Steve Wozniak, son of a Lockheed engineer, grew up in Sunnyvale where he dreamed of having his own computer. The rest is Silicon Valley history and legend.

At the Homebrew Computer Club he passed out copies of his original designs. With Steve Jobs
he began working on a commerical model and in 1977 the Apple II made its debut. Three years later Apple went public. The 30-year-old ''Woz'' was suddenly worth millions and became a symbol of free-wheeling nerd enterprise and ingenuity.

In early 1981 a high performance plane Wozniak was piloting went down and he was seriously injured. After recovering, he took a leave of absence from Apple. He devoted himself to his growing family, to community projects and to education. Today, in a small office in Los Gatos, he teaches computer skills to local students and advises school districts on how to get wired.

Wozniak:

"My 4th and 5th grade teacher was a real inspiration to me—just that she seemed to care about students so much. It was at the time that my other hero, my father, was teaching me the values of education—why children have to learn to make this a better world than the parents had made and why school is so important to your life.

"I decided I wanted to be an engineer like my father and second, I wanted to be a fifth grade teacher. Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for—the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being an engineer—gave him an ability to invent solutions to problems. He's always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.

" . . . My high school electronics teacher was another hero. He didn't just use a course out of a book. He wrote his own courses. He wrote his own assignments. That's how I run my computer classes now. "

". . . I am the mother of media and of communication, for communication is at the flow of the nexus of the figure eight and it is by the mercy of the technology of the Mother that all of this is the instrument in our hands."

"Today we are on the verge of making another great technological leap.

"Imagine a world without television or computers, a world in which man had never traveled to the moon or launched a satellite, a world where man had not split the atom or unlocked the DNA code, a world without the Internet!

"These scientific and technological advances have taken place during the last complete revolution of Uranus. It is from this base of knowledge that we will launch the next revolution in science—in microelectronics and microbiology, in computer science, information science, military science and communications technology.

"The scientific breakthroughs of the next 12 years—and the next 200 years—could greatly improve the quality of life for all. They could provide greater wealth and leisure, greater health and longer life. They could help us launch a real revolution in education.

"These new discoveries will give us new powers. But we will need a commensurate spiritual revolution so that we will use these powers wisely and well. In our lifetime, we will have to decide where to draw the line."