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supposed to see or even be interested in because it was targeted to high-level government engineers.
After that, I was addicted. I started reading and rereading this journal and others my dad had. I remember one day finding an article on Boolean algebra. That's the type of mathematics computers use. And I learned about De Morgan's Theorem, which is what Boolean algebra is based on. And that's how logic became the heart of my existence, there in the fifth grade. I was learning that formula and figuring out how to use it so I could swap ANDs and ORs in logic equations. In logic, for instance, you might ask if a word starts and ends with a vowel. Well, then the formula would be an AND—there's a vowel at the beginning and a vowel at the end. That's AND in Boolean algebra. But what about a word that starts with a vowel but doesn't end with one, or the other way around, but not both? That's an OR statement in Boolean algebra.
And in this journal they had diagrams of AND gates and OR gates and I copied them, learning to draw them the standard way.
For instance, a half-moon shape with a dot in the middle represents an AND gate. If it has a plus sign in the middle instead of a dot, it's an OR gate. Then I learned how to draw a picture that represented an inverter—it's a triangle pointing to the right with a little tiny circle at the very end of its tip. What's funny is, I use these very same symbols when I design electronics to this day,
and I learned all this in my room with these journals in front of me on my bed in fifth grade.
Here's what was amazing to me back then. I thought to myself: Hey, at my current level of fifth-grade math, I am able to learn the math used by a computer—De Morgan's Theorem, Boolean algebra. I mean, anyone could learn Boolean algebra and they wouldn't even need a higher level of math than I already had in fifth grade. Computers were kind of simple, I discovered. And that blew me away. Computers—which in my opinion were the most incredible things in the world, the most advanced technology there was, way above the head, above the understanding, of almost everyone— were so simple a fifth grader like me could understand them! I loved that. I decided then that I wanted to do logic and computers for fun. I wasn't sure if that was even possible.
To say you wanted to play with computers in those days, well, that was so remote. It was like saying you wanted to be an astronaut. It was 1961; there weren't even real astronauts yet! The odds of being one seemed really slim. But logic was different. I could see that it just came so easily for me. And it always would.
So that's how computers became the heart of my life straight through. As a matter of fact, computer logic was something I eventually became better at than probably any other human alive. (I can't be sure of that, of course. Maybe there were really high- up people in colleges who were as good at applying De Morgan's Theorem in their heads.) But by the time I designed the first Apple computer, logic was my life. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I just loved logic and everything about it, even back then.
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I was in elementary school and junior high at a time when science projects were cool—when you weren't strange if you did one, and you got celebrated if you won an award. So I got celebrated a lot. My science fair projects are some of the things I am still proudest of. We're talking third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and
eighth grades here. (For some reason, I didn't enter a project in the seventh grade.) And these projects were hard, harder than kids many grades ahead of me could ever pull off, and I knew it even then. I put some science projects together that, for that audience of kids and judges, just blew their minds. I was like a hero, and I won all kinds of awards, including top honors at the Bay Area Science Fair.
The science fairs gave me the feeling of what I was and could be in the world, just by entering something good in a science