.460 --> 37:39.540]  They say, oh, that's a blue box, I've heard about those.
[37:39.540 --> 37:43.760]  And you can say, well, get everybody you know who knows somebody in another country down here at 7 tonight.
[37:44.320 --> 37:47.860]  We'd show up with amplified speakers and tape recorders and tape the whole thing.
[37:47.940 --> 37:49.140]  And I was very shy.
[37:49.140 --> 37:58.220]  But for an hour and a half, I was master of ceremonies, explaining all the famous phone freaks and the stories and what they could do and how amazing it was and the flaws in the phone system.
[37:58.280 --> 38:00.280]  And then we'd start making calls around the world.
[38:00.280 --> 38:06.740]  And you call the phone in the next room over, and you talk in one phone, you hear it a second later, and all these great, great, amazing, amazing things.
[38:06.740 --> 38:10.140]  But it really gave me, like, the first time in my life I was on a stage.
[38:11.800 --> 38:13.180]  So we had a lot of fun doing that.
[38:13.280 --> 38:16.260]  One time we tried to sell one to some guys in a pizza parlor.
[38:17.600 --> 38:22.920]  And they liked our demonstration in the back, but they didn't have the money to pay for it.
[38:22.920 --> 38:30.340]  So we went out to our car and got in it, and this guy came over and pointed a gun right in the car at Steve Jobs.
[38:30.860 --> 38:32.440]  He wanted the blue box.
[38:33.000 --> 38:34.780]  So he got the blue box real quick.
[38:36.460 --> 38:40.680]  However, he didn't know how to use it, so he gave us a phone number.
[38:43.220 --> 38:46.240]  We weren't super smart with phone numbers back then, but now we had a number.
[38:46.240 --> 38:49.660]  And occasionally, we could call that number.
[38:49.740 --> 38:51.020]  Somebody would say, call another number.
[38:51.140 --> 38:51.820]  It's a pay phone.
[38:51.840 --> 38:55.940]  And we'd talk to this guy, Charles, and he just wanted to pay us someday.
[38:56.080 --> 38:59.800]  But could we meet him somewhere and give him instructions on how to use it?
[39:00.000 --> 39:06.400]  So I was toying with one approach of telling him, instead of starting out with an 800 number, start out with an 808.
[39:06.680 --> 39:08.620]  You know, so he'd get billed for every call.
[39:09.980 --> 39:12.760]  Or maybe telling him a way that would get him busted for sure.
[39:12.920 --> 39:14.580]  You know, use a 555 number.
[39:15.380 --> 39:17.260]  But we never went that far.
[39:18.120 --> 39:29.620]  While we were doing all this stuff and reading articles about people like Captain Crunch, a guy that used a whistle and got a neat name, Steve said he heard that he did an interview on a station around the San Jose area.
[39:30.300 --> 39:33.260]  And we tried to go through that station, didn't get a hold of John Draper.
[39:33.520 --> 39:34.400]  Didn't know his name.
[39:34.520 --> 39:36.240]  The FBI probably didn't know his name, I don't think.
[39:36.620 --> 39:39.980]  So then, a guy came by my dorm room one day from high school, and he said...
[39:39.980 --> 39:43.180]  I started telling him all the phone stories, and he said, I know who Captain Crunch is.
[39:43.620 --> 39:44.240]  Don't tell anyone.
[39:44.460 --> 39:45.540]  His name is John Draper.
[39:45.700 --> 39:47.600]  He worked at KKUP in Cupertino.
[39:48.900 --> 39:49.300]  Whoa!
[39:49.840 --> 39:50.720]  What a surprise!
[39:50.880 --> 39:54.260]  So we called KKUP, and we said, is John Draper there?
[39:54.300 --> 39:56.460]  And they said, he dropped out right after the Esquire article.
[39:56.660 --> 39:57.260]  Dropped out of sight.
[39:57.260 --> 39:58.880]  So we knew we had the right guy.
[39:59.000 --> 40:00.220]  And ten minutes later, the phone rang.
[40:00.500 --> 40:09.980]  And I had been seating my dorms with stories of the biggest hero in phone-freaking, and all the amazing things he'd done, and I had exaggerated the stories.
[40:10.260 --> 40:13.620]  And everybody in the dorm knew that he was going to come visit me that night.
[40:13.860 --> 40:20.680]  You know, and probably everybody was nervously looking out their windows, hoping to get a glimpse of this incredible, you know, kind of...
[40:20.680 --> 40:22.600]  What do you call the opposite of a hero?
[40:23.780 --> 40:24.220]  Zero.
[40:24.900 --> 40:25.260]  Whatever.
[40:26.620 --> 40:29.160]  So, the door... my roommate stayed in the door.
[40:29.280 --> 40:30.160]  He wanted to... in the room.
[40:30.260 --> 40:32.660]  He wanted to see what John Draper looked like.
[40:32.780 --> 40:36.000]  And Steve Jobs and I were there, and there was a knock on the door, and I went and opened it.
[40:36.140 --> 40:43.520]  And I was expecting the suavest, you know, guy in the world with coats, sport coats, and the man with the woman.
