If there's one person who perfectly personifies Maker Faire, it could well be Steve Wozniak.
That's why a standing room-only crowd had gathered to see him speak at the event in California on Saturday afternoon, and when he still hadn't shown up five minutes after he was scheduled on the main stage here, there was some concern.
Not to worry. There was a sudden murmur of excitement as the Apple co-founder and all-around computing hero appeared from the right side of the stage, pulling up on his Segway, rolled to a stop and jumped up on stage.
Wozniak is in fact a veteran of Maker Faire, the bacchanalia of do-it-yourself technology, hacking, fire arts, robots, mad scientists and mad crafters that is taking place in the small town of San Mateo, California, all weekend.
But while Woz last year spent most of the event riding around, playing Segway Polo, he had come this time to fire up those in the audience with romantic and impassioned stories of the power and excitement of mathematics and engineering.
That concept might draw a groan at a lot of gatherings, but at Maker Faire, it was just the right message for a crowd thick with accomplished engineers and hackers, as well as countless budding would-be Wozes.
"This whole fair represents something that was so prominent when I was young," Wozniak began. "Sit down and make something fun."
At a frenetic pace that seemed to be geared toward making up for the lost minutes caused by his late arrival, Woz charged into his speech, fired up about the pure energy that can come — and that he clearly got — from understanding the glory of manipulating machines.
"Those inspirations, when you get a goal," he said, "it's going to carry with you for the rest of your life".
For him, Woz said, the epiphany of electronics and computers came in fifth grade when he discovered a magazine that spelled out a binary world vision in which everything is made out of ones and zeroes.
"In fifth grade, there was this specialness [that came from science]. I just loved learning how to add zeros and ones," Wozniak said. "As a fifth grader, you didn't need higher levels of mathematics."
Wozniak has always been known as a bit of a prankster. And he related what might have been the beginning of that lifestyle.
He said that when he was a kid, he once visited his engineer father's company and found himself charged with flipping a switch that would turn on a bunch of things and start some sort of exciting chain reaction. But he said he grew impatient with waiting for the signal to go, and so he decided to act on his own.
"I went over and flipped the switch," Wozniak recalled. "It was a little early. I guess that was my first prank."
For me, if I could design things and show them to people, I had something I could talk about
Steve Wozniak
Befitting what seemed like the off-the-cuff nature of his talk, Wozniak changed gears rapidly.
He next remembered how, as a school kid, he had not been part of the in-crowd.
"[My friends and I] decided early on that we knew electronics. We were a group," he said. "Of course, that set up apart from the other people at school. You know, they were the 'normal' people."
But Wozniak said that he drew power from his discovery of heavy knowledge of computers, electronics and engineering — power that helped him overcome to some degree his shyness.
"For me, if I could design things and show them to people, I had something I could talk about," he said. "You always feel good about the things you're good at."
And in the end, he said, for him, it all boils down to maths.
"To this day, when I do magic tricks," he explained as an example, "I like to tell people that I'm not a magician, I'm a mathematician."
That means, he said, that while magicians never reveal how they do their tricks, he enjoys explaining how they work.
Although we live in an era when there are computers in just about anything and millions upon millions of people own personal computers, that wasn't always the case. And Wozniak talked about how his passion for computing in the 1960s and 1970s made him sure he needed to have his own computer.
"I told my dad that sometime I would own my own computer," Wozniak said. "He said they cost as much as a house. So I said, 'Well, then I'll live in an apartment.'"
The point, which he expanded on over the laughter of the crowd, was that he was committed to achieving his goal of having such a machine at a time when almost no one could afford to have one.
And that, in turn, led him in the direction which would eventually make him rich: as the engineering mind behind the founding Apple team.
He recalled that in the early days of the fabled Homebrew Computer Club, there were rumours going around that people were going to soon be able to program their own computers, something unheard of at the time. And he recalled a sentiment that was just starting to make the rounds, one that fuels the minds of the thousands of people who make Maker Faire a success.
"They said that the guy who knew how to write computer programs was going to be more important in their company than the CEO," he said.
