They were an unusual pair who shared a love of electronics. Woz was the tech genius and Jobs the brash idea man. They’d first bonded at the Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of engineers and hobbyists who would gather to swap parts and ideas. An early Woz-Jobs production was a “blue box”—a hacker’s term for a device that taps into the phone system to make free long-distance calls. It worked. They prank-called the Vatican and realized they could make money selling blue boxes handmade by Woz. It was amazing: Build a little machine and fake out the phone company and its billions of dollars of equipment. “That was an incredible lesson,” Jobs said in the 1996 PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds. “I don’t think there would ever have been an Apple computer had there not been blue boxes.”
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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