Kevin Mitnick: We have a great guest in our studio today, somebody I've looked up to. I mean, since I was a young kid I remember going into stores like, Computerland when I was 16-17 years old, and using the Apple Computers, and playing with the - trying to program in Basic, and all this great stuff. I'm just honored to have this gentleman in the studio. He's the inventor of the Apple Computer, co-founder of Apple Computer, and just a great guy. I want to welcome you to my show, Steve.

Steven Wozniak: Well you know Kevin, we have a lot in common - you want to be me, and I want to be you.

Kevin: [laughs]

Steven: And I think Steve Jobs wants to be himself, and Bill Gates too.

Kevin: That's true. What I wanted to ask you is, what originally sparked your interest in technology? I'm talking when you were much younger. What really influenced you back then?

Steven: Boy, it's hard to look back and be absolutely certain. But I knew my whole life... it really started with the sort of books that I liked to read. When you're young you might watch a certain kind of TV show and say, "Wow, that's a hero. That's what I'd like to be someday." It started with Tom Swift, Jr. books. All the kids in school would go down and buy a new book. I think they came out once a week or once every two weeks. Nancy Drew books, the girls liked to buy. The Hardy Boys Adventure Series, the boys liked to buy.

Kevin: The Hardy Boys. Right.

Steven: But some of us, we had a lot of engineer fathers in the area where I grew up, which was the Santa Clara Valley then, it's the Silicon Valley now -- and we liked to buy the Tom Swift, Jr. books about this kid that had some good friends and he had this company he ran with his dad. And he was an engineer. And whenever there was some problem in the world, he'd run into laboratories and work in factories and get things built like spaceships and submarines and plasma fields to hold aliens. He would solve the problem with his own ingenuity and that attracted me - and also science fiction books later on. But that was sort of a start of science fiction at a young age.

Kevin: So he was a problem solver.

Steven: Yes. In addition to that 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. You know even building your own flashlight at an early early age makes you think, "I know something special." You learn from these sorts of things. We would go and run house to house intercoms; we would run the wire all the way down the fence up and down the block and tap it into our rooms so we could flash some lights in a friends house and wake him up at two in the morning to go out and toilet paper houses, you know.

Kevin: [laughing] All the good stuff kids do.

Steven: Yeah. But we'd read "Popular Electronics" magazine, and go down to Sunnyvale Electronics and buy parts, and build projects every now and then, you know. Tone makers or...

Kevin: How about radios? Wireless radios or FM transmitters...

Steven: Actually, one of my dreams was, I had a Ham radio license in sixth grade, because I'd read a book and the hero was a Ham, and at the end of the book it said, "You can have a Ham radio license at any age." And I thought, "Wow, for a person who's normal, you can be very special." It's like being told that at eight years old you could get a driver's license. So in sixth grade I got my Ham radio license, and was actually out making contacts. Back then you had to buy a kit of parts for a transmitter, a kit of parts for a receiver, bolt them together, follow the instructions, run little threads around the tuning dials...

Kevin: Remember Heathkit?

Steven: And they ran on tubes and you'd always take your tubes down to the grocery store -- even the moms would -- and test them out, and find out which tubes went bad.


So, I was into wireless then. But I'll tell you, I remember in junior high school, I wanted a walkie-talkie so bad from the Lafayette Catalogue. It cost 37 bucks. So, I figured out, I saved 35 cents lunch money every day and skipped lunch, day after day after day.


But back then we had the "build your bomb shelters" because the Russians might nuke us. And they had these emergency supplies. So they had an auction at our school -- not an auction -- but everyone buys a ticket, a raffle kind of thing. Everyone buys tickets and they win a bunch of prizes. So, I think I bought half the tickets with all my money and my friends' money. And we won about half the prizes of emergency supplies candy that would last for 10 years.

Kevin: Oh, that's not bad. So, what was so special about this Lafayette walkie-talkie?

