Graduation prank
Comment from E-mail
I couldn’t love a machine as much as the passion that was put into building it. I bet you had more fun building that middle finger than you ever did making calculators. Or at least I would like to think you did. That is all I wanted to communicate to you. from one designer to another, or from one human being to another. Passion is a good thing.
Woz
You’re right. Steve Jobs and Allen Baum and myself made it. The graduation was Steve Jobs’ and it was at our high school. We spent 4 nights in a row working out a scheme that wound up with two ramps guiding 2 skates over the edge of a 2-story building right where half of the graduates exited after graduating. The skates pulled the sheet over. Tennis shoes and other things kept the sheet from blowing away. The skates were weighted down. Everything, including the tennis shoes, was tied together so that it couldn’t hit anyone on the head below. 40 lb. Fishing line held the skates at the top of the 2 ramps and ran down the side of the building.
The next morning the sign was down. Steve and I determined that the line had been cut at about waist height. It hadn’t torn. The next year, at Berkeley, I ran into one of the seniors working on another senior prank the last night that we got our sign working. He said that Steve Jobs had told them what we were doing up on the roof and had even shown them where the fishing line was. So they cut it themselves for fun. Too bad, it would have been funny.
We tried another very ambitious graduation prank there the next year but that’s another story.
When you die, I think that your ration of laughs to frowns is the most important thing to judge.