I was fortunate enough to meet Apple’s Steve “Woz” Wozniak yesterday at a banquet hosted at Qwest Convention Center. This event was hosted by The AIM Institute of Omaha and AITPOmaha, organizers of Infotec). It was a coincidence my son won a programming competition sponsored by The AIM Institute and I got invited to join this banquet where Steve Wozniak was a guest speaker.
It is amazing what sixteen year olds can achieve today. My son, along with his friend created a PHP / MySQL / Apache based Online Music Store with an AJAX shopping cart. However after hearing Steve Wozniak for a spell-binding hour and half, I realized that kids achieved amazing things back when Internet existed in the form of ARPANET as they achieve now.
It was nostalgic to hear Steve Wozniak narrate his experiences with electronics and it took me down the memory lane when I was doing my under-graduate studies and scouring the library to find electronic books and circuits to create musical dancing lights, play with logic gates and running down to Bombay’s only electronic marketplace to buy right electronic parts and getting right transformers manufactured.
While Steve Woz created his Apple computer and I created my musical dancing lights, I can imagine his satisfaction of creating his own product. In his long, one hour and half speech, his opening lines were simple and same time impressive-”The technology is something that should ease your work, give you some leisure time and reduce your stress“. Then he went on to narrate, how he in his fifth and subsequent grades participated in Science fair projects with increasingly complex electronic circuits and how his love for electronics increased after joining college, at time play pranks with his TV jammer and other times exhaust computer department’s budget. His love for electronics took him to his dream company Hewlett Packard (coincidentally the same company where I worked for 9 long years as an iSeries Developer). His narration further included his meeting with Steve Jobs and subsequent formation of Apple Computers as a result of entrepreneurial streak of both Steves, and the rest is history.
After banquet, I got an opportunity to talk to this down-to-earth great human being. He was gracious enough to grant my hesitant request to autograph my HP laptop with his famous “Woz” signature.