Steven: I wanted it, because my friends go into it. And I think they got them, a couple friends in the neighborhood. And one year they got -- I think I was in eighth grade -- they got communications receivers. I wanted a communications receiver. That's a short-wave radio. That's a radio that could pick up the transmissions from other countries if you had a good antenna on the roof.

Kevin: WWV.

Steven: I wanted it and it only cost about 80 dollars. That was a lot of money back then, more than 80 bucks now. I wanted it so badly, and I didn't get that for a Christmas present. But, hey, some Christmases... There was one Christmas I got my Ham radios and I got all these other great gifts, it was the most incredible Christmas ever. And I'd been told by my parents that I couldn't have the one thing I really wanted, a three-speed bike, because they couldn't afford that. So, I walked from my room to the Christmas tree and there was the bike.

Kevin: Ha, very good. Now, when you were young -- and this was the time of playing with amateur radio and stuff -- were you the type of guy that liked to rip things apart and just see how they worked?

Steven: No, back in those days you didn't rip much apart. Electronics, we didn't have a lot of it. You might have a tube radio, but you'd only have one. You might have one TV in the house. You couldn't dare take it apart, even though I understood these things. I might just open it up and look at the parts. They came with schematics back then.

Kevin: Right.

Steven: Today everything is almost closed up, but back then it was just so open. Your TVs came with schematics, they didn't have video in but if you were smart you could figure out where to tap in a signal and supply some video to a TV. And remember, we didn't have color TVs until later in my childhood. So, it was kind of early years of electronics.


Transistor radios came out. I think my most valuable thing was my transistor radio. It influenced me. I thought, "Wow they made a device that I can sleep with and hear wonderful music all night long every night. Turn it on and carry it with me." It was so personal. It was mine. It wasn't somebody else's. It wasn't my parents' radio. I could listen to it.

Kevin: Whenever you wanted.

Steven: And I could listen to whatever channel I wanted. I loved that thing. My Dad, he was working for Lockheed. Only the military could sponsor this early transistor companies in Silicon Valley and the early chip making companies because, for the military to launch missiles, they needed low weight and low weight was to put in six transistors on one chip instead of six separate transistors. So that was early it got me an early education to the whole chip thing and I said, "Are they are going to do that so they can make smaller better transistor radios for us people?" and he said, "No, they are going to make it for the military." I was disappointed. I really really wanted them to be making the best technologies for people at home.

Kevin: Right, so your dad was an engineer.

Steven: He sure was. He was an electrical engineer not a computer engineer.

Kevin: Right. Now what did you mom do?

Steven: My mom was housewife.

Kevin: OK so did you...did you follow your dad footsteps? Did he teach you a lot about engineering or...

Steven: Yeah he did. Not to say he wanted his children to be engineers and of the three of us, really, I'm the only one that turned out that way.


It turns out that when he saw me go in a direction and find something I liked, he would explain how it worked. He would pull out a blackboard and explain how electrons went around atoms. When I was in early elementary school, I did atom projects. And then he would explain how to hook up all these switches to show that if you have 92 switches for each of the natural elements and 92 lights to show where the electrons in the various shells of the atom might come on, he would show me how you could hook up diodes so the switches don't conflict with each other. Diodes only let electricity go one way and not the other way. So, switch two can turn on the same lights as switch 3, but not vice versa.

Kevin: A little bit of theory, there.

Steven: A little bit. I'm not trying to explain it. But he taught me these sorts of things, how parts work. And then we got up to the point of logic. You know, if this then that. If you're playing Tic-Tac-Toe, it's a game of logic. You cannot lose if you have a set of rules in your head. Well, you can actually play every game of Tic-Tac-Toe on paper and write those rules down. For example, if there's an X in the top left corner and an X in the upper right corner and no O between them, you know you going to take that spot to win Tic-Tac-Toe.


