Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers, he was just a super-nerdy kid who loved to operate HAM radios. In a new video interview detailing the most formative moments in his totally geeky life, Woz explains how he went from tinkering with electronics to teaching himself binary by 5th grade, and then made a machine that played tic-tac-toe in 6th grade.
Woz eventually got so good with machines that he could design a mini-computer in two days. Those skills led to his creation of the Apple II computer, which put his and Steve Jobs’ fledgling company on the map.
Watch as Woz recounts his childhood obsession with computers, during the humble beginnings of Silicon Valley, below:
Note that Woz also punctures the myth of Apple getting its start in a Silicon Valley garage:
“The garage is a myth, it is accurate to say we had a humble start. And when you have a humble start, and you have no money, your friends from high school are the ones doing it with you and you’re in your house. We never once discussed a product in the garage, never conceived of a product, never talked about features of a product in the garage. We did them a lot of other places, but people thought we had a garage with people sitting around in it.”
