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local research libraries. They then started manufacturing blue boxes in sizeable quantities. To keep their identities secret they adopted aliases: Steve Jobs, the effusive, glib salesman of the two, became Berkeley Blue; Steve Wozniak, the consummate technician, became - as far as he can remember - Oak Toebark. The company they founded in Jobs's parents' garage was to become Apple Computers.

The duo's garage blue-box factory began to manufacture MF-ers on nearly an assembly-line basis. Jobs, whose sales ability was apparent even then, managed to find buyers who would purchase up to ten at a time. In interviews given since, they have estimated that they probably sold a couple hundred of the devices. Under California law at the time, selling blue boxes was perfectly legal, although using them was an offence. They got close to getting caught only once, when they were approached by the Highway Patrol while using one of their own blue boxes at a telephone booth. They weren't arrested - but only because the patrolman didn't recognize the strange device they had with them.

The two Steves had grown up in the area around Los Altos, part of that stretch of Santa Clara County between San Francisco and San José that would later become known as Silicon Valley. They had both been brought up surrounded by the ideas and technology that were to transform the area: Wozniak's father was an electronics engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, and helped his son design logic circuits. When the two boys first met, Jobs was particularly impressed that 'Woz' had already built a computer that had won the top prize at the Bay Area science fair.

It has been said that Jobs and Wozniak were the perfect team, and that without Jobs, the entrepreneur, Woz would never have outgrown Homebrew. Wozniak was thought to be, at heart, a hacker and a phreaker. At the Club he liked to swap stories with Draper, and he once tried to phreak a call to the Pope by pretending to be Henry Kissinger. Before a Vatican official caught on, he had almost succeeded in getting through. Jobs, on the other hand, was first and foremost a businessman. He needed Wozniak to design the products - the blue boxes, the computers - for him to sell.

The Apple computer happened almost by accident. Had he had enough money, Woz would have been happy to go out and buy a

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