Woz at the Shore

For photos of the event by W4RIS click here.

121604: More photos on the Woz at the Shore website.

Woz at the shore 11-14-04 (by Sjaak, W4RIS)

Early October Jeff, WA4AW announced that Steve Wozniak (Woz for short) was going to speak at the Florida Linux User Xchange at Nova Southeastern University on Sunday November 14th.

Having seen Woz in TV interviews and having read many articles about him I knew I had to be there!
It took a while before more details became available but once the Woz at the Shore web site was up and running I immediately signed up. Reading the information on the web site I noticed that there was going to be an informal get-together before Woz was going to speak for all South-Florida user groups. Although not computer related I thought that it would be nice to promote K4FAU and Amateur Radio at this event. So I contacted the organizers and to my surprise they welcomed us and reserved a table for us at the informal get-together.
I invited Paul, N2PK to show of his Vector Network Analyzer.

Sunday morning Nov.14 Paul, N2PK called me to cancel because he wasn't feeling too well. So this meant our group would only be: Hank N3HV, Anna and me W4RIS.
This also meant we wouldn't have any thing to show off so I got my to 70cm converted cell phone equipment together (the RS9044 and the Nokia Mobira).

We got to the event at 4:30 pm and had to share a table with a Mac user group. As soon as we started setting up we had people over at our table asking about K4FAU and Amateur Radio.
We had a good number of people visiting our table despite (or maybe because of) not being a computer / software user group. Around 6:00 pm everybody started heading for the Miniaci Theater. Lucky for us the organizers of the event reserved the two front rows for the people that manned the demo tables so we had a great view of Woz speaking.

His talk was really interesting and surprisingly low on technical terms (considering the audience) and when ever he did mention a technical term he tried to explain it. He told us about his upbringing and how he became a Amateur radio operator at age 11. His speech brought you step by step closer to the man, the reasoning and the tech behind the Apple I and Apple ][.
His story was similar, but funnier to this 1998 interview in Wired magazine.
At the end of his 2.5 hour talk a raffle was held for a iPod mini. Our surprise was big when Woz announced the winner to be "Ann van Dam".

After the raffle Woz took the time to talk to anybody that wanted to talk to him in person. Anna, Hank N3HV and I W4RIS went up to Woz to talk to him, get a photo op and to have him sign our K4FAU t-shirts and the mini iPod that Anna won.