At the Homebrew Computer Club, he passed out copies of his original designs. With Steve Jobs, he began working on a commerical model and in 1977, the Apple II made its debut. Three years later, Apple went public. The 30-year-old ''Woz'' was suddenly worth millions and became a symbol of free-wheeling nerd enterprise and ingenuity.

In early 1981, a high performance plane Wozniak was piloting went down and he was seriously injured. After recovering, he took a leave of absence from Apple. He sponsored two large rock concerts -- the U.S. Festivals -- and devoted himself to his growing family, to community projects and to education. Today, in a small office in Los Gatos, he teaches computer skills to local students and advises school districts on how to get wired.

Recently, Wozniak, 46, returned to the Apple fold as an advisor. He spoke with writer Jill Interviewer and student John Interviewer before that announcement.

Wozniak: OK, you have questions, I presume?

Interviewer: What initially got you interested in technology and science? When did you get started?

Wozniak: Around 4th grade, I'd say. I started reading "Tom Swift" books. They were about this young guy who was an engineer who could design anything, and he owned his own company, and he would entrap aliens, and build submarines, and have projects all over the world. It was just the most intriguing world, like the first TV shows you ever watched.

Also, my father was an engineer and he helped to guide me into some science fair projects that were electronics, so my love grew. Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science! Eventually, by 5th grade, I was building very large computer-like science fair projects. In 6th grade, I built one that really was a computer; it played Tic-Tac-Toe.

I was also real bright at mathematics and got my HAM radio license in 6th grade. So, I got an early start. Then I continued throughout the years, building more sophisticated computer projects, eventually designing complete computers and building them through high school and college.

It was all self-done; I didn't ever take a course, didn't ever buy a book on how to do it. Just pieced it together in my own head. I loved doing it, because when we were in elementary school and junior high school and even high school, it was neat to have other friends in electronics down the block. We would run house-to-house wired intercoms and somebody would build a neat little sound maker, and we'd go down to Sunnyvale Electronics and buy the parts. It was neat to grow up with a crowd of electronics kids. That was a big part of my life. That was how we had our fun.

Interviewer: This is a question from my ten year old. He wants to know how you got the idea for the first Apple. Was it hard to make, or are you a genius?

Wozniak: In some parts of life, like mathematics and science, yeah, I was a genius. I would top all the top scores you could ever measure it by. And in designing computers, which had become the love of my life, it was like solving puzzles. I tried to get better and better and better. If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

The first Apple was just a culmination of my whole life. My whole life had been designing computers I could never build. And all of a sudden -- well, for a few years I had gotten out of computers because I worked at Hewlett Packard designing calculators, which is a different kind of computer. And then all of a sudden, I discovered that the prices of some parts called "microprocessors" and "memory chips" had gotten so low, that I could actually afford, with maybe a month's salary (if I saved for a little while) I could afford to design and build my own computer.

When I was in my first year of college, I told my father that I was going to own a 4K computer someday! And he said, 'Yeah, but they cost about as much as a house!' And I said, 'Well then, I'll live in an apartment.'

All the little computer kits that were being touted to hobbyists in 1975 were square or rectangular boxes with non-understandable switches on them, and some wires that could connect to this, and maybe you could get a teletype machine. These things were kind of strange because I'm a normal person who believes in the very middle road and just having a normal life and doing what normal people do.

I had a TV set and a typewriter and that made me think a computer should be laid out like a typewriter with a video screen. I'd learned enough about circuitry in high school electronics to know how to drive a TV and get it to draw - shapes of characters and things. So it's like all these influences came together and out came a product that I knew would be easy to use the way I liked to use a computer at my job at Hewlett Packard, which was to solve engineering problems, and occasionally to solve a puzzle, and also to play games.

Interviewer: Was there a specific moment that you knew that you actually had something revolutionary?

Wozniak:Yes and no. I had designed so many computers in my life that I knew what exceptional things I had done and could do. I had even built a small computer five years before, around 1970.