So that's logic. If this and that is true, then do this other thing. It taught me how transistors play a role in these games. So it moved me up to understanding how transistors worked and games, and then I moved into real computer stuff - its like numbers and calculations and mathematics. Of course, you see lights blinking on TV now. Well, back then, you didn't even see computers in TV shows. They were that foreign and unknown. We didn't have computers in our schools. They were just the huge, big thing you'd never do in your life, but I discovered a computer journal in the house by accident.

Kevin: Right, well I heard you had an interesting time in high school with computer technology and I want to cover that when we come back from break. So this is Kevin Mitnick filling in for Art Bell on Coast To Coast AM and when we come back from break were going to continue our talk with Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak.


[radio break]

Kevin: Hi this is Kevin Mitnick and were talking with Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak. So Steve, right before we went to break I remember you telling me a story once where you first really got involved in computers in high school, or was this before.

Steven: 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. In high school I had other accidents. I was also on a path to find out what a computer was and I was too shy to ask people, "What is a computer?" So I'd look it up in books. So I kept learning more and more by doing my own projects and seeing others at science fairs. In high school a lucky thing happened. 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.


At one time, my lab partner asked me to write a report on crystals for him. So I wrote a really good report right out of the book, and then I wrote a second report that was total farce, that was on every kind of crystal that was not electronic, like watch crystals and crystals in geodes and that sort of thing. So, I showed him the good one, and said, "I'll put it on the teacher's desk for you." And I put the bad one on.

Kevin: That's terrible.

Steven: 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.

Kevin: Going to hold you to the four corners.

Steven: This teacher went beyond and he arranged for me to go down to a company in Silicon Valley and program computer once a week.

Kevin: What company was that?

Steven: It was Sylvania, in Sunnyvale.

Kevin: OK, OK.

Steven: And I went down, this engineer showed me this computer and manuals and I took a Fortran manual and learned the language of Fortran and wrote some programs, and had some interesting programs.


While I was down there one day I saw a book called "The Small Computer Handbook." And remember I was on a search. I didn't know exactly what a computer really was but by then I sure knew logic. I knew how to build adders and subtractors and win science fair projects.


I even got the award for the best electronics project in the Bay area science fair when I was in eighth grade, and it covered up through 12th graders. So I was really advanced that way.


OK, I saw a book called "The Small Computer Handbook" and I went crazy because I knew computers were going to be my life's interest. I didn't think I'd ever have a job in them. I didn't think there were jobs in computers.


I thought that once I became and engineer, I told my dad I'd become an engineer like him first, a fifth-grade teacher second. Well, I thought an engineer would design missiles or radios or televisions -- you know, things with dials. I didn't think that computers was a job I'd ever have, but I was in love with them. So I took this book home.

Kevin: OK.

Steven: And then I looked and it described a computer like architecture, like describing a house. How many rooms it has, how many cabinets, and where the doors are to walk through. Then I took my list of parts, which are like lumber, but they were called "chips" and I started designing on paper, drawing the diagrams of how the chips could hook together to make this thing called a computer. A PDP eight was the name of the computer...

Kevin: Ah, a DEC.

Steven: That was in my manual.

Kevin: Yes.

Steven: Well, I got into this habit of every computer... There were about 20 of these things called "mini-computers" being introduced in the late '60s. They all looked like big, square, rectangular boxes -- very cold. They'd sit on a factory floor in a rack, and they had switches and lights and push buttons...

Kevin: And they were quite large.

Steven: You'd never go near them because you'd never know what to do with one of these things. They were for some very strange computer people. They were intimidating, but there were a ton of them that came out in the late '60s.


Well, what I would do is drive up with a friend of mine, Ellen 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, Radio Shack, I mean Radio Shack did not.

Kevin: Radio Shack. Tandy.

Steven: Sorry, we're way back before personal 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.

Kevin: All you had to do is fill out this card.