[40:43.720 --> 40:48.240]  I opened it up, and there he is, kind of ragged, missing teeth, and he's John Draper.
[40:48.840 --> 40:52.020]  And I looked a little stunned, and he said, I am he, Captain Crunch.
[41:00.090 --> 41:02.550]  You know, some people had a boring night that night.
[41:02.690 --> 41:05.630]  And, you know, they have nothing that they can remember to this day to talk about.
[41:05.790 --> 41:07.330]  But, boy, you don't forget something like that.
[41:08.030 --> 41:09.030]  Anyway, he came in.
[41:09.130 --> 41:10.570]  He started explaining codes.
[41:10.710 --> 41:15.070]  He started helping us get our first successful international calls to go.
[41:15.150 --> 41:19.170]  We went out to Kip's Pizza Parlor until 2 in that morning, trading codes.
[41:19.570 --> 41:23.330]  And then I had a little problem.
[41:23.710 --> 41:25.770]  My car was back an hour down the bay.
[41:26.030 --> 41:31.030]  I had to drive back at night and get my car at Steve Jobs' house and drive it back up to Berkeley.
[41:32.130 --> 41:33.730]  And it was kind of late at night.
[41:33.930 --> 41:37.910]  Well, on the way back, Steve's generator was bad, and his car broke down on the freeway.
[41:38.450 --> 41:39.990]  We said, well, you know what?
[41:40.150 --> 41:42.150]  Crunch was going to come back this way in his van.
[41:42.250 --> 41:43.510]  Maybe he can give us a ride.
[41:43.950 --> 41:45.210]  So let's get to a payphone.
[41:45.210 --> 41:48.810]  We walked to a payphone at a gas station and said, let's try to use the blue box.
[41:48.970 --> 41:53.830]  We've never done it from a payphone, but John had given us a little advice that night in the pizza parlor.
[41:53.990 --> 41:54.550]  And we made a call.
[41:54.710 --> 41:58.310]  Steve Jobs makes the call on the blue box, and the operator comes on the line.
[41:58.330 --> 41:59.670]  And he hangs up all scared.
[41:59.930 --> 42:01.030]  The operator came on the line.
[42:01.670 --> 42:02.030]  Whoa.
[42:02.410 --> 42:03.690]  So we said, let's try it again.
[42:03.790 --> 42:04.410]  And we tried it again.
[42:04.550 --> 42:07.430]  The operator came on the line, and we got so scared, we put quarters in.
[42:08.310 --> 42:09.890]  And a cop car pulled up.
[42:10.690 --> 42:11.610]  Cop pulls up.
[42:11.890 --> 42:17.170]  And we had long hair back then, so the cop walked past me, and shone his flashlight into the bushes.
[42:17.750 --> 42:19.050]  And his back was turned to me.
[42:19.190 --> 42:21.770]  So Steve Jobs, shaking hand, passed me the blue box.
[42:21.850 --> 42:23.830]  And I had a coat on, so I got it in my pocket.
[42:24.590 --> 42:24.730]  Whew.
[42:25.530 --> 42:28.270]  Then the cops turned back around, and they search us.
[42:28.450 --> 42:31.430]  And they find this thing in my pocket with a keypad.
[42:31.910 --> 42:33.170]  And a cop said, what is it?
[42:33.210 --> 42:34.710]  And I said, it's an electronic music synthesizer.
[42:35.330 --> 42:35.850]  It makes tones.
[42:35.850 --> 42:37.350]  And I played a couple of notes.
[42:37.570 --> 42:39.410]  Not enough that he would know it wasn't music.
[42:42.530 --> 42:46.030]  But this cop, you know, he's holding the blue box.
[42:46.150 --> 42:47.190]  He says, what's the orange button for?
[42:47.310 --> 42:48.870]  And Steve Jobs said, that's for calibration.
[42:49.910 --> 42:52.110]  The cops, you know, you know, this is our story.
[42:52.290 --> 42:53.190]  A second cop came up.
[42:53.390 --> 42:55.210]  The cop took the blue box first thing.
[42:55.290 --> 42:55.910]  And he says, what's this?
[42:56.030 --> 42:59.630]  And I said, well, it's an electronic music synthesizer to make music electronically.
[43:00.690 --> 43:02.670]  And those things were unheard of back then.
[43:03.130 --> 43:05.010]  I mean, the Moog synthesizer had just come out.
[43:05.330 --> 43:06.330]  You know, and getting some...
[43:06.330 --> 43:07.490]  He said, what's the orange button for?
[43:07.590 --> 43:08.730]  Steve Jobs says, that's for calibration.
[43:08.750 --> 43:09.650]  It's computer controlled.
[43:09.790 --> 43:11.570]  And the cop looks at it, and he says, where does the computer plug in?
[43:11.870 --> 43:13.090]  Steve says, oh, that's inside.
[43:13.690 --> 43:15.670]  You know, well, these cops, we knew we were caught.
[43:15.930 --> 43:17.510]  So, you know, that's how it is.
