He had a hunch…
[1] When Steve Wozniak was in high school in the mid-1960s, he dreamed of owning a computer. His father told
him that computers cost as much as the down payment on a house. “Then I’ll live in an apartment,” Wozniak said.
Today, Wozniak is widely acknowledged as the engineering genius who made computers affordable and userfriendly.
“The other Steve,” as Wozniak is known, is the reclusive cofounder – along with the more flamboyant Steve
[5] Jobs – of Apple Inc.
Growing up in Sunny-vale, California, the heart of what would become Silicon Valley, Wozniak started tinkering
in fourth grade, encouraged by his father, an aerospace engineer. It was a time when NASA and the race to the moon
regularly made front-page news.
By the mid-1970s, the shy young man in his mid-20s and a crowd of like-minded nerds founded the Homebrew
[10] Computer Club, an association that nurtured some of Silicon Valley’s smartest brains. “People were talking about how
we were going to revolutionize the world,” Wozniak recalls.
Until that point, electronic parts had been too expensive for Wozniak’s budget, so he’d been designing his
computers mainly on paper. But then the prices came down enough so that Wozniak could move his designs from the
drawing board to reality. “I built a very tiny computer. I couldn’t afford a device for display, but I had a TV at home and
[15] purchased a keyboard.”
Members were fascinated by the idea of a device small enough to fit on a desk. One of the members was
Steve Jobs, a close friend of Wozniak’s who said, “Let’s build a PC board that makes the assembly easy”. It was the
start of an extraordinarily productive partnership. Together, they managed to save a few hundred dollars to start their
business. They named the company Apple Computer and called Wozniak’s creation the Apple I.
[20] The large computer companies that were manufacturing main frames scoffed at the idea of personal
computers for ordinary people. But Wozniak and Jobs made it happen. And by then a young fellow named Bill Gates
was designing software for small computers.
Wozniak was just 26 years old when he cofounded Apple. He had the opportunity to attain wealth to a degree
few 30-year-olds could even imagine. But money had never been a motivating force for Wozniak.
[25] Now older, Wozniak looks back on his life and says, “The themes that drove me were the love of engineering,
enabling me to design things that other people could not design, and also the social ramifications of doing good. We
were talking about taking the little guy to a new place where the individual would be as important as the big company.
I got to be a creator.”
(Reader’s Digest, p.75-80, mar. 2007. – Texto adaptado.)
Analise a veracidade (V) ou a falsidade (F) das proposições abaixo, com base no texto.
( ) Wozniak utilizou, na montagem de seu primeiro computador, um televisor que tinha em casa.
( ) Wozniak recebeu ajuda financeira de seu pai para o projeto de construção do computador Apple I.
( ) A notícia da construção do computador foi publicada junto com as manchetes sobre a corrida à Lua.
Assinale a alternativa que preenche corretamente os parênteses, de cima para baixo.