And it was very equivalent to all the computers that were popping up in '75. What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.

As soon as I had this "Apple One" (except it didn't have a name then), I actually brought it into work and solved some engineering and design problems I was working on, so I knew I had something good.

In those days, there was no idea there was going to be a huge computer market; that they were going to enter everyone's lives so pervasively as they have. At our computer club, we talked about it being a revolution. Computers were going to belong to everyone, and give us power, and free us from the people who owned computers and all that stuff. But, pretty much it was a small time little hobby like HAM radio activity that only went to a very few people that kind of understood all the bits and bytes of computers. And big companies that ran big businesses - IBM, Hewlett Packard, companies like that - sneered at these little products, based on microprocessors.

I had people who started gathering around me, and I was very shocked. They gathered and asked questions like I was the leader of a different technology. I was helping people build their own computers. I would pass out schematics. I went over to friends' houses and sat there, hour after hour, soldering the wires together to make their computers.

Steve Jobs saw this and said: 'Why don't we make a PC board?' Basically it was like a $1,000.00 investment and we'd have to sell fifty to get our money back, because we'd build the boards for $20.00 and sell them for $40.00. And boy, I remember not being sure we'd sell fifty of them at the club. But, you know, Steve thought there were surplus dealers and all that. And then finally he said, "Even if we lose our money, at least we had a company." And we were young back then. And when you think of it that way, you know, obviously we were going to do it. Sure, just to have a company, I'll gamble a few bucks on that. And really, we didn't take a risk - I didn't give up my job; Steve just lived at home with his parents; we didn't change our lifestyle.

I sold my most valuable possession, but I knew that because I worked at Hewlett Packard, I could buy the next model calculator the very next month for a lower price than I sold the older one for!

So we didn't really take a big financial risk or something like that, we just said, hey, this is a neat thing; let's be part of this new, developing industry. And sure enough, one of the most amazing things is, we got this name, "Apple". And Apple started being heard all over the world. We started feeling proud of it.

Interviewer: How did the Apple name come about?

Wozniak:Steve said he had an idea for a name - Apple Computer. He doesn't always let on where ideas come from, or how they come into his head. That was constantly true all the time. We both tried to think of names that were more suggestive or technological words for the name of the company.

The more we thought, the more they all sounded boring compared to Apple. You didn't have to have a real specific reason for choosing a name when you were a little tiny company of two people; you choose any name you want.

Interviewer: I had read somewhere that Steve had just come back from vacation in Washington or something and had been in some apple orchards. Any truth to that?

Wozniak: He did work in an orchard up in the state of Oregon. Maybe it was Washington; I think it was Oregon. It was just my opinion that maybe they had apple trees in their orchards, you know? Maybe that's where the idea popped in. Maybe it was just listening to a Beatles' song.

Interviewer: To a lot of young people, you are a hero and a role model. Who did you look up to?

Wozniak: My 4th and 5th grade teacher was a real inspiration to me - just that she seemed to care about students so much. It was at the time that my other hero, my father, was teaching me the values of education -- why children have to learn to make this a better world than the parents had made and why school is so important to your life. I decided I wanted to be an engineer like my father, and second, I wanted to be a 5th grade teacher. Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

My high school electronics teacher was another hero. He didn't just use a course out of a book. He wrote his own courses. He wrote his own assignments.That's how I run my computer classes now.

And then, in the arts, I'd say Bob Dylan was a hero. Just the way he put words together - such strong meaning in so very few words. It's just like trying to build a very good computer with very few parts.

Interviewer: If you could summarize your life up to now with one word, what would it be and why?

Wozniak: Lucky. Every dream I've ever had in life has come true ten times over. I am just the luckiest person in the world for everything I have. My wife, my Apple successes, from having kept true to some very strong and good values that I developed in myself when I was young

Interviewer: Can you explain some of those values?