[43:18.170 --> 43:18.930]  So we get...
[43:18.930 --> 43:19.850]  The cop said, what's happened?
[43:19.910 --> 43:20.930]  We said, our car broke down.
[43:21.070 --> 43:22.370]  And the cop said, we'll take you out to it.
[43:22.470 --> 43:23.670]  So we got in the cop car.
[43:23.770 --> 43:25.210]  They're holding the blue box in the front seat.
[43:25.510 --> 43:28.790]  This cop turned around, passed it back to me in the back seat.
[43:28.790 --> 43:31.430]  And he said, well, a guy named Moog beat you to it.
[43:40.040 --> 43:43.160]  Sometimes you can't write a story as what really happens.
[43:44.000 --> 43:45.460]  That was the night we met Captain Crunch.
[43:45.540 --> 43:47.120]  Of course, I finally got home.
[43:47.240 --> 43:48.340]  I ride with John Draper.
[43:48.460 --> 43:51.440]  And I drove back to Berkeley in about 3 or 4 in the morning.
[43:51.640 --> 43:52.280]  Fell asleep.
[43:52.480 --> 43:53.240]  Totaled my car.
[43:53.460 --> 43:54.380]  No collision insurance.
[43:54.560 --> 43:55.360]  Lost my whole car.
[43:55.480 --> 43:55.700]  Everything.
[43:57.320 --> 43:58.860]  Walked into the dorm room at Berkeley.
[43:59.060 --> 44:00.360]  You know, walked an hour and a half from Oakland.
[44:00.520 --> 44:02.260]  Walked in on my roommate at 7.30 in the morning.
[44:02.260 --> 44:06.200]  And I said, good thing I didn't pay the $25 parking fee this quarter.
[44:07.780 --> 44:10.280]  I mean, you've got to joke about anything in the world.
[44:10.280 --> 44:11.820]  No matter how bad or hard it is.
[44:13.440 --> 44:17.980]  As I've often been told, yes, I did actually place a call to the Pope once from the blue box in the dorms.
[44:18.060 --> 44:21.260]  One of these tape recorded demos and sold the blue box the next day.
[44:21.260 --> 44:25.420]  And as John Draper likes to say, I was calling the Pope to make a confession.
[44:29.110 --> 44:35.310]  Well, eventually, I wound up with an incredible job without a degree yet, working for Hewlett Packard.
[44:35.390 --> 44:38.370]  I took the next year off to work to earn money for my fourth year of college.
[44:38.570 --> 44:42.070]  And I got a job at Hewlett Packard designing calculators.
[44:42.070 --> 44:45.570]  The Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, the HP 35, had come out.
[44:45.750 --> 44:48.750]  It was the most incredible product in the world to engineers.
[44:48.970 --> 44:51.070]  It was going to change life forever for us.
[44:51.330 --> 44:54.130]  And how could you ever luck into a job designing them?
[44:54.690 --> 45:00.850]  Even though I worked all day long designing at Hewlett Packard, when I came home, I didn't want to get away from electronics.
[45:01.070 --> 45:02.310]  I wanted to keep doing it.
[45:02.370 --> 45:03.630]  I wanted to keep doing fun things.
[45:03.630 --> 45:07.770]  So I had lots of outside projects, probably the one I'm most proud of.
[45:07.930 --> 45:11.230]  As a matter of fact, I think some media interviewed me the other day.
[45:11.250 --> 45:12.670]  What are you most proud of in your life?
[45:12.930 --> 45:14.450]  And I really said, it's this.
[45:14.650 --> 45:17.390]  I started the first Dial-A-Joke in the Bay Area.
[45:17.990 --> 45:20.470]  I had had a year of blue boxing at Berkeley.
[45:20.670 --> 45:22.770]  I had learned about Dial-A-Jokes around the world.
[45:22.930 --> 45:24.710]  We never had one in the Bay Area.
[45:24.930 --> 45:26.930]  I wanted to start a Dial-A-Joke.
[45:27.250 --> 45:28.030]  Sounds easy.
[45:28.870 --> 45:30.730]  You couldn't buy an answering machine, right?
[45:30.950 --> 45:32.830]  You couldn't buy a telephone back then.
[45:32.830 --> 45:34.810]  This is 1971, 1972.
[45:36.590 --> 45:38.850]  And so, how do you do it?
[45:38.890 --> 45:39.750]  It's pretty expensive.
[45:39.810 --> 45:40.850]  I just wanted to.
[45:41.150 --> 45:43.370]  Nobody else had ever done it in the San Francisco Bay Area.
[45:43.890 --> 45:47.550]  You've maybe met a lot of people in your life that started companies, right?
[45:47.890 --> 45:52.990]  But you've only met one, probably, that started the first Dial-A-Joke ever in a regional area.
[45:53.490 --> 45:56.110]  This is probably the wrong crowd to say I'm the only one.
[45:57.190 --> 46:00.830]  Anyway, I had to rent a very expensive machine from the phone company.
[46:00.830 --> 46:01.890]  It broke down.
