Steve Wozniak didn’t know what a microprocessor was when he first saw the Altair at the Homebrew Computer Club. And he was shy, the type of club member who sat in the back row, silent and invisible, while the great plans and accomplishments of others dominated the meetings. Yet within a year this quiet kid was Homebrew’s brightest star, having designed and built an astonishing microprocessor-based computer he called the Apple I, the founding product of Apple Computer, which he started with his friend Steve Jobs.

Wozniak’s sudden success wasn’t a case of spontaneous combustion. He knew nothing about microprocessors because, aside from the Altair, computers of the time didn’t use microprocessors. Otherwise he probably knew computers better than anyone in the room. He had grown up building electronics projects. In high school a teacher introduced him to FORTRAN, and somehow he got his hands on a PDP-8 manual, which he read from cover to cover. He became so obsessed with computers that he spent a year or two continually redesigning the Data General Nova minicomputer, just for the fun of it. Whenever a new integrated circuit appeared he would study the specifications and figure out how to use it to improve the Nova. It is likely that these “paper computers” taught Wozniak more about computers than anything.

In 1970, he and a friend actually built a computer, which they called it the Cream Soda Machine, after their favorite drink. A reporter came out to do a story, but the machine burned up when the power supply malfunctioned. Had that not happened we might have Cream Soda Computer now instead of Apple—though probably not. Apple Computer was Steve Jobs’s passion. Wozniak just wanted to build computers. He has said that he would have been content to stay at Homebrew, impressing his friends with one new design after another.