Steven: 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. I would figure out to use... oh my gosh... if you need an inverter, why add a whole chip with inverters? I have a spare register left over on another chip and a register actually can be used as an inverter. So I would use parts not for what they were intended but they did the job. I needed to design my circuit with the fewest parts. So it became interesting; it became more and more challenging. I had a real competition every weekend with myself. How can I do a better job yet? By the end of high school I knew I was very good because my designs were like half as many chips as the companies were using.

Kevin: How many years were you doing this in high school? You usually go to high school for three years...

Steven: Actually, it was only my last year of high school - my senior year of high school - and pretty much my first year of college I was doing the same thing. It was so fun, but when you are competing against yourself there's no limit that stops you. You don't ever get a grade. Also, you don't get any rewards that people can see. Nobody in the school knew I was doing this.

Kevin: How about friends...

Steven: I didn't have any friends, except for one - that Allan Baum guy. He knew the computers, too. We shared a lot over the years. As a matter of fact, almost everything major I did in my life, everything important including Hewlett Packard calculators and Apple computers, he had a good bit of fingerprint in.


One friend, no teachers, not even my parents knew I was doing this. I didn't share it with anyone. I'd go in my room, close the door, and do it quietly. I did not get a grade for it, because everyone would see my grade. I didn't get some fancy clothes that people could see. I didn't get a fancy title. I didn't get awards from the school. I didn't get a yacht - no yachts, no mansions.

Kevin: It's all about self-satisfaction. How about your dad? Didn't you share it with your dad, since he was an engineer?

Steven: You know what? I told my dad that I was designing these computers, but, you see, he was not really a computer designer. I'm not sure that he knew that what I was designing was real and complete and would work. I never really showed him any one of my designs - Look, here's these gates, and these registers do that and that. He designed a different kind of circuitry - analog, and I was doing digital.

Kevin: Ah, right.

Steven: And that's a big enough separation, but I didn't really share it because I didn't really know that what I was doing was things that people do. I thought it was something I wanted to do.

Kevin: It was more of your hobby than really anything else at the time.

Steven: Exactly. It was the hobby, your pastime, what you do when you don't have to do something else you chose to do that. And it was not just a hobby. It was my fun; it was my fun in life.

Kevin: Now with going through designing devices with as few chips as possible, what's the most proud, what are you most proud of? What accomplishment? What were you able to design with as few chips?

Steven: Well back in those days, something really...

Kevin: Yeah, when you were young.

Steven: This was another accident. I ran into so many accidents that taught me electronics and computer design. Boy, I'll tell you. I designed a, well the house intercom stuff. I was so proud of my little console that could buzz all my different friends and light up their rooms and all this stuff. I took so much care with carefully colored pens and pencils to draw over and over. If there was one slight imperfection, I would redraw it in ink. It's kind of funny, because even through all the Apple stuff, I designed everything of the Apple stuff -- and I wrote every program -- only in ink, never pencil.


It became a style of forcing yourself to be very, very accurate, just like typing at high speed in the days of typewriters, when you didn't have a delete key.


So, by accident, I ordered one day -- the Data General Nova computer had come out -- and I got their manual. I looked at the design of that computer one weekend and it came out to they had a very strange "instruction set" it's called. A very weird approach compared to all the others. And what came out of it was the computer took half as many chips for as good a computer.

Kevin: Wow, that's incredible. Well, Steve, we've got to go to break real quick and we'll be right back and we'll talk little bit more about your life before Apple computer. We're talking with Steve Wozniak here on Coast to Coast AM. I'm Kevin Mitnick filling in for Art Bell and we'll be back with you in a moment.


Hi. I'm Kevin Mitnick, filling in for Art Bell, and we're here in the studio with Steve Wozniak, cofounder and inventor of Apple Computer. Steve, right before we went to break or actually, during the break, you wanted to talk a little bit about the Nova.

