Over at Jason Scott's ASCII weblog there's a transcript of a Coast to Coast radio interview with Steve Wozniak from April 2006. It's an interesting read on several grounds, but especially for some things it says about Education, and the contexts of family support and teachers and one's own activities. A few juicy snippets:
Woz: ...I lived with a bunch of kids that had engineers for parents. So they had electronic parts around the house. They had parents that could teach us how things worked and how to hook up some of the parts to get some interesting things to happen...Posted by oook at February 26, 2007 08:39 AM...Actually, my whole technical evolution was very much accidents. It was not planned by myself. There were no classes, there were no books, it was all accidental. I would stumble into journals. I would stumble into magazines. I found that was what my interest was. You know what your interest is, and not everybody comes up with the same. And it's accidentally inspired maybe by the fun I had with my electronics friends I had in the neighborhood... I was one of the math/science stars of the school and we would get the awards and all that, but I was also in electronics class. We had a great electronics class in our high school and the teacher realized that I knew it all and I was just playing pranks and wiring other people's radios to blow up if they asked me for help...
...So, the teacher said, "You know you're good at giving pranks." So he arranged for some help. This is very unusual when a teacher sees a student that could be helped with a lot of stuff that's not in the school. A lot of teachers will say, "You know what, the education is here in this school and these books and my class," and that's all we take responsibility for...
...what I would do is drive up with a friend of mine, Alan Baum, up to Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. And we'd go there on a Sunday. And the reason we'd go there is there's a lot of smart people that work at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and wherever smart people work there's open doors. So, we would actually drive to the main building and we'd walk up some stairs and try some doors and eventually we'd find a door open from the outside, and we'd go in. And they had a computer library in there, a technical library. I found computer manuals and there were little cards where you could fill out your name and address and they would send you a computer manual. Sylvania sent me manuals to their computers, ...Hewlett Packard would send me manuals to their computers. Digital Equipment would send me theirs. A company started up called Data General and they sent me theirs.
...Fill out the cards, and we'll send you a manual describing our computer because to get this magazine, back in those days, you were probably an engineer. You are the sort of person who might buy our expensive computers. And I would sit down at home, whenever I had a free weekend. I would sit down and pull out blank paper and just start designing that computer. And if I'd already designed that computer, I would design it again using the latest, newest chips. My dad would get me the chip manuals of the newest, latest chips, and I would design it with fewer parts as a goal. I started making a game out of this, and the game was: how few of chips can I do it in? And I started coming up with tricks in my head as a young high school kid, that I knew that nobody else in the world was doing with chips...
[at University of Colorado] ...I wanted to write every program that I could think of. Programs to calculate mathematical tables of numbers, things like Fibonacci numbers, powers of two, these great tables that you'd find in the tables of the books that engineers have to use to do their jobs. And I wrote so many programs, and I could run them three times a day. It was back when you had to type out punch cards, submit them, come back later to the computer to get your printouts and see that it's done. I would run them three times a day, seven programs each, 60 pages each time, piling up reams and reams of output in my dorm room. And they cut me off. I didn't realize they had a class budget. I thought, "You take a computer class, you get to write programs." No. I ran our class five times over budget, which is more than twice the tuition of the second highest out of state tuition university in the country, and I was so scared that my parents would find out that I could never afford to pay that money back. They made it sound like they were going to bill me. So I didn't try to go back there my second year.