Wozniak: Although I never went to church, I was influenced occasionally by stories about Christian things; values like the idea of turning the other cheek. If somebody does something bad to you, you don't fight back. You're still good to them and treat them with love from your heart. Values of caring about the communities I grew up in, the schools that I went to, the cities I lived in; putting proper value on that. Values of respecting other people; not being a criminal or stealing.

I was heavily influenced by individualistic thinking in literature and along the lines of Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

 He would talk about things like civil disobedience and there being kind of ways to justify even things that are considered wrong with there's a payment that you pay; there's a price that you pay for it.

It was a little bit deeper thinking. Get's a lot further in some of the issues in life than just wanting to take an immediate stand. There are so many values; I can't think of them all right now, but all my I life, I can think back to incidences when I came up with, you know, this is the way I should treat a situation or a person. And still, those beliefs are still very strong in me.

Even if you do something that others might consider wrong, you should at least be willing to talk about it and tell your parents what you're doing because you believe it's right. You shouldn't have two people in your head saying two different things because you'll wind up psychologically disturbed and neurotic.

I don't like to solve things with confrontation; I don't like to take strong opinions. When you die, the main judgment of your life is going to be: How happy were you? How many times did you smile? At jokes? Or at anything?

Compared to how many times did you frown? I see a lot of people that get so involved with political issues of the day. They set themselves up in advance for being upset if it goes this way or that way. They are constantly complaining. And so I basically am non-political.

I don't participate in taking strong sides on issues. I also don't like it because it leads to arguments between people.

Interviewer: Do you vote?

Wozniak: Pretty much, no. I did vote a couple of times. Strangely enough, I was even a delegate to a national convention. But not because I have some strong opinions It's just because I was well known and got a phone call and somebody said, 'Would you like to be a delegate?'    Well, who wouldn't?

Interviewer: Yet, you are involved in community things. You seem to have a sense of that.

Wozniak: I try to keep it low key. The communities, the schools that I went to, I've always been strongly supportive of. From elementary schools to colleges, in a lot of ways. And the communities I've lived in, including San Jose.

I used to really appreciate San Jose becoming a more "grand" city; a more beautiful city. I currently live in Los Gatos and everything I do here is very private, but it's huge in the schools here. Schools and computers.

I did a lot of stuff for peace and understanding between the U.S. and the USSR back before the coup and all that. During "peristroika" times. None of that was ever known; nobody wants to report that. The papers don't care about it because people don't care about it.

Interviewer: Here's your uncensored chance to explain.

Wozniak: I established schools and computer schools over there. I contributed to a lot of peace groups and to groups that sent 'normal' Americans to the USSR to meet people, live in their houses and travel and vice versa. I believe that once you understand the people, you find out that all these things you've been taught your whole life about something to fear really isn't there.

I sponsored the first concert in a stadium in the USSR that was ever permitted, with US and Russian rock groups on the same stage. I learned a lot of strange things, like you can't buy a ticket to a concert there.You can only get it from somebody with party connections.

When we went to the Soviet Union, we weren't allowed to travel freely. We had to be in a certain city on a certain date and we had to get permission from the government to go to a different city. That was such a strange way of life.

And then I found out that when a Soviet comes to the United States, they could not travel either. I thought that we should be showing the good side; showing the good way, the good side of the force. And they would see it. And see what we have. And no, they were just as restricted when they came because the State Department plays a tit-for-tat game.

I'd say my contributions to those efforts were over a million dollars. One year, I paid for, I think, 400 Soviets to travel to the US. And these were just normal people. They weren't the high level people who got privileges and pass stays. It was a group that only took like the teachers, not the principals.

Interviewer: Of all these things you've done in your life, what would you most like to be remembered for?

Wozniak: Being a good father. And, I'd like to be remembered for having been a good person who had business success who didn't step on people's toes and who didn't run over them and treat them badly and get into arguments over what's right and wrong. And I'd like to be remembered for having designed some really great computers that helped inspire this whole computer revolution

Interviewer: What do you see as the future of technology?

