Wozniak fires up crowd at Maker Faire

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 so when he still hadn't shown up five minutes after he was scheduled on the main stage, 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 took place in a small town south of San Francisco at the 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 towards 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.