Steve Jobs

glories of Bob Dylan. “We tracked down this guy in Santa Cruz who put out this newsletter on Dylan,” Jobs said. “Dylan taped all of his concerts, and some of the people around him were not scrupulous, because soon there were tapes all around. Bootlegs of everything. And this guy had them all.”
    Hunting down Dylan tapes soon became a joint venture. “The two of us would go tramping through San Jose and Berkeley and ask about Dylan bootlegs and collect them,” said Wozniak. “We’d buy brochuresof Dylan lyrics and stay up late interpreting them. Dylan’s words struck chords of creative thinking.” Added Jobs, “I had more than a hundred hours, including every concert on the ’65 and ’66 tour,” the one where Dylan went electric. Both of them bought high-end TEAC reel-to-reel tape decks. “I would use mine at a low speed to record many concerts on one tape,” said Wozniak. Jobs matched his obsession: “Instead of big speakers I bought a pair of awesome headphones and would just lie in my bed and listen to that stuff for hours.”
    Jobs had formed a club at Homestead High to put on music-and-light shows and also play pranks. (They once glued a gold-painted toilet seat onto a flower planter.) It was called the Buck Fry Club, a play on the name of the principal. Even though they had already graduated, Wozniak and his friend Allen Baum joined forces with Jobs, at the end of his junior year, to produce a farewell gesture for the departing seniors. Showing off the Homestead campus four decades later, Jobs paused at the scene of the escapade and pointed. “See that balcony? That’s where we did the banner prank that sealed our friendship.” On a big bedsheet Baum had tie-dyed with the school’s green and white colors, they painted a huge hand flipping the middle-finger salute. Baum’s nice Jewish mother helped them draw it and showed them how to do the shading and shadows to make it look more real. “I know what that is,” she snickered. They devised a system of ropes and pulleys so that it could be dramatically lowered as the graduating class marched past the balcony, and they signed it “SWAB JOB,” the initials of Wozniak and Baum combined with part of Jobs’s name. The prank became part of school lore—and got Jobs suspended one more time.
    Another prank involved a pocket device Wozniak built that could emit TV signals. He would take it to a room where a group of people were watching TV, such as in a dorm, and secretly press the button so that the screen would get fuzzy with static. When someone got up and whacked the set, Wozniak would let go of the button and the picture would clear up. Once he had the unsuspecting viewers hopping up and down at his will, he would make things harder. He would keep the picture fuzzy until someone touched the antenna. Eventually he would make people think they had to hold the antenna while standing on one foot or touching the top of the set. Years later, at a keynote presentationwhere he was having his own trouble getting a video to work, Jobs broke from his script and recounted the fun they had with the device. “Woz would have it in his pocket and we’d go into a dorm . . . where a bunch of folks would be, like, watching
Star Trek
, and he’d screw up the TV, and someone would go up to fix it, and just as they had the foot off the ground he would turn it back on, and as they put their foot back on the ground he’d screw it up again.” Contorting himself into a pretzel onstage, Jobs concluded to great laughter, “And within five minutes he would have someone like this.”
    The Blue Box
    The ultimate combination of pranks and electronics—and the escapade that helped to create Apple—was launched one Sunday afternoon when Wozniak read an article in
Esquire
that his mother had left for him on the kitchen table. It was September 1971, and he was about to drive off the next day to Berkeley, his third college. The story, Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box,” described how hackers and phone phreakers had found ways to make long-distance calls for free by replicating the tones that routed signals on the AT&T network. “Halfway through the article, I had to call my best friend, Steve Jobs, and read parts of this long article to him,” Wozniak recalled. He knew that Jobs, then beginning his senior year, was one of the few people who would share his excitement.
    A hero of the piece was John Draper, a hacker known as Captain Crunch because