[46:02.150 --> 46:03.990]  The tape ran out from so much use.
[46:04.070 --> 46:04.990]  It ran out after a month.
[46:05.130 --> 46:06.930]  And I always made them replace it with a new machine.
[46:07.370 --> 46:10.410]  So, I was getting my money's worth by having to rent it at a high price.
[46:11.290 --> 46:16.050]  And it was kind of cool because it was a little bit like chat rooms were eventually to be on the internet.
[46:16.550 --> 46:19.350]  I could get tons of calls coming into an answer machine all day.
[46:19.470 --> 46:21.710]  And after work, I could come home and take live calls.
[46:22.190 --> 46:22.610]  Hello.
[46:23.070 --> 46:25.410]  Thank you for dialing Dial-A-Joke.
[46:26.010 --> 46:27.970]  Today's Polish joke is...
[46:27.970 --> 46:29.810]  And I would tell a joke quickly.
[46:30.390 --> 46:32.650]  Thank you for dialing Dial-A-Joke and hang up.
[46:32.890 --> 46:39.890]  Matter of fact, in my blue box days, I liked humor so much, I had built one special button on my blue box that would go...
[46:41.070 --> 46:42.290]  ...automatically dial a call.
[46:42.590 --> 46:45.110]  One call and it dialed, Happy Ben in Los Angeles.
[46:45.870 --> 46:47.090]  Anyone remember Happy Ben?
[46:48.070 --> 46:50.430]  There's this old guy singing, Happy days are here again.
[46:50.650 --> 46:51.630]  That was my favorite thing.
[46:52.130 --> 46:55.570]  So, now I had my own Dial-A-Joke, but I could come home and take live calls.
[46:55.770 --> 46:59.850]  And when I took live calls, I always had books of insults by me so I could always beat the kids.
[46:59.990 --> 47:06.950]  Even though I was older, they would normally beat me with ability to talk and communicate and come up with clever ideas, but not if I had books in front of me.
[47:08.310 --> 47:11.270]  So, I'd collect notes on all the schools in the area.
[47:11.270 --> 47:18.010]  And if somebody called from Oak Ridge High School, I'd say, Oh, yeah, you know, does Mr. Wilson still have those big glasses he wears?
[47:18.310 --> 47:19.350]  Yeah, you know him.
[47:19.510 --> 47:21.210]  They thought I knew everybody in that area.
[47:22.450 --> 47:23.690]  It was fun to do.
[47:23.850 --> 47:26.830]  You know, it's fun to do just lying on my mattress on the floor of my apartment.
[47:28.110 --> 47:33.290]  But I also got involved in other projects in those days, like the first hotel movie systems.
[47:33.290 --> 47:40.030]  I saw a pong game once in a bowling alley and said, Oh my God, I can actually build this.
[47:40.210 --> 47:43.430]  I know television circuits from high school, and I know digital design.
[47:43.590 --> 47:46.810]  And so I built a very low chip count pong device for my house.
[47:47.190 --> 47:49.790]  In those days, it was hard to come up and build something.
[47:49.910 --> 47:50.830]  It wasn't really possible.
[47:51.290 --> 47:53.170]  TVs did not have video in.
[47:53.170 --> 47:56.390]  But every TV set in those old days came with a schematic.
[47:56.790 --> 47:57.650]  Can you imagine?
[47:57.790 --> 48:00.530]  It's almost like every program today coming with source code.
[48:01.470 --> 48:03.030]  Every TV had a schematic.
[48:03.030 --> 48:10.430]  So you could go figure out where to tap a video signal in, and what little transistor interface to make it right, and send your video into your home TV.
[48:10.710 --> 48:12.910]  Now, I couldn't afford any input output terminals.
[48:13.210 --> 48:14.470]  Couldn't afford a teletype.
[48:14.590 --> 48:16.530]  But everyone has a television for free.
[48:17.090 --> 48:19.870]  So that was really the only solution for me.
[48:19.870 --> 48:21.930]  And I got my pong done.
[48:22.210 --> 48:23.170]  And it was pretty good.
[48:23.290 --> 48:26.070]  And I did other, like, home pinball games.
[48:26.230 --> 48:28.350]  And I was into the fun things you can make with electronics.
[48:28.510 --> 48:29.410]  The earliest VCR.
[48:29.650 --> 48:31.450]  What was the earliest consumer VCR?
[48:34.640 --> 48:37.620]  A lot of people might say it was Sony Betamax.
[48:37.760 --> 48:40.780]  But there was one before Betamax, and it was from the United States.
[48:43.580 --> 48:43.980]  Nope.
[48:43.980 --> 48:44.380]  CartraVision.
[48:45.620 --> 48:47.060]  Probably not many people know about it.
[48:47.120 --> 48:50.680]  They had a big, huge PC board that was the spinning motor itself.
[48:50.680 --> 48:53.100]  The parts of it were on the PC board.
[48:54.140 --> 48:56.780]  And it was a big helical scan deal.
[48:56.940 --> 48:57.840]  But you had cartridges.
[48:58.000 --> 48:58.620]  You shoved them in.
