Steve Wozniak

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Steve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, built his first computer in June 1971. A newspaper reporter destroyed it by stepping on the power supply cable.

  He had built the machine with his friend Bill Fernandez as a self-taught engineering project. It predated useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards. Punch cards fed it, and it ran on just 20 TTL chips, donated by an acquaintance. The two friends named it Cream Soda, after their favorite beverage. Years later, Wozniak called the episode a good prelude to the thinking he did five years afterward on the Apple I and Apple II.

  That ruined experiment set a pattern. Wozniak made machines because he wanted to use them and nobody had made them yet. How did a tinkerer with a taste for practical jokes end up designing the computers that launched Apple? What pulled him away from the company he helped start, and what did he build once he was free of it? And what does a man do with money he says he never wanted to be near?

  194037

• 2. Blue Boxes and Breakout

  ›

  Wozniak was born on the 11th of August 1950 in San Jose, California. His father, Francis Jacob "Jerry" Wozniak, was an engineer for the Lockheed Corporation, and his mother, Margaret Louise, came from Washington state. He graduated from Homestead High School in Cupertino in 1968. Star Trek, and the conventions he attended in his youth, helped inspire him to start Apple Computer. In his autobiography, iWoz, he credits the Tom Swift Jr. books for pushing him toward engineering.

  In 1969, the University of Colorado Boulder expelled Wozniak in his first year for hacking its computer system. He came home to the San Francisco Bay Area and enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino. In 1971 he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley. He later dropped out and took a job at Hewlett-Packard, designing calculators. It was during this period that he befriended Steve Jobs.

  Bill Fernandez made the introduction. He had attended Homestead High School with Jobs, and he would eventually become Apple's first full-time employee. Jobs spent a summer working at Hewlett-Packard, where Wozniak was also employed. Wozniak remembered the pitch his friend gave him: you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.

  The October 1971 issue of Esquire carried an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Wozniak read it and began building his own blue boxes, devices that let a caller make long-distance phone calls at no cost. Among phone phreakers, his design earned him the nickname "Berkeley Blue." Jobs handled the sales and moved some two hundred boxes at $150 each. The two split the profit. Jobs later told his biographer that without Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."

  In 1973, Jobs was working for the arcade game company Atari in Los Gatos, California. His assignment was a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, the company offered $100 for every chip eliminated from the machine. Jobs knew little about board design, so he promised Wozniak half the fee if Wozniak could shrink the chip count.

  Wozniak cut 50 chips by storing the game's bricks in RAM. His prototype was unusable, since it had no scoring or coin mechanisms, yet Jobs collected the full bonus anyway. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had paid only $700, which made Wozniak's share $350. The real bonus was $5,000. Wozniak did not find out for ten years, and he said he would have given Jobs the money if he had simply asked.

  38152524

• 3. The Zaltair Hoax

  ›

  The Zilog Z-80 processor gave Wozniak the idea for his most elaborate prank. Several companies building around that chip were choosing brand names that leaned on the letter Z, such as ComputerZ or Z-Node. Wozniak decided to join in with a computer that did not exist.

  He called it the Zaltair, a parody of the Altair 8800, which was hugely popular at the time. Adam Schoolsky and Randy Wigginton helped him carry it out at the West Coast Computer Conference. The plan centered on a printed brochure, reportedly run to some 20,000 copies. It described a machine that solved every problem in the world. It also promised a new version of the BASIC programming language called "BAZIC," with a feature the brochure called "perZonality."

  To make the ad believable, Wozniak added fake trademarks and a shipping label for MITS, the company that made the Altair. He expected no trouble, because he had made sure in advance that MITS would not be at the show. A MITS representative turned up anyway and ended up taking large numbers of the fake brochures.

  Steve Jobs received a copy and fell for it. He even took pride in how well the Apple II stacked up against the Zaltair in the brochure's comparison chart. Like many others, he did not learn who was behind the joke until Wozniak gave him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift in 1985.

  The brochure also carried a fake quote from Ed Roberts, then president of MITS. The first letter of each word in that quote spelled out Processor Technology, the name of a rival company. Wozniak added that trick so no one could trace the brochure back to him.

  313240

• 4. Building Apple

  ›

  In 1975, Wozniak started on the machine that would make him famous, the Apple I. He was mainly trying to impress fellow members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a Palo Alto group of electronics hobbyists. The club was one of several centers that established the home hobbyist era. Unlike other custom designs shown there, the Apple had video capability that was easy to achieve, and it drew a crowd when unveiled.