Wozniak: I think that the hardware but the hardware of computers has just increased so dramatically in the sense that the price for how much for how much computer you get has gone down so much.

Basically, for the same price, you just get one thousand times as much computer as when we started. No question. The software has increased in the size of programs and their complexity, but it really hasn't increased in how well they deal with human beings.

I think that there will come a time when we stop making more on a piece of silicon. Every year, we're able to etch lines a little bit thinner on a piece of silicon due to high level physics and the like. Make the lines on silicon a little bit thinner and the next piece of silicon will have four times as many parts on it for the same price to manufacture.

You look at a computer board these days and there's a thousand times as much computer in it, but it has the same number of chips. And that's what really has spurred the computers to become much more important than they were even when we developed the first Apples.

But eventually, we'll reach some physical limits. We won't be able to make those lines any smaller; etch the traces on silicon any smaller than we do. And all of a sudden, computers are going to wind up being about the same amount of computer as the year before for the same price. And it's going to finally stabilize. It won't be, 'sell the newest hardware, sell the newest hardware, sell the newest hardware.' It will be more like automobiles where it's a lot less stressful in the hardware areas, and that's when we can go back and make the software obey something like a Ten Commandments of Software, which we don't have yet. Starting with things like: computers shall not crash; if programs crash, they shall not crash the operating system; error messages shall be understandable; error messages should guess what you are trying to do and should explain the proper way to do it; should ask you if you want it done for you.

The more a computer becomes like a real person, the more we like it. When a computer speaks in a nice voice and the more human it sounds, the more intriguing it is to a child learning. The more it seems like a mechanical device with a bunch of little squares and click-on boxes and text, the less it is humanistic.

You should be able to think with your head and just sort of look and not knowing very much, spot the correct ways to get the things done you want to. We're going through some big revolutions in recent years called "object-oriented programming" and we're moving away from mouse and menus (M & M) towards drag and drop, where you can drag a file to a printer icon and it prints on that printer.

Interviewer: You work a lot with kids and teach kids. Do you learn a lot from them?

Wozniak: Oh yeah. That's one of the fun areas! It's incredible. Often, they'll discover something in a program that I didn't know was there. Either an easier way to do something; an alternate approach that's really better if you think about it, and they discover it by accident. It's not just because I have kids; it's because I have a class of 30 of them. There's 30 of them and one of me.

There was one kid who said: 'I've got a way to make animation in this program.' I said, 'No, this doesn't do animation.' 'Yeah, but I do it!' And I looked at his screen, and sure enough, he was doing it. And I learned a new technique. I taught it to the whole class!

Interviewer: A lot of people are worried that a lot of minorities and women are kind of getting left behind because the technology industry is a very male dominated field. Do you see that changing in the future?

Wozniak: I worry about that hugely. I think its going the wrong direction and no matter how much we're aware of it, and concerned about it, that there aren't - well, there are small efforts here and there.

I know there's things like the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Jose and there's a group in East Palo Alto that some very good friends of mine have gotten associated with that try to work with kids in poor neighborhoods. And I just really worry that the Internet is going to reach some people and not others.

Interviewer: What are you doing with your life now? Can you explain what you do in this office?

Wozniak: This office is just a place for me to do all of my current charitable activities and everything else. I've got accountants and secretaries to handle everything so I can spend as much time as I can doing what I like to do, which is to work with computers and schools and kids.

I have a classroom in here and sometimes I go down to the schools. We have to do a lot of keeping up to date on computer technology, a lot of computer repairs we do here for the school district and for ourselves.

I have to keep up with the technology to recommend purchases to the school district and to buy equipment for my own classes.

I've contributed something like 12 labs to schools here. I am trying to lead the schools into being a little bit ahead of most of the districts in being wired, the long-distance wiring that basically gives us high speed internet to every school. I help the school district hire other people to set the technology direction of the district and I train staff and I train students. That's what I've been doing for the past five years.

Before that, I used the office just as a place to keep up with the latest in technology. But now, I don't have as fast a computer as my friends.