[48:58.760 --> 49:00.240]  The company went bankrupt right away.
[49:00.400 --> 49:02.980]  And there were, like, 8,000 of these units available for 60 bucks each.
[49:03.100 --> 49:08.280]  So we Hewlett Packard engineers would go down and buy them, and look at the schematics, and figure them out, and make them work.
[49:08.420 --> 49:10.020]  And they actually work.
[49:10.140 --> 49:11.080]  Color VCRs.
[49:11.200 --> 49:15.040]  For 60 bucks in 1974-ish.
[49:17.880 --> 49:18.560]  Pretty amazing.
[49:18.560 --> 49:19.240]  So I was...
[49:19.240 --> 49:21.600]  So electronics was so much a part of my life.
[49:21.900 --> 49:24.300]  Inside the company, Hewlett Packard, outside the company.
[49:24.740 --> 49:28.220]  One time when I was taking jokes on Dial-A-Joke, I actually met...
[49:28.220 --> 49:33.080]  I was kind of one of those guys that would never quite really be able to meet a girl the right way to ever have a girlfriend.
[49:33.360 --> 49:37.920]  And I met somebody on Dial-A-Joke where I was kind of anonymous and wound up marrying her.
[49:38.200 --> 49:38.920]  So I got my...
[49:38.920 --> 49:40.160]  So I even met my first wife there.
[49:41.560 --> 49:44.160]  So I'm very thankful for those sort of things.
[49:44.160 --> 49:46.740]  Eventually, I couldn't make any money.
[49:46.880 --> 49:47.700]  I couldn't afford it.
[49:47.900 --> 49:50.280]  So I said, all these 2,000 people a day are calling.
[49:50.380 --> 49:51.640]  Why don't I ask them for money?
[49:52.120 --> 49:54.800]  Post Office Box 67, Cupertino, California.
[49:55.160 --> 49:57.020]  And these kids sent in money.
[49:57.280 --> 49:57.900]  Lots of them.
[49:58.080 --> 50:00.540]  But nobody even sent in a dollar bill except once.
[50:00.900 --> 50:04.040]  And so in three months, I got $11 in coins.
[50:04.520 --> 50:05.440]  That was all.
[50:05.780 --> 50:06.680]  So it was sad.
[50:06.680 --> 50:08.160]  I finally had to stop Dial-A-Joke.
[50:08.320 --> 50:11.480]  As I ran it, humor changes throughout time.
[50:11.480 --> 50:12.160]  What's good?
[50:12.280 --> 50:12.780]  What's allowed?
[50:12.960 --> 50:13.740]  What's okay?
[50:14.260 --> 50:15.960]  We didn't have political correctness yet.
[50:16.100 --> 50:17.460]  But I told Polish jokes.
[50:17.920 --> 50:19.720]  Well, there are Polish societies.
[50:19.980 --> 50:22.580]  The Polish American Congress Incorporated is a company.
[50:22.780 --> 50:25.460]  And they support Polish people.
[50:26.060 --> 50:29.260]  Twelve years later, of course, I was to get their highest distinction, their Heritage Award.
[50:29.440 --> 50:31.900]  But at this point in time, I was...
[50:31.900 --> 50:35.200]  At this point in time, the popular jokes of the United States were Polish jokes.
[50:35.380 --> 50:36.020]  And I was telling them.
[50:36.020 --> 50:42.680]  So they threatened me with a lawsuit for maligning people of Polish descent.
[50:43.860 --> 50:44.780]  Oh, my gosh.
[50:44.920 --> 50:45.740]  I thought, I'm Polish.
[50:45.860 --> 50:46.580]  These are jokes.
[50:46.740 --> 50:47.220]  These aren't...
[50:47.220 --> 50:48.140]  We're not putting...
[50:48.140 --> 50:49.020]  We're not serious.
[50:49.440 --> 50:51.260]  So I went on and made a joke that...
[50:51.260 --> 50:55.640]  I said, hey, the Polish American Congress Incorporated doesn't like our jokes.
[50:55.880 --> 50:57.380]  You know, Polish jokes.
[50:57.500 --> 51:00.520]  Why don't you call them up and tell them what they're full of?
[51:01.920 --> 51:02.320]  Well...
[51:02.320 --> 51:02.700]  Well...
[51:02.700 --> 51:03.960]  And I gave them a phone number.
[51:04.660 --> 51:05.060]  So...
[51:06.500 --> 51:08.340]  That might have amounted to thousands of calls.
[51:08.440 --> 51:12.520]  Anyway, the next letter from their lawyer accused me of malicious and obscene phone calls.
[51:13.060 --> 51:15.680]  So I guess those kids didn't quite understand what I meant.
[51:15.900 --> 51:16.340]  Just to...
[51:16.340 --> 51:17.940]  I meant to just tell them that they're funny.
[51:18.020 --> 51:18.460]  We like them.
[51:18.800 --> 51:21.100]  So I talked to their lawyer and I said...
[51:21.100 --> 51:21.660]  Or their president.