Steven: Well, yeah. When I went down and designed this Nova computer, it took half as many chips as all the other mini computers I was designing in those days and they all were about equal to how they could process data. So, I'm thinking, "Why did it take so many fewer chips?" and the real reason was the architecture of the computer matched the parts that were available. If you were to think of a house, and you designed your house around the sizes of lumber that are available and some certain sizes and shapes and devices, you could design a house very efficiently. But you'd have to know both ends of the story: the components that are available -- the lumber that's available -- and be a good architect of a house design.


So, I learned so much from that Nova computer that I applied for the rest of my life. Which is if you know the chips very well, and you think about it in that term and try to design around them rather than defining a computer -- here's what it'll do -- now I'll figure out how to do it with chips. You do the reverse. You say, knowing what chips are available, I'll take that into account. Now, I had years and years of experience with these chips, so I knew how to do that. But that was my style forever in computers.

Kevin: So, if you look at the method that you didn't use where you're looking at the computer first, that's kind of like locking you into the box. If you look at the... going from the chips out, it's pretty much...

Steven: Making things with very few parts. I always grew up with this desire for simplicity. And I would tell people I wanted to be lazy. The fewer parts I used, the fewer parts I have to hook up.

Kevin: [chuckle] That's very true. So tell me about your college life.

Steven: Well, y'know what, most people would say OK, I had all eight hundreds on my math and science SATs, and they'd say oh, you'd apply to schools like MIT. Well I flew out with some friends, first time ever out of California, to visit the University of Colorado, and the weekend we went, it snowed. And I walked around in snow for two days, and I said... We built snowmen, we threw snowballs... I had never been in snow in my life. So that was the only college I'd apply to. And I was real lucky that both my parents didn't pressure me in this way, not very much, and they both let me follow my heart. So, I went to the University of Colorado. Now back in 1968, there were probably very few colleges with computer curricula for undergraduates. So, it was a grad course to even take one computer class. Since I was a freshman in engineering, I was allowed to and I took the class and got an A Plus in it.


But 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. But I did have a great year there, and I put my technology to good use, because one of the things about electronics is you can build things other people don't understand or don't know could be designed, and that lets you play tricks. And I was always a good prankster. I always loved the fun, to combine fun with what you were doing, so that was the year I built a TV jammer, a device that would fuzz up the TV picture a little, and if a friend pretended like he hit the TV, I'd make the picture go good, and everyone thought, "Oh, hitting the TV makes it go good," so for weeks they would station someone next to the TV to hit it, or tune the fine tuning control... It would go good and bad, and they started figuring out that... I started playing with their bodies, like you'd play with rats. Where you moved your body made the TV work or not work, and one time I got a guy to hold his hand on the middle of the TV screen and have one foot off the floor on a chair for the last half hour of a Mission Impossible. And this is a true story, and they never caught me. Another time I got them to hold the antenna up higher and higher and higher to get the TV to work. They would up standing on a chair, and then it would finally only work if the guy was on his tiptoes.

Kevin: [laughter] My god.

Steven: And so some of the joy that you get... I don't know why that's joyful -- maybe everyone doesn't find it that way -- but you get this kind of joy and it just helps enhance, y'know... Electronics is not only a job but it can be fun.

Kevin: That's hilarious. I love it. Anyway, when we come back from break, I want to talk to you a little bit about Steve Jobs. I want to learn a little bit more about your relationship with him in the younger years. So this is Kevin Mitnick on Coast To Coast AM and we'll be back with you in a moment.


[music]

Kevin: This is Kevin Mitnick, filling in for Art Bell, and I have Steven Wozniak in the studio. We're talking about his life before Apple Computer. Steve, I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley about two years ago. How true is that movie? It kind of portrayed the relationship of you and Steve Jobs with Apple computer?

Steven: I get asked that a lot and it's very easy to say it's extremely true or it's extremely false. Anybody near the situations could say either and Ill tell you, every single scene in that movie actually happened. And actually had the meaning the movie gave it. Also the top personalities, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, even myself, were very much on target, the sort of things we would have said.


