But what was Steve Wozniak’s Cal experience really like? We at the Daily Clog sat down with the Wizard of Wozillia himself to find out.

The Daily Californian: Can you tell us a little bit about how you arrived at UC Berkeley? Why did you choose to transfer here for your junior year?

Steve Wozniak: My parents had me apply to the University of California because it was an awful lot less expensive. So I applied. Berkeley really was the school I would have wanted to go to, because it had a reputation for intellectual free-thinking. Civil liberties and the politics and economics of war were being challenged. Freedom of speech was being brought up as a subject. So I really admired Berkeley in that sense. I just wanted to be among great thinkers. So in my third year of college, I transferred into Berkeley.

DC: After your first year at UC Berkeley, you left and founded Apple with Steve Jobs. But you made sure to return to UC Berkeley to finish your degree. Why? Why does a college degree matter to you?

SW: I had done a lot outside of Cal that would have been equivalent to Master’s and PhD projects, but having a symbol to represent these accomplishments is very important. Also, just being able to tell your kids what college you went to is going to encourage them to go to college. And college is just the most fun four years of your life.

DC: Where, in your experience, is the best place for experiencing what it means to be a Golden Bear?

SW: Oh my gosh. The first place that comes to mind is the rallies before the Big Game. As part of Berkeley itself, Sather Gate stands out in my mind as the most prominent feature of the university.

DC: Sproul Plaza has always been a center of campus activity. Any memories, strange encounters or lessons that you learned there?

SW: I often saw musicians sitting down and playing the guitar. I was into that kind of folkish approach. Sometimes, I’d sit down and listen to them — and even skip class for it.

DC: Do you still like the same kind of music? What’s playing on your iTunes right now?

SW: [laughs] Usually something a little bit country. A little bit folk. Ariana Gillis is one of my favorites. Let’s see, I like The Airborne Toxic Event, Train, Counting Crows — oh my gosh — Counting Crows. Right out of Berkeley! I love them so much. We got to meet the guitarist and we go out with him and his girlfriend all the time.

DC: Do you have a favorite song from Counting Crows?

SW: “Round Here,” “Mr. Jones,” … actually, all their songs. They are just so incredible. I actually take most songs I like and go online, read the lyrics and think about them. This kind of thinking is what college is about and it means a lot to me. Music was a big part of my life in learning how to live.

DC: Cool. Other than music, Sproul is known for its demonstrations. Was this true when you were at Cal?

SW: We had sit-downs in those days. But there was one protest where marchers went to Bancroft and Shattuck and smashed every window. We had large demonstrations; the police would show up and start firing tear gas and everyone would run. The cops would be shooting rubber bullets, so the kids in the dorms would love to go looking for them. I kept hoping … to get a picture taken next to a tear gas canister spewing out smoke. But I never achieved that. I never found a rubber bullet either — but thank God I never got a hit by one. Although, one time I was at a payphone on Bancroft and Telegraph and all of a sudden cops pulled up in “blue minis.” They started shooting their guns; the crowd started running but I was trapped in the phone booth, waiting for an operator to get back to me. I was ducking down. The windows were already broken on that pay phone. I was so scared I was going to get hit. But I didn’t. They left me alone. [laughs]

DC: While living in Norton Hall, Unit 3, you describe phone phreaking. Can you tell us a bit more? What experience stands out?

SW: Wow. I discovered, the day before coming to school at Berkeley, this whole idea that you could put little tones into a phone and dial calls anywhere in the world. It was  a bug in the phone system. I was talented enough to build tone makers — I did this with Steve Jobs — and I was excited that we would be able to make a device that would make calls all over the world. We were honest enough to tell our parents what we were doing. They just said not to make any of the calls from their phones. So we would mostly do it from the dorm rooms.

I had read about phone phreaks that were great engineers. They would hook into payphone cables in Arizona and set up worldwide networks. They were smarter than phone company engineers and drove around with vans full of equipment. And oh my gosh, they were just like science fiction heroes — except they were real.

DC: Tell us about the Blue Box. We know it’s a device that you used to make international calls for free, but what did you do with it?