[51:21.840 --> 51:24.280]  And I said, well, what if I change the jokes to Italian jokes?
[51:24.540 --> 51:25.480]  And he said, that's fine.
[51:29.610 --> 51:31.370]  This is before political correctness.
[51:31.370 --> 51:34.770]  And the whole idea was, a joke makes a person look bad.
[51:35.410 --> 51:35.850]  Right?
[51:36.030 --> 51:36.530]  A different...
[51:36.530 --> 51:38.910]  A certain class of people gets you a stereotype.
[51:39.450 --> 51:44.650]  Well, I told a joke at a University of Colorado engineering graduation once that was an example of...
[51:44.650 --> 51:47.550]  What, you know, it's hard to even tell.
[51:47.730 --> 51:51.650]  And the joke was, what do you call four Mexicans in quicksand?
[51:53.270 --> 51:54.150]  Quatro Cinco.
[51:56.090 --> 51:57.450]  It's a play on words.
[51:57.670 --> 51:58.990]  It's a cute little play on words.
[51:58.990 --> 52:01.170]  I offended so many people that night.
[52:04.230 --> 52:05.170]  Seriously, I did.
[52:05.370 --> 52:06.050]  I got really...
[52:07.870 --> 52:09.070]  Horrible things said to me.
[52:10.590 --> 52:12.690]  So, you know, I don't know.
[52:12.930 --> 52:14.450]  To me, how do you measure life?
[52:14.570 --> 52:17.310]  Happiness equals smiles minus frowns?
[52:18.370 --> 52:18.890]  Maybe.
[52:21.830 --> 52:28.050]  Well, eventually, eventually, I got a call or something from an old friend, John Draper.
[52:28.170 --> 52:30.290]  I liked to go visit John every few months.
[52:30.390 --> 52:31.550]  He wasn't a close friend.
[52:31.730 --> 52:33.030]  He was a little strange.
[52:33.370 --> 52:43.290]  But he had great stories of, if you tap the hook switch at this exact time between the two-click or the three-click section, you can somehow get the operator to come on and get free calls.
[52:43.290 --> 52:45.350]  He had method after method after method.
[52:45.490 --> 52:48.530]  If you go to this one pay phone in Los Altos after 6 p.m.
[52:48.630 --> 52:55.910]  at night, instead of calling 6-1-1, it puts it on a machine that starts clicking out 298-something, a San Jose number for telephone repair.
[52:56.090 --> 53:00.290]  But you can start tapping out your own New York number instead from a little machine in the phone.
[53:00.290 --> 53:02.150]  He had all these amazing things.
[53:02.410 --> 53:05.090]  Once told me a code to tap into phone lines.
[53:05.450 --> 53:07.450]  I called it and tapped into the FBI.
[53:07.870 --> 53:09.270]  And this is the one time I ever did it.
[53:09.350 --> 53:13.550]  And I heard them talking about some sensitive, picking up some suspect issues.
[53:14.250 --> 53:15.570]  And I was just blown away.
[53:15.690 --> 53:21.590]  And John told me that one time when he did it, the FBI sort of heard these very weak beeps every 15 seconds.
[53:21.650 --> 53:22.550]  You could almost not hear it.
[53:22.830 --> 53:26.170]  One time they heard it and they said, oh, it must be the guys downstairs taping us again.
[53:26.330 --> 53:27.570]  They suspected their own people.
[53:32.900 --> 53:35.120]  So the Apple one was to come to the world.
[53:35.320 --> 53:40.800]  But eventually, well, I went over to John Draper's basement where he was working on a project on phones in Cupertino.
[53:40.960 --> 53:42.520]  And he was so excited.
[53:42.760 --> 53:44.300]  And he said, you've got to see this, Steve.
[53:44.420 --> 53:47.160]  And he goes over to a teletype, a machine that I could never even afford.
[53:47.320 --> 53:48.280]  And he's typing away.
[53:48.380 --> 53:50.620]  He says, I am playing chess with a computer in Boston.
[53:50.880 --> 53:52.940]  And he says, watch, I can switch over to Stanford.
[53:53.200 --> 53:55.640]  And I can switch up to Berkeley and Santa Barbara.
[53:55.780 --> 53:57.940]  And he could switch to all these computers around.
[53:58.100 --> 53:59.340]  It was the early ARPANET.
[53:59.900 --> 54:00.980]  This was amazing.
[54:01.180 --> 54:06.080]  It was like phone, like ham radio could reach out to people far across the country.
[54:06.520 --> 54:09.720]  Blue boxes could reach out to people far across the country and world.
[54:10.020 --> 54:13.500]  And now here was a computer network that reached out across the world.
[54:13.900 --> 54:15.500]  It's those kind of things always intrigued me.
[54:15.800 --> 54:17.000]  And I got pulled into it.
[54:17.040 --> 54:19.560]  I said, oh, my God, I have to do this.
[54:20.140 --> 54:22.480]  How do you do it when you can't afford the equipment?
[54:22.480 --> 54:25.620]  I mean, I had to pay cash at my apartments because my checks bounced.