The other personalities were so poorly implemented and events were shown at different places in time a little. They had to create every event fictionally that had the meaning that it had really happened when it happened and a lot of the lines that were said in there, the extreme ones, were true. The ones that really mattered were true. But the story they built around it, you can't duplicate things when there's no written records of it. They didn't discuss it with any of us principals before they did the movie either. They did it all from research, so they'd only get the research on a few people. But, boy, I'll tell you, I was shocked watching it. I was not going to watch it, because I don't like to read Apple books or watch Apple stories, but my wife wanted to watch it. It caught my attention from the first, especially when I'm sitting there running through the tear gas with a blue box at Berkeley. And I said, "My God, that's how it was!"

Kevin: So, how was your relationship with Steve Jobs in the earlier years, were you like best friends?

Steven: Yeah. Yeah. Actually, we didn't know each other that many years, even before Apple. You'd be surprised. But it was around my second year of college. I took a year off to work for a year to earn money for my third year of college.


And while I was working, an executive got me the chips to finally build one of these computers I was designing on paper. I built the computer down the street and we soldered it together down at my friend Bill Fernandez' house. Bill said, "There's this guy that went to our high school that you should meet, Steve Jobs." He likes electronics and he likes pranks like you do."


So as I remember, Steve came right over to the house that day. Right outside the garage, where we've got our new little computer we're working on -- we called it the Cream Soda Computer -- Steve and I started sizing each other up. Not with our electronics knowledge right away, but with the pranks we'd done in high school.


Then, after the pranks, we started getting into electronics, and how much we knew about what types of chips, and counters and how to hook them together, and stuff. I was ahead of Steve in that area, being a designer and a creator, but he still had a lot more technical knowledge than almost anyone you'd find in high school. And we just became really good friends.


We also liked talking about life and important things. He was into Eastern religions and very much a hippie type, and although I wasn't -- my feet were really on the ground and I'm always going to be an in-the-middle type of person -- I really did get influenced by how should you live your life and these kind of thoughts that you have with yourself, and probably everyone does about the end of high school when you're around 20 years old. You know, what's important in life. And Bob Dylan music had struck us both as just very important words that had very important meanings to us, the way that we interpreted them.


And the Beatles' music was the most popular music of all time, forever, but it was just more juicy and pop and nice and simple to listen to and fun, good music. But Bob Dylan was writing about serious subjects and trying to really stimulate parts of your brain. So, that was another thing that drew us very close together. And we'd go to concerts together and eat together, and were just real close friends.

Kevin: Yeah, we'll have to get to it later in the show about the US Festival. Did he actually attend the US Festival, which, I guess it was several groups that got together and kind of like a...

Steven: Sure, the US Festival of 1982 and 1983 were two big, big concerts I put together near San Bernardino, and we had a million attendants over three days at each one.

Kevin: Wow.

Steven: This was a huge, huge show, with tons of huge headliners. I don't recall if Steve actually came to the US Festival. A lot of my friends did. But this was post-Apple - that was post-Apple. It was a later point in time. Steve and I weren't that close anymore, like everyday friends.

Kevin: Right. Was he like a geek and a nerd, and really technically astute? Or was he more - because these movies, and what I read in the press and stuff like that, portray him more like a marketing genius.

Steven: He was a geek and a nerd in the sense that he was an outsider. He did know electronics when he was in high school. Now, when it came time to start Apple, I think the reason he shied away from technology and really being into that, is that he never wrote a program. See, he did the half of it. He had done some hardware. He could understand it, he could look at somebody else's diagrams and even add a part here and there, modify things, move something around, maybe fix a problem. But he hadn't been given the opportunity to design things himself, and he had not written software. And I think he felt - especially in the shadow of my own abilities, being so great - that he just felt like he never had a role in that end of it, that he took over marketing. But a lot of marketing, or running a company - it has a technical end of, A: knowing how to understand people that are describing new technologies, new parts that you might want to build with or what you might want to do, and what's possible and what makes sense to people. He just has a really good head for just the whole sense of the whole picture even if he hasn't programmed or really designed things himself.

