Fire in the Valley, 3rd Edition

Jobs and Woz

Woz was fortunate to hook up with an evangelist.

—Regis McKenna, high-tech marketing guru

There were still orchards in Santa Clara Valley.

But by the 1960s it was no longer the largest fruit-producing area in the world. It was starting to transition to urban sprawl as the electronics and semiconductor companies began taking over, and for the son of an engineer in Sunnyvale it was easier to pick up a spare transistor than to find somewhere to pick an apple.

The Prankster

In 1962, an eighth-grade boy in Sunnyvale built an addition-subtraction machine out of a few transistors and some parts. He did all the work himself, soldering wires in the backyard of his suburban home in the heart of what became Silicon Valley. And when ...