[54:25.920 --> 54:29.980]  Well, I knew how to design a Pong game.
[54:30.260 --> 54:32.120]  That puts Pong on a TV screen.
[54:32.340 --> 54:36.640]  So I just designed it to put letters on my TV screen and be a terminal.
[54:37.420 --> 54:38.420]  And what do you need?
[54:38.520 --> 54:39.920]  You need a keyboard to be human.
[54:40.360 --> 54:42.960]  Keyboards back then were like equivalent of a thousand bucks today.
[54:42.960 --> 54:46.080]  But I found one keyboard in a magazine for $60.
[54:47.020 --> 54:48.880]  Uppercase only, $60.
[54:49.560 --> 54:52.860]  That was the most expensive thing I purchased on the road to Apple success.
[54:53.940 --> 54:54.700]  Bought that.
[54:55.540 --> 55:06.520]  Hewlett Packard had a very nice policy written down, which I actually got to see, which was if you used... you could use chips out of the storeroom for projects of your own design if your supervisor approved.
[55:07.000 --> 55:08.780]  So I had access to chips.
[55:09.900 --> 55:13.020]  And this keyboard for $60 made the whole thing go.
[55:13.140 --> 55:13.880]  A little interface chip.
[55:14.100 --> 55:15.300]  Got my terminal working.
[55:16.080 --> 55:17.120]  I built a modem.
[55:17.500 --> 55:19.740]  And I could call a number at Stanford.
[55:19.740 --> 55:21.320]  And I could talk to all these computers.
[55:21.560 --> 55:22.580]  I almost never did it.
[55:22.640 --> 55:24.620]  There wasn't really anything I wanted to use the computers for.
[55:24.780 --> 55:26.700]  But it was neat to have been able to do it.
[55:26.780 --> 55:33.020]  It was just from that hacking spirit and telling other people, what an incredible, amazing thing you can do that you'd never...
[55:33.020 --> 55:35.860]  that almost anybody in the world wouldn't even know about or think is possible.
[55:38.200 --> 55:42.880]  And then a friend called up and he said, Steve, a club is starting up.
[55:43.720 --> 55:46.460]  And it's for people who build terminals and things.
[55:46.680 --> 55:52.360]  And it was very lucky that Alan said that because if he had said it's a microprocessor club, I would have said, I'm not going.
[55:52.440 --> 55:53.740]  I don't know anything about microprocessors.
[55:54.480 --> 55:58.020]  I had really dropped my computer in stuff since working at Hewlett Packard.
[55:58.220 --> 55:59.900]  But he said, it's for people with terminals.
[56:00.040 --> 56:08.920]  And I thought, well, if I go with something I've done, I've built a terminal, I can always communicate because I can talk about what I've done easier than anything else.
[56:09.160 --> 56:11.180]  I went to this meeting and I was shocked.
[56:11.400 --> 56:22.140]  They were all talking about microprocessors, little computers with face plates that looked like airplane cockpits, and pictures on magazines and people who'd gone to the companies and everybody was going to build these microprocessors.
[56:22.640 --> 56:24.160]  And I felt really dumb.
[56:24.280 --> 56:26.240]  All I had was a terminal that worked on my home TV.
[56:26.720 --> 56:28.780]  And I'd pass out the schematics to anybody who wanted.
[56:29.660 --> 56:34.180]  But I took home a data sheet for what a microprocessor was and astounded myself.
[56:34.400 --> 56:38.720]  This microprocessor is just like the mini computers I designed back in high school.
[56:39.020 --> 56:40.520]  Oh my God, it's the same thing.
[56:40.700 --> 56:41.460]  It's on a chip.
[56:42.060 --> 56:48.280]  Okay, when I was at the end of high school, I told my dad, I'm going to, someday in my life, I'm going to have a 4K Nova.
[56:49.060 --> 56:50.180]  Because it can run Fortran.
[56:50.280 --> 56:51.160]  4K can run Fortran.
[56:51.300 --> 56:55.220]  I'm going to have a 4K Nova and he said, Steve, it costs as much as a house.
[56:55.760 --> 56:57.740]  And I said, well, I'm going to live in an apartment.
[56:57.740 --> 56:59.520]  Someday I'm going to have a mini computer.
[56:59.780 --> 57:05.660]  Now I realize with these microprocessors, I was actually going to be able to afford a real computer of my own design maybe.
[57:06.400 --> 57:08.180]  And started thinking that way.
[57:08.320 --> 57:10.240]  Didn't have enough money to buy anything right away.
[57:11.100 --> 57:13.460]  Microprocessor, 400 bucks, way too expensive.
[57:14.180 --> 57:17.760]  Hewlett Packard, microprocessor, 40 bucks as an employee.
[57:18.340 --> 57:19.540]  That was going to be my road.
[57:20.380 --> 57:23.000]  Designed it on paper, drafted it on my drafting board.
[57:23.420 --> 57:26.760]  And a company introduced the best newest microprocessor for $20.
[57:27.660 --> 57:32.580]  Not only that, but instead of having to go to a distributor and fill out credit reports like you're a company.