Kevin: Right. Interesting. I want to go back into the college days and the mischievous years with Steve. Like, I remember reading on your website -- I believe it's www.woz.org -- and it talked about the secrets of the blue box. And what the blue box is, for those that don't know, it was a device that emitted certain types of tones that could control telephone equipment. So, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Steven: This was an amazing, amazing, amazing part of my life. It lasted one year, my third year of college. After I worked a year, I earned the money to go to Berkeley for my third year of college. I loved taking four graduate computer courses all in the same classroom, two classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, two on Mondays and Wednesdays. They were all in the same room in Cory Hall and I sat in the same seat for each of them and none of my classes started before noon. I'll never forget that year. And Steve and I were best friends.


Like, the day before school was starting, I think it was a Sunday at my parents' house, I read an article in Esquire Magazine called "fiction" about these devices that do what you said, put some tones into any normal phone and make calls anywhere in the world. And that there's a group of engineers that are smarter than the phone company engineers, driving around the country setting up networks, trying to fix problems in Ma Bell, analyzing it. And they were like hackers exploring but setting up their own networks that were better than Ma Bell's.


I envisioned vans full of racks of computer equipment and everything, and the lead guy was Captain Crunch. I called Steve Jobs up halfway through the article and started reading it to him, and I said, "Steve, there's something wrong. This doesn't sound like fiction, it sounds too real." It turns out that every word in that article was totally truthful, exactly what the people had said, exactly how they say it. Every detail in there was 100% exact, but it was called fiction, because who would believe it was possible.


Steve and I started questioning, "Is it fiction?" That same day, we went down to Slack, we went to the technical library, we found a book that verified some of the data in the article and now we knew the whole list of what tones cause what effects in the phone system.

Kevin: Those were the multi-frequency tones.

Steven: Right, the multi-frequency tones called MF, and we tried to build a quick blue box that would make a free phone call. We didn't quite succeed right then. We bought some parts at Sunnyvale Electronics for a little analog oscillator, but it kind of wavered in its tone -- pitch -- just too much to ever work. We worked and worked and didn't get a call that day.


I eventually designed a digital one and, man, I was so proud of it. I did things in that digital design, with parts having three purposes instead of just two, when normal people would use them for one purpose. And the blue box finally worked and made a call. We quickly rushed up to the dorm, because we had told our parents what we were doing. We had told them all about blue boxes, because it was such an interesting story. These guys sat out there and clamped into pay phones and started setting up networks, and dialing calls around the world to the next phone over, and stuff like this.


Our parents knew we were excited about it. I didn't like holding things back from my parents, but they said, "Don't use our phone." So we went up to the dorm and from then on, we used the dorm phone. I had another philosophy that I would pay for my calls to my relatives, to my family; I would pay the cost of my phone and I would only use the blue box to explore the world and see what countries I could get to, how I could talk operators into transferring calls around the world, and so on. We pulled these tricks for fun.

Kevin: And I heard a rumor that one of those tricks was to actually call the Pope?

Steven: Yeah. What happened was, I designed this great blue box, and we actually met Captain Crunch and he taught us a bunch of codes. Matter of fact, driving home that night, Steve's car broke down -- generator broke down, about midnight or one in the morning. We walked to a pay phone and we tried to use the blue box to call Captain Crunch for a ride home and the operator came back on the line. Steve hung up real quick. He was all scared. He tried the blue box again; the operator came on the line and he was all scared. Then the cops pulled up. They shined their flashlight in the bushes looking for drugs and Steve passed the box to me. I had it in my pocket. The cops felt me up and they said, "What's this?" I said, "Well you push the buttons and it makes tones. It's an electronic music synthesizer." This was the year the Moog synthesizer had come out - the first electronic music synthesizer. The other cop comes over and looks at it, "What's this?" I said, "An electronic music synthesizer." "What's the orange button for?" Steve Jobs said, "It's for calibration." We knew we were dead, we didn't know how much trouble we would get in. They said, "What happened?" We said, "Our car broke down." We got in the cop car behind the cops, this cop leaned over, handed me back the blue box, and said, "A guy named Moog beat you to it."

