Mr. McCollum. McCollum later recalled of one time when his pupil Steve called up David Hewlett himself, co-founder of HP, to get spare parts for his homework, and even a summer job at HP’s factory. Steve’s entrepreneurial skills showed up early in his life indeed.

At Homestead, Steve befriended Bill Fernandez, a neighbor who shared his interests in electronics. It was Bill who first introduced him to another computer whiz kid, an older guy named Stephen Wozniak, or — as everybody used to call him — Woz. Steve and Woz met in 1969, when they were respectively 14 and 19. At the time, Woz was building a little computer board with Bill Fernandez that they called “the Cream Soda Computer”.

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