SW: It was never my idea to sell a Blue Box — just to make one to show off. But Steve Jobs said, “Why don’t we sell these to students?” He was always short on money. So we would set up demonstrations in dorms around campus. We would knock on doors until we found someone that looked cool … so, you know, they wouldn’t turn us in. Then we would set up an appointment to come back that night. Usually a group of about 12-20 people would be in the room. I would be the master of ceremonies. I’d tell stories about what phone phreaks have done and what they could do. I’d make a demonstration Blue Box call and we would wind up calling around the world. At every single demo, we sold a Blue Box.

DC: Wow, it sounds like you could do some crazy stuff with the Blue Box. Did you pull any pranks with it?

SW: We called the Pope. I pretended to be Henry Kissinger with Richard Nixon at a summit meeting in Moscow. I said that I wanted to talk to the Pope. I reached the Bishop, who going to be the translator, an hour later — but he had called the real Henry Kissinger. So, I was busted. We didn’t have caller ID in those days.

DC: That’s awesome. Are there any other wild experiences you had because of your phone phreaking hobby?

SW: One day, we had a Blue Box to sell to somebody in the dorms. We stopped at a pizza parlor and demonstrated it to some people there. Then they came up to our car and robbed us of it at gun point. But they left their phone number so that we could call and tell them how to use it. They wanted to pay for it but just didn’t have the money.

DC: Wow, that’s intense.

SW: [laughs] We did a lot of incredible interesting things that people couldn’t believe.

DC: Looking back, what advice would you give graduating seniors?

SW: Don’t expect that right away — even though you’re smarter than someone else — you’re going to stand out and have better ideas and approaches. It takes a while to learn that.

Contact Alex Mabanta at amabanta@dailycal.org.

The post The Clog interviews Steve Wozniak appeared first on The Daily Californian.

We at the Clog absolutely love that so many amazing people have attended our school, so we found five other alumni who are also super influential:

Tom Anderson. Remember when MySpace was actually cool? At some point in our lives, we were all probably addicted to this website before Facebook showed up.Well this guy helped create it … and also served as the president. He graduated from Cal in 1996.

Steve Wozniak. We wrote about this guy earlier this semester and now return to remember why he is so cool. Wozniak is the co-founder of the Apple computer and graduated from Cal in 1986 — enough said.

Earl Warren. All you political buffs are probably familiar with this man. He was the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the governor of California for three terms. He got his B.A. from Cal in 1912 and his Juris Doctor in 1914.

Douglas Englebart. You may not recognize the name of this 1953 alumni (we sure didn’t), but he invented the computer mouse. For that, he deserves some recognition. Despite the fact that touch screens and track pads have pretty much eliminated the mouse, if Englebart hadn’t invented them we might still be in the Dark Ages. 

Jack London. Even though he never finished his degree here at Cal, he still wrote Call of the Wild. Even if you’ve never had to read the book, he’s quite an icon in the Bay Area. There’s even a Jack London Square and a Jack London Park.

Contact Kristen McFadden at kmcfadden@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @kmcfadden7.

The post Cal alumni inspires ‘Argo’: why they (and other Cal grads) rock appeared first on The Daily Californian.

He has his own category on Jeopardy! For $1,000: “Woz was the creator of this ’80s event that brought music fans out to see an all-star lineup”

He competed on Dancing with the Stars. As far as we know, he is the only person who can pull off the cha-cha-cha in a pink feather boa.

He dated Kathy Griffin. Did you know that the ever-naughty female counterpart to Anderson Cooper’s New Year’s Eve Live romanced Woz? Here he is on her show in a bear convention.

He cameoed on Big Bang Theory. And called Sheldon a nerd. Major swag.

He is a third-degree Freemason. National Treasure profiled it. He’s on par with 14 Presidents, Mozart and Bach.

He has four patents, 10 honorary doctorates of engineering and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He’s is listed next to the Wright Brothers, Walt Disney, Edison and Tesla. That’s Berkeley.

He has a street named after him. Woz Way is located in San Jose, the capital of the Silicon Valley

He gave a Game Boy to President H.W. Bush. Woz also scored 702,000 playing Tetris on his Game Boy.

He graduated UC Berkeley in 1986 as an EECS major. That’s not easy to do.

He is a really good friend. We cried when he talked about Steve Jobs too.