Kevin: That's a great story. What was the orange button for?

Steven: The orange button put out 2600 cycles per second, a high E note. The second harmonic of the high E string on a guitar will seize a phone line and will hang up a long distance call, and it would seize the equipment that would be listening for little tones, telling the phone company where to dial for you.

Kevin: So, what you do is, you hit the orange button. It would emit this 2600 Hertz tone.

Steven: On a long distance call, you'd click the orange button, and it'd go beep beep and you'd hear a beep. Then you could punch out your own little tones, just like a touch-tone phone, but they were different tones. It would dial. There were codes for how to reach an overseas sender, and then country codes, and the whole works.

Kevin: Was there actually a code - you know how you can call your operator, and you're trying to get hold of your parents or somebody, and the phone is off the hook, and they could pop in on the line?

Steven: Yes, one time Captain Crunch actually showed us. He was famous for discovering the Captain Crunch whistle made that tone that seizes the phone line. One time he taught us a code and I punched it out myself and then I punched out the FBI in San Francisco's phone number, and I popped up listening to them talking about how they were about to go out and arrest this one suspect and what he had done. It was a pretty sensitive call.

Kevin: Wow.

Steven: Yeah. And the newspapers around those times, they had the phone company representative saying, "Such a thing is not possible." Well, I'm sorry, I did it.

Kevin: Well, I'm glad the statute of limitations happens to be over for that one. Was there any other, like, cool things you actually did with the blue box, or was that pretty much it?

Steven: The funny thing is, when Steve Jobs came along, every time I designed something neat he would say, "Let's sell it!" So, we actually sold some door-to-door in the dorms. We had routines for determining if people were cool enough or not safe enough, you know. We'd do demos and call all these countries. We'd say, "Everybody be back at 7:00 tonight in this room that knows somebody in another country." Wed have a ball. We sold one each time. One time we actually, as part of a demo, we said, "Yeah, we could call the Pope." I called Italy inward. I got to Rome inward. I got to the Vatican operator, and told her I'm Henry Kissinger with Richard Nixon in Moscow at the Summit Meeting, and I'd like to speak to the Pope. They said, "Well, its only 5:30 here. Call back in an hour."


So I called back, and I said, "This is Henry Kissinger." I used my voice, my accent. I got to talk to the bishop that was the highest-up bishop that would be the translator, and he said, "You're not Henry Kissinger. I just spoke to Henry Kissinger."

Kevin: Oh, my God!

Steven: So they checked me out. And Captain Crunch later said that I was calling the Pope to make a confession.

Kevin: To make a confession? Yeah, I heard that Captain Crunch actually did this himself, but I think he actually reached the President at the White House.

Steven: I didn't believe him for years and years and years. It was Nixon, and I didn't believe that he had reached the White House. I think it was Nixon. He had tapped into a law, found a couple of numbers that didn't have any explanation that were tappable in the Washington, D.C., area. He listened to one of these, and he heard people, whenever they asked for Olympus, they got to the president. He learned to ask for Olympus. He called one day and said, Olympus, and they put him through to Nixon or whoever the president was. He said, "We have a problem in the bathroom. Were out of toilet paper."

Kevin: Oh, my God. We need more Charmin - more Charmin in the bathroom.

Steven: I actually believe him now. He's told that story enough times with enough realism that, although I doubted it once, I actually believe that's true.

Kevin: Wow. Steve, we have to go to break for a moment, and well be right back. This is Kevin Mitnick filling in for Art Bell on Coast To Coast AM. When we come back from break, were going to continue our conversation with Steve Wozniak.