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

nights, and I knew why. I'd say, Well, okay. I'd take this tape recorder I had and a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes—Simon & Garfunkel was my big group then—and I'd go over to Rich Zenkere's room and come back much later. I remember one time I was sleeping and he brought in this Mormon girl in the middle of the night. He was really something.
Meanwhile, I'd hang around with other friends I'd made in the dorm. I went to football games. Our mascot was a buffalo named Ralphie (a humiliating name for anyone!), and a bunch of students dressed like cowboys would race him around on the field before the game. Ralphie was a real buffalo. I remember how my friend Rich Zenkere told us that, twenty years earlier, Colorado's main rival back then, the Air Force Academy, managed to kidnap him. And when the Air Force Academy players showed up for the big game they cooked and ate poor Ralphie.
I believed the story at the time, but you never knew about Rich. He took things so lightly and easily, always smiling and joking about the most serious things. He was a little bit dishonest, though. We worked together washing dishes at a girls' dorm, and he ended up getting fired for faking time cards and stuff.
I spent a lot of time in Rich's room with him and his two roommates, Randy and Bud, playing hearts, poker, and bridge. Randy was interesting to me because he was a serious Christian—a born-again Christian—and the other two guys would denigrate him for it. Like he was dumb because of it. But I used to spend a lot of time talking to him about his beliefs. I had never had any kind of religious training whatsoever, so I was impressed when he told me about Christian tilings like "turning the other cheek" and
forgiveness. I definitely became his friend. So anyway, we'd usually play cards late into the night, and I remember thinking, This is just the best year of my life. It was the first time in my life I could decide what to do with my time—what to eat, what to wear, what to say, what classes to take and how many.
And I was meeting all kinds of interesting people. The bridge thing ended up getting huge for me. We started playing it right around finals week, and then it stuck. The four of us played bridge right off the seat of our pants. We didn't have any books or tables in front of us, or anything that normal bridge players use. We just sort of figured out for ourselves what bridge bids worked and which ones didn't. I mean, in my mind, bridge is more sophisticated than other games.
A lot of card games are based on "tricks" where one person puts a card down and the other players follow with their own cards, and the highest-ranking card of the suit of the first card down wins. That's a trick. Now, in hearts, you try to avoid taking certain cards: for example, eveiy heart you win in a trick counts against you. In spades, you have a round of bidding first, betting how many tricks you and your partner—the person across the table from you in a game of four players—will take. If you bet five tricks and get that many, you get fifty points. But if you overbid and don't get as many tricks as you thought you would, you lose that many points. In spades, all of the spades have the special ability to trump the other cards.
But bridge is at the top end. You not only bet how many tricks you can take with your partner, whose hand you cannot see, but you also have to bet which suit will be the trump suit that beats all other suits.
Bridge is such a good balance of strategy and offense and defense. And at the same time, you're looking at your hand and trying to guess what others might have and passing signals for the bidding. You have to play on so many levels at once. We really
started out, like I said, knowing nothing. So we all had fun, since we were all playing at the same level.
But it's funny, we thought we were real bridge players, but we never could've gotten around and competed with real bridge players. A few years later when I was working at