Read Online iWoz by Steve Wozniak, Gina Smith - Free Book Online

with. So this was amazing! All of a sudden we were outside throwing snowballs at each other. This was a whole new adventure for me.
For some weird reason, we had shown up over Thanksgiving weekend. I guess we thought they'd have tours on a holiday, but of course they didn't. So we just kind of walked around the empty campus for a couple of days. At one point we actually found an engineering building and there was a student inside. He walked us around the halls and showed us where the different departments were. He showed us all the engineering stuff and talked to us about the kinds of engineering projects going on at Colorado.
Walking through the snow those two days, I was just so enamored of the place. The brick buildings were beautiful. Their reddish color looked so impressive up against the backdrop of the Flatiron Mountains. It was a college out in the middle of nowhere—it was about a mile walk to the city.
I thought, Tliis is just so beautiful. It's so wonderful to walk around this campus in the snow. And it was that snow that made me decide this was the college I was going to be attending. Its entrance requirements were low compared to my grades and SAT scores—I had perfect 800 scores on all my science and math entrance tests except for chemistry, where I only got a 770. But this was the college I was going to go to. The snow made me decide. I made the final decision right then and there.
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The only problem was, my dad said Colorado would be too expensive. Next to some state university in New England, it charged the second-highest tuition in the country for out-of- state students.
But we finally worked out a deal. He said I could go to Colorado for my freshman year and then to De Anza Community
College, which was close to home, for my sophomore year. After that, I would transfer to the University of California at Berkeley for my junior year, where tuition would be much, much cheaper. I also applied to Berkeley—my parents forced me to—and I sent in my application on the very last day you could.
I was accepted at Colorado and my parents paid everything in advance that summer, including the dorm fees and the tuition fees. But then my dad kept imploring me to go to De Anza, it was so much closer to home and cheaper. And he could afford, then, to give me a car.
So I went down to register at De Anza and saw that the classes for chemistry, physics, and calculus were all full. What? I couldn't believe it. Here I was—the star science and math student at my high school and all set to be an engineer—and the three most important courses I needed were locked out.
It was horrible. I called the chemistry teacher on the phone, who said if I showed up I could probably get in, but I couldn't shake this terrible feeling that my future was shutting down. I could see it shutting down right in front of me. I felt my whole academic life was going to be messed up right from the start. And it was right then that I changed my mind, and decided to see if it was still possible to go to Colorado.
School had already started there, but after a couple of calls I found out I could still go. I had everything set up, airplane flight schedule and everything. I bought the tickets, went down to San Jose Airport, and flew into Colorado the next day. Just in time for the third day of classes.
I remember arriving on campus that fall and thinking it was so beautiful, early September in Colorado. The leaves were yellow and orange and gold, and I felt like I was just so lucky.
My roommate was Mike. The first thing I noticed when I walked into the dorm room with my bags was that he'd posted up about twenty foldout Playboy centerfolds on the walls.
Wow, that was different! But I thought Mike was a neat guy, and I used to like listening to his stories of life as a military brat, about his high school in Germany and all the experiences he had. He was very sexually advanced, I thought. Sometimes he'd tell me he wanted the room alone on certain