Steve Jobs and Woz are well known to have been involved with the use of blue boxes while at college. These devices allowed anyone to make free calls by generating a tone that put payphones into free mode.
“It was all about finding flaws in phone system,” he said.
“We had fun. We called the Hilton in Paris just because we could and tried to get through to the Vatican in Italy. Having fun with a device is a bigger motivation than a pay check for some people.”
This attitude towards devices, and the motivation, helped him in his early career with Apple he said.
The first year CES allowed personal computers Apple was going to be there, with Steve Jobs and two other staff going. Woz had never left California and persuaded Jobs that if he could get a floppy drive operational he would get to go too. It took him two weeks of near-continuous work but he finished it the day before the show.
This continues today with his obsession with his Toyota Prius. He's had nine so far he said and would continue to buy them despite the current problems with the car.
He said he'd found a fault in the car months ago, whereby if you put the cruise control on at just the right speed the car would accelerate continuously. He tried to alert Toyota but had no luck convincing them he said.
“We who work in computing know there are a lot of little errors that can occur,” he said.
“I've also had other problems but in almost every case there's a simple fix. I stop the car, turn it off and on again and everything works, it's just like any other gadget.”