[57:32.760 --> 57:33.340]  And you know what?
[57:33.420 --> 57:35.320]  A lot of us just want to be normal human beings.
[57:35.440 --> 57:36.320]  I don't want to be a company.
[57:37.200 --> 57:42.560]  Instead of filling out these weird things like you're a company, you just go and pay them 20 bucks at a show in San Francisco called Wescon.
[57:42.720 --> 57:44.360]  And they give you a microprocessor chip.
[57:44.360 --> 57:46.580]  Oh man, I went and bought a few chips.
[57:46.820 --> 57:49.160]  So did a lot of other people in our Homebrew Computer Club.
[57:50.600 --> 57:54.040]  And got to work and started designing the computer.
[57:54.260 --> 57:55.640]  Eventually got it to work.
[57:55.860 --> 57:59.660]  Got some really good, made some good choices and went for dynamic RAMs.
[58:00.620 --> 58:04.660]  The 4K dynamic RAMs were going to be the first RAM ever to be cheaper than core memory.
[58:04.860 --> 58:07.200]  And change computer memories forever.
[58:07.500 --> 58:10.760]  But everybody was designing the infantile computers back then.
[58:10.920 --> 58:12.960]  They were simple hobbyists that worked at home.
[58:12.960 --> 58:20.600]  And they were designing with static RAMs because you can take the address pin of a microprocessor and connect a wire to the address pin of a chip.
[58:20.940 --> 58:23.360]  The data of a microprocessor to the data of a chip.
[58:23.460 --> 58:24.900]  Just connect a wire and it works.
[58:25.400 --> 58:30.260]  But those static RAMs were going to cost a lot more than dynamic RAMs.
[58:30.320 --> 58:32.740]  And it was going to take a lot more of them to make a computer.
[58:33.180 --> 58:38.280]  In fact, it took 32 chips to get 4K of RAM on static RAMs.
[58:38.360 --> 58:42.960]  But these new dynamic RAMs, the new 4K dynamic RAMs, You could do it with eight chips.
[58:43.460 --> 58:44.840]  Eight chips instead of 32.
[58:45.180 --> 58:49.180]  My goal was always to compete with myself and do things in fewer chips.
[58:50.280 --> 58:51.280]  Had to go that way.
[58:51.400 --> 58:58.280]  So I could be smart enough to design the refreshing circuitry because these dynamic RAMs forget their contents after two thousandths of a second.
[59:00.500 --> 59:01.960]  And that was a good decision.
[59:02.140 --> 59:03.320]  So things started looking good.
[59:03.380 --> 59:06.000]  I had this Apple One computer finally built and working.
[59:06.000 --> 59:11.400]  And instead of having a faceplate that looked like an airplane cockpit, it had a keyboard that looked human.
[59:11.720 --> 59:14.840]  And really that was suggested more than anything else to me by two things.
[59:15.000 --> 59:16.760]  I had built the faceplate computer.
[59:16.960 --> 59:19.320]  I had gotten some chips and built one five years before.
[59:20.560 --> 59:22.260]  And I worked at Hewlett Packard.
[59:22.420 --> 59:24.000]  Our calculators had a human keyboard.
[59:24.460 --> 59:25.960]  How does a human keyboard work?
[59:26.240 --> 59:28.400]  A program runs saying, are you pressing a key?
[59:28.780 --> 59:31.300]  If you press the five key, the program says a key got pressed.
[59:31.460 --> 59:32.680]  I figure out it's a five key.
[59:32.840 --> 59:35.060]  I go and run the programs and stick a five in the display.
[59:35.060 --> 59:35.860]  And I quit.
[59:35.960 --> 59:37.580]  Now I go back and say, is a key being pressed?
[59:38.480 --> 59:43.360]  So a Hewlett Packard calculator said they had a program watching for you to press keys and then did what the key should do.
[59:43.420 --> 59:48.180]  So I wrote a little program for my keyboard that I could now type on a human keyboard.
[59:48.640 --> 59:49.000]  Okay?
[59:49.080 --> 59:49.900]  And I was a good typist.
[59:49.960 --> 59:57.880]  And I could actually type data into the computer so much faster than toggling a bunch of lights into the right one-oh-oh-one-oh-one-one-one-oh address.
[59:57.880 --> 01:00:00.500]  Push a button and it puts it in the address register.
[01:00:00.700 --> 01:00:04.400]  One-oh-five, one-oh-one-oh-one-one-one, pop it into data.
[01:00:04.660 --> 01:00:10.960]  And it was so miserable to imagine those other computers that other people were getting popular about in the hobby sphere.
[01:00:11.160 --> 01:00:12.920]  I wanted something that I could really use.
[01:00:13.040 --> 01:00:14.820]  And most of all, you had to use it for games.
[01:00:14.820 --> 01:00:14.940]  All right.
[01:00:14.940 --> 01:00:14.980]  All right.
[01:00:15.000 --> 01:00:15.160]  This links to my list- It's the link.
[01:00:15.160 --> 01:00:15.180]  There you are.