Return to the Little Kingdom (6 page)

Commuting occupied a prominent place among Paul Jobs’s pet dislikes, so after the finance company transferred him to an office in Palo Alto the entire family was tugged farther down the Peninsula. Jobs bought a home in Mountain View, a stone’s throw from the area’s first covered shopping mall, where the neighbors were a mixture of blue-collar and lower-middle-class families.

At the Jobs home Steven took to waking up so early that his parents bought him a rocking horse, a gramophone, and some Little Richard records so that he could amuse himself without disturbing the entire household. Some children across the street made super-8-mm movies and Jobs junior, dolled up in his father’s raincoat and hat, played detective. The family television set that normally was tuned to a steady diet of
Dobie Gillis, I Love Lucy, Groucho Marx,
and Johnny Quest cartoons.

Like Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, Mountain View had its share of electrical engineers. They brought scrap parts home from work, tinkered about in the garage, and when they built something interesting or novel, usually displayed it in the driveway. One engineer who worked for Hewlett-Packard and lived a few doors away from the Jobses brought a carbon microphone home from his laboratory, hooked it to a battery and speaker, and immediately turned into an electronic Pied Piper. Steven Jobs, who had picked up some elementary electronics from his father, was baffled by something that seemed to violate the rules that he had learned: The carbon microphone had no amplifier and yet sound emerged from the speaker. He reported this to his father who couldn’t provide a satisfactory explanation so he returned and badgered the expert from Hewlett-Packard. He was soon presented with the object under inspection and was frequently invited to dinner at the engineer’s house where he learned some more rudiments of electronics.

Jobs senior found automobiles altogether more interesting than electronics. As a teenager he had scraped together enough money to buy a car and had turned into a perpetual moonlighter—buying, trading, and swapping automobiles. He took pride in the fact that he stopped buying new cars in 1957 and thereafter relied on instincts and the wit in his hands to rescue and restore old models. Jobs concentrated fiercely on fixing examples of a particular model until something else caught his fancy. He mounted snapshots of his favorite automobiles either in a scrapbook or in a picture frame, and would point out subtleties that only a collector would appreciate: a seat decorated with a rare trim or a peculiar set of air vents.

After work he would clamber into a set of overalls, trundle out his clinically clean toolbox, and disappear under the car of the week. He came to know most of the clerks at the local department of motor vehicles by their first names and on Saturday mornings he trailed around the junkyards on the Bayshore frontage road in Palo Alto, sorting through the pickings. He frequently took his son along and let him watch the negotiations and bargaining at the front counter: “I figured I could get him nailed down with a little mechanical ability but he really wasn’t interested in getting his hands dirty. He never really cared too much about mechanical things.” Steven said he was more interested in wondering about the people who had once owned the cars.

 

One of the Mountain View neighbors convinced Paul Jobs he should try his hand at real estate. He earned his Realtor’s license, did well for a year or so, but disliked the hustle, the sycophancy, and the uncertainty. During his second year he didn’t make much money. Circumstances were so grim that he had to refinance his home to tide the family over. To help make ends meet, Clara Jobs found part-time work in the payroll department at Varian Associates, a firm that made radar devices. Finally Paul Jobs became so disenchanted with the vagaries of real estate that he decided to return to his trade as a machinist. When he was finally hired by a machine shop in San Carlos he had to work his way up from the bottom again.

The setback wasn’t something that escaped Steven Jobs. There were no family vacations, the furniture was reconditioned, and there was no color television. Paul Jobs built most of the home comforts. In fourth grade when his teacher asked her pupils, “What is it in this universe that you don’t understand?” Steven Jobs answered, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden we’re so broke.” That same teacher, Imogene “Teddy” Hill, saved her nine-year-old charge from going astray after he had been expelled from another class for misbehaving. Her pupil recalled, “She figured out the situation real fast. She bribed me into learning. She would say, ‘I really want you to finish this workbook. I’ll give you five bucks if you finish it.’” As a consequence Jobs skipped fifth grade and though his teachers suggested he attend junior high school and start to learn a foreign language, he refused. His sixth grade report noted, “Steven is an excellent reader. However he wastes much time during reading period. . . . He has great difficulty motivating himself or seeing the purpose of studying reading. . . . He can be a discipline problem at times.”

For the Jobses, as for the Wozniaks, swimming was important. They first ferried Steven to swimming lessons when he was five and later enrolled him in a swim club called the Mountain View Dolphins. To pay for swimming lessons Clara Jobs spent her evenings babysitting for friends. Some years later, when he was old enough to become a member of the club swim team, Jobs met Mark Wozniak. Jobs, Wozniak recalled, was taunted and roughhoused by some of the other swimmers who liked to snap wet towels at him. “He was pretty much a crybaby. He’d lose a race and go off and cry. He didn’t quite fit in with everyone else. He wasn’t one of the guys.”

Steven Jobs did, however, change schools and started attending Mountain View’s Crittenden Elementary School. The school drew children from the lower-income eastern fringes of Mountain View and had a reputation for attracting ruffians and fostering hooliganism. Local police were frequently summoned to break up fights and discipline children who jumped out of windows or threatened teachers. After a year, Steven Jobs, who found himself miserable and lonely, issued an ultimatum: He would refuse to return to school if it meant another year at Crittenden. Paul Jobs detected the firmness. “He said he just wouldn’t go. So we moved.” Once more the Jobses hopped another step down the Peninsula, attracted by the lure of the Palo Alto and Cupertino school districts. In Los Altos they bought a house with a gently raked roof, a large garage, and three bedrooms, all of which happened to sit within the curious embrace of the Cupertino School District.