Image Source: The DEMO Conference under Creative Commons

The post 10 random facts about Commencement speaker Steve Wozniak appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Wozniak, who graduated in 1986 with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science, is best known as the creator of the Apple I and Apple II computers along with the late Steve Jobs. He is currently the chief scientist of Fusion-io, a data storage company.

Woz, as he is commonly called, will be speaking at California Memorial Stadium on Saturday, May 18, “rain or shine,” according to the invitation.

Since his enormous success at Apple, Wozniak has been involved in a number of philanthropic activities, especially related to education in his local community.

UC Berkeley’s Wozniak Lounge in Soda Hall bears his name.

Sara Grossman is a news editor. Contact her at sgrossman@dailycal.org.

The post Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak named keynote speaker of 2013 Commencement appeared first on The Daily Californian.

“I was one of maybe five students on my dorm floor to have my own computer,” he said, “so my room, as a result, was a hub of activity, as my floormates clamored to finish up their term papers, or, more commonly, to play what in those days qualified as awesome video games.”

It seems impossible for us now — with projectors in nearly every classroom, multiple computing facilities within reach, and bSpace — to fathom this world in which personal computers were so scarce. Visions of dystopian landscapes emerge. They are barren, barbaric landscapes where people had to walk, check out and — it pains me to say — turn pages in a book to find out what exactly was the Jugurthine War (note: an old war, apparently).

This sad scene may have been the case for other, less fortunate schools. However, when it comes to technology, UC Berkeley has nearly always been at the forefront of innovation in education.

Flush with federal funding after World War II, UC Berkeley commenced an unprecedented rush of computer science development that hasn’t ceased since. The computer mouse, digital libraries, the Apple desktop computer, course webcasts and online databases can all be traced back to UC Berkeley faculty. Finished in 1951, the California Digital Computer, or CALDIC, was one of the first inexpensive and accessible computers for its day. The only catch: it consisted of nearly a thousand vacuum tubes. But, this combination of low cost and high efficiency has been the overarching trend of Berkeley innovation.

UC Berkeley electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart worked with the men who created the CALDIC, and he did them one better in 1963 by inventing the computer mouse that has now become the staple, computer accessory.  By the time former campus electrical engineering and computer science student Steve Wozniak helped develop the Apple personal computer in the early 1980s, technology had become a full part of the average students’ lifestyle.

According to the Pew Internet Project, a 2010 survey of computer-usage among college students, 88 percent of undergraduate college students own a laptop computer. And, according to a Group Logic Inc. survey from the same year, more and more of those laptops are Macs.

It’s hardly a surprising statistic given the high visibility of laptops in classrooms. But, it’s in the classroom where the significant changes can be seen. When Noreña was a student, though, he only used that “large, boxy”  computer outside of the classroom.

“I do not recall any of (my professors) using any technology whatsoever,” he said.

This phase did not last long. In 1995, Berkeley was one of the first American universities to offer video and audio of courses online with the Berkeley Internet Broadcasting System, now known as Berkeley Webcast. A year later, the campus became one of the first sites in the United States to install SunSITE — a digital catalog of the millions of books held in UC Berkeley’s 10 plus libraries.

Now, as a campus professor of history, Noreña’s utilization of several digital outlets, such as bSpace and PowerPoint presentations to showcase the several “slideshows, maps, images, texts and key terms” that might be overwhelming without the accompanying visual element.

In addition, for his United States history survey course this fall, associate professor Brian Delay decided to participate in a nationwide e-book pilot program. For her international and area studies class, lecturer Tara Graham began using Twitter as a means to guide student discussion in class.

It’s a brave and virtual new world, with seemingly endless possibilities for enhanced interaction and communication within the academic atmosphere. Already, individual intellectuals such as Howard Rheingold, an adjunct professor in UC Berkeley’s School of Information, have founded their own online universities, complete with video lessons and online quizzes.

Whether developments like these are positive or negative, the future is unclear. But, as computer science student Aatash Parikh remarked, “The prominence of technology in our lives is always going to be increasing, so we need to be aware of the negative implications while taking advantage of all the positives.”

The post A look back at UC Berkeley’s computer evolution appeared first on The Daily Californian.