And I just basically am more concerned with having a good computer, but one that's kind of middle-level that you can teach normal people with, and a normal person could have also. All my friends have the hottest, latest, fanciest sped-up equipment.

But no, no, no, if you play that game, your whole life goes into it. It's like cars. You can get into making cars fancy and faster, and your whole life goes into it. And then you look back and say: Where did the last year go? All I did was add this, and add this, and try to keep it up. For schools and homes, you really just want to buy something that's kind of there and usable, without adding everything in the world to it.

Interviewer: How are the students? Are the girls and boys equal in skill?

Wozniak: In 5th grade, I've always found them very equal in results and interest and enthusiasm. But by 8th grade, it seems to change to where a bunch of boys are just experts and have used the computer every bit of their life. I don't find many of the girls like that. It's almost as if girls want to shun it and in the group dynamic situation, just pretend and not let on to other girls that the computer is really important to them. But that's not totally true. My best student ever -- well, that was probably my son -- but the other one was a girl.

Interviewer: What do you think we as students can do to prepare ourselves for life in the information age?

Wozniak: Being good at computers comes from a lot of time spent with a computer. A lot of hours. There's nobody who just happens to know it real easily. Computers are not simple, no matter what anyone tells you. And the main thing as a teacher that I always think about is how do you motivate students to put in enough hours so they become good at it.

As far as schools getting more into it, the problem comes from school administrators. In the case of the highlight school districts that you hear about, that are doing all sorts of things to show off on the network, they almost always have one person who is wealthy and has made some money in the business and is associated with a school.

But getting the equipment is really just a start. You have to have the ongoing training, support and repair, and people to keep it running. Even our own school district, even with everything that I do, they don't pay enough salaries to really answer computer questions quickly.

Computers are obviously the most important academic tool that we will have. The world has changed. For the rest of our life, from kindergarten on, that's the most important academic tool we'll have. Because it's an academic tool, unlike a car, which is just a living tool, it deserves being taught in school.

Interviewer: If a student wanted to get a job at a high tech company such as Apple or any other, what could that person do to make that a reality?

Wozniak: I've never been involved with running a company. My whole life, I did not want to be a company runner. I just wanted to be a good engineer, wanted to write programs, design computers. I can't really direct people on career paths. That's never been something I'm good at. My suggestion is to work at what you're good at in life, even if it seems like just a pastime or just a hobby or just the sort of thing you do on your own time when there's no reason to do it, when there's no grade or no salary. Eventually, if you're good at it, it will have value.

Don't just do schlock work and go out and party with your friends at night. When you're young, skip the partying. Because if you work hard, and you're very, very good at something when you're young, you'll have a super life, for the rest of your life.

If you do something better than other people, and you just want to do almost the best that a human could do at something, the one thing you like in the world, the one thing you're really good at, then you can walk into these real prestigious companies-- including Apple or other high tech companies-- you could be the one that they're begging for.

Interviewer: Your life has been mythologized. Is there anything about the myth of Steve Wozniak that you would like to correct?

Wozniak: One of the things that I find strange is that I have to read the newspaper to find out who I am, so I can be that person. Little errors in reporting just get carried out; history gets written. One major national newspaper writes something, the opposite of what you said, and that becomes history in books. And you see it in books. And then it's repeated by the other books. All the history of all time must have been written with these errors.

 I wonder why, when I just did kind of normal things-- some good engineering and just what I wanted to do in life-- why everywhere I go, some people think that I'm some kind of hero or a special person.

People want to say, it's one special person in the world that does the good thing. But it's really the body of people and their mass thinking that caused computers to happen. But you always want to pinpoint a few individuals and say this is why. That is dodging the fact that all people, really, were going that way. There was a long development of technology that was leading to what we have today.

Interviewer: Well, maybe they make you a hero because kids need a Tom Swift in their life.

Wozniak: Yeah, that's like it. We all want to build up the few heroes in our life. That's how we are as people. You can't change the human brain.

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