W
hen John McCollum arrived to teach electronics at Cupertino’s Homestead High School the day it opened in 1963, Classroom F-3 was almost empty. There was a cold concrete floor, cinder-block walls, some gray metal chairs, and on a swivel stand a television which carried the school’s closed-circuit announcements. The classroom and the rest of Homestead High School looked like a minimum-security prison and its boundaries were certainly well defined. The houses that McCollum could see through his classroom window were in Sunnyvale, but his blackboard hung in Cupertino. When Homestead opened, Classroom F-3 was so barren that even the most enterprising student would have had difficulty electrocuting himself. McCollum immediately made some changes.

He hoisted a long, yellow slide rule above the blackboard, pinned the stars and stripes high on a wall, unrolled a bright poster that said SAFETY IS NO ACCIDENT and a bumper sticker that carried the exhortation FLY NAVY. A couple of long wooden laboratory benches were bolted to the floor and gradually covered with equipment. Rather than scrimp and save for a few new devices, McCollum used his wits. The shelves above the benches started to fill as Classroom F-3 became a well-stuffed wastepaper basket for nearby companies like Fairchild, Raytheon, and Hewlett-Packard. McCollum turned into a decorous alley cat prowling up and down the Santa Clara Valley looking for parts. He found his students sooner or later managed to destroy about one third of everything he brought into the classroom. “Onezees,” as electronic distributors disparagingly called on order for any quantity under fifty, would not do. McCollum, or rather his students, dealt in bulk.

Fortunately, the electronics companies were selling to customers who were so finicky that they sometimes seemed to reject more parts than they bought. They would refuse to buy a transistor that had a blurred part number, or a resistor whose pins weren’t straight, or a capacitor with a small bubble baked in the paint. McCollum’s greatest coup came when Raytheon gave him nine thousand transistors (then going for sixteen dollars a piece), which a components-evaluation engineer at NASA considered too flimsy to packet to the moon. There were other substantial trophies and some came from a warehouse that Hewlett-Packard maintained in Palo Alto. It was Hewlett-Packard’s version of a Salvation Army store packed with used and surplus test equipment which high-school teachers were free to rummage through. McCollum paid regular visits and on a few occasions returned with expensive dual-trace oscilloscopes and frequency counters. Within a few years, and by the time Stephen Wozniak—and later Steven Jobs—enrolled in Electronics 1, Classroom F-3 had become a miniature parts warehouse. McCollum had accumulated as much test equipment as they had at nearby De Anza Community College, and compared to the hoard at Homestead, some of the electronics labs in neighboring high schools might as well have been in the Upper Volta.

 

For some of the brighter students and for those who had been tutored at home, many of the projects assigned by McCollum were old hat. The formal theory was not. Electronics 1, 2, and 3 became Stephen Wozniak’s most important high-school class, fifty minutes a day, every day of the week. McCollum’s class also brought a definite divide between matters electrical and matters electronic. For the students this wasn’t a semantic difference; it was something that separated the men from the boys. Electrical devices were the stuff of play kits composed of batteries and switches and light bulbs. Electronics was an altogether higher calling that journeyed into the world of technology, the ethereal realms of physics, and was devoted to the peculiar behavior of the mighty and entirely invisible electron.

Standing in front of the class, wearing a woolen cardigan, McCollum drummed home electronic theory. Stories and set speeches from the twenty years he had spent in the navy, before he retired in pique at a rule requiring infrequent pilots to fly with a backup, spilled out with such regularity that some students took to giving the old favorites code numbers. McCollum would fidget with his spectacles, placing them on his nose, removing them and tucking them into his shirt pocket behind the pens in the streaked plastic pouch. He started with theory and followed up with applications. The students were paraded through Ohm’s law, Watt’s law, basic circuitry, magnetism, and inductance. They found that if they paid attention the lessons stuck and that their teacher planted seeds that kept sprouting. They solved elementary equations, linked resistors in series and parallel, and watched capacitors charge up. They built power supplies and amplifiers and learned how to manipulate alternating and direct currents.

McCollum was also the quality-assurance center. When students finished building radios, he disappeared into his stock-room, inserted some faulty parts and urged them to troubleshoot with their minds rather than their eyes. “You have got to be able to think it through,” he repeated. Keen students brought the devices they built in their bedrooms and garages for McCollum to scrutinize. He would jab loose parts with a screwdriver and wiggle the solder joints much like a rough dentist. On one occasion he criticized a knob on a power supply that Bill Fernandez had built because it behaved in the opposite manner to most knobs. Fernandez later said, “It was the first time I started to think about standards and human design.”

To reveal the power of electricity McCollum became a showman. He chilled his students with tales of acid burning the faces of people who carelessly jump-started automobile engines. With a flourish he produced props from a locked desk drawer and demonstrated well-tried tricks. He indulged in the mundane and would rub a balloon against his sweater and hang it from the underside of the television. Or he would dim the lights and throw the switch on a Tesla coil that generated high-frequency currents. The class would be left watching one hundred thousand volts leap from the end of the coil and illuminate a fluorescent tube held close by. And on other days the students in Classroom F-3 would see flames crackling up the rods of a Jacob’s ladder. McCollum made his mission plain. “I try to dispel the mystery of electrons. You cannot see them, but you can see the effect of them.”

Electronics was not, however, a purely intellectual quest. It was also a practical matter that with very little skill produced all manner of shrieks, sirens, ticks, and other noises calculated to amuse, irritate, and terrify. The same parts that built sturdy voltmeters and ohmeters could be turned to far more diverting purposes. From an early age Stephen Wozniak had a penchant for practical jokes and he usually managed to add a twist of his own. Throwing eggs in the dark at passing cars didn’t strike him as either entertaining or ingenious. But painting an egg black, attaching it to string hooked to lampposts on either side of the road, and suspending it at a height calculated to smack a radiator grill was more his style. Electronics opened up a new realm for pranks.