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20 Steve Jobs

him on a swim team. Although Steve was not naturally athletic,

he was a good swimmer. Despite his skill, he did not fit in here

either. He did not like being part of a team, and he was so intense

about winning that he made the other boys uncomfortable. “He

was pretty much a crybaby. He’d lose a race and go off and cry.

He didn’t quite fit in with everyone else. He wasn’t one of the

guys,”13 Mark Wozniak, Jobs’s former teammate and the brother

of his future partner Steve Wozniak, explains.

Fortunately, Steve did not mind being an outsider. He liked

being seen as different, and he thought of himself as a rebel.

And, he was not completely alone at school. He made friends

with another outsider, Bill Fernandez, who shared his passion

for electronics. Outside of school, Los Altos contained even

more engineers and electronic hobbyists than Mountain View.

Bill already knew many of these people and took Steve into their

garage workshops. They were happy to share their knowledge

and spare electronic parts with the boys. Fernandez explains:

If you grow up in a woodworking community, with all the

tools and professional woodworking around you, and every￾one on the block is talking about woodcarving all the time,

don’t you think the kids will turn out to be good woodwork￾ers? We grew up in a town, on streets, . . . and [working in]

garages where all we had were the tools for electronics. Isn’t

it natural that we ended up being pretty good at it, being

involved with electronics, doing something in that field?14

Meeting Steve Wozniak

In 1968 when Steve was a freshman at Homestead High School,

Bill introduced him to an older boy named Steve Wozniak. Woz,

as he was known, was a college freshman. He loved electronics

and pulling pranks. At the time Woz and Jobs met, the older

boy was trying to build a computer-like device from a plan he

designed on paper. The device was actually no more than a cir￾cuit board to which Woz plugged in connectors and soldered on