  By the 1st of March 1976, Wozniak had finished the basic design. He alone created the hardware, the circuit board designs, and the operating system. He first offered the design to Hewlett-Packard, his employer, and the company turned him down five times. Jobs then urged him to start a business to sell bare printed circuit boards. Wozniak was skeptical. Jobs argued that even if they failed, they could tell their grandchildren they had once owned a company. To pay for the first batch of boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator and Jobs sold his Volkswagen van.

  On the 1st of April 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple Computer Company with administrative supervisor Ronald Wayne, whose part in the venture was short-lived. They chose the name soon after Jobs came back from Oregon with stories of time spent on an apple orchard.

  Paul Terrell, who was opening a computer shop called the Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, watched the pair present the assembled machine at the Homebrew club. He promised to order 50 units at $500 each, but only if they arrived fully assembled. The duo built those first boards at the Los Altos home of Jobs's parents, starting in his bedroom and moving to the garage when space ran out. The Apple I sold for $666.66. Wozniak said he had no idea the number echoed the mark of the beast and simply liked repeating digits.

  In November 1976, Mike Markkula, a semi-retired Intel product marketing manager, provided substantial funding. At his request, Wozniak resigned from Hewlett-Packard and became Apple's vice president in charge of research and development.

  The Apple I resembled the Altair 8800 but had no provision for internal expansion cards. Wozniak's design used a $25 MOS 6502 processor on a single circuit board. It carried 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM, and a display controller of 40 characters by 24 rows. The buyer had to supply a case, power supply, keyboard, and display.

  The Apple II came next. Inspired by the way Atari simulated colors in its early arcade games, Wozniak gave it color graphics and built-in BASIC. He found a way to put color into the NTSC video system using a $1 chip. In the PAL system, colors appear almost by accident when a dot lands on a line. He says he still has no idea how that works.

  During the design stage, Jobs argued for two expansion slots, while Wozniak wanted eight. The argument grew heated. Wozniak told Jobs to go get himself another computer, and they settled on eight. Jobs oversaw the foam-molded plastic case, and early employee Rod Holt developed the switching power supply.

  Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977. Wozniak's first article about it ran in Byte magazine that May. In 1978 he followed with the Disk II floppy drive, built to replace slow cassette tape storage.

  In 1980, Apple went public, and the offering made both founders millionaires. Wozniak offered $10 million of his own stock to early employees, something Jobs refused to do. The Apple III, released that same year, was a commercial failure. Wozniak said it suffered "100 percent hardware failures," which he blamed on a design led by the marketing department rather than by engineers. Apple discontinued it in 1984.

  3741434652

• 5. Crash and Reset

  ›

  On the 7th of February 1981, Wozniak was piloting a Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC that he was not qualified to operate. Soon after takeoff from Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley, California, the plane stalled while climbing. It bounced down the runway, broke through two fences, and crashed into an embankment.

  His three passengers were injured along with him. They were his fiancée, Candice Clark, her brother Jack Clark, and Jack's girlfriend, Janet Valleau. Wozniak suffered severe face and head injuries and lost a tooth. For the next five weeks he had anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. He did not remember the crash or even his own name in the hospital. He later said Apple II computer games helped him recover his memory. The National Transportation Safety Board cited premature liftoff and pilot inexperience as probable causes.

  Wozniak did not rush back to Apple, because the crash gave him a good reason to leave. The book Infinite Loop described the recovery as flipping a reset switch in his brain. Though he was thirty, it was as if he had regained the mind he had at eighteen, before all the computer madness began. He found he had little interest in engineering or design and wanted to start over fresh.

  He married Candice Clark in June 1981, and the marriage lasted until 1987. Later in 1981 he re-enrolled at Berkeley to finish the electrical engineering and computer sciences degree he had started there in 1971. Because his name was so well known, he enrolled as Rocky Raccoon Clark, and that is the name on his diploma. He did not officially receive the degree until 1987.

  In May 1982 and 1983, with help from professional concert promoter Bill Graham, Wozniak founded a company called Unuson, short for "unite us in song." It sponsored two US Festivals, with "US" pronounced like the pronoun. They began as a celebration of evolving technology and became a mix of technology exposition and rock festival. The 1982 festival lost several million dollars. Wozniak said that unless the 1983 event turned a profit, he would quit rock festivals and return to designing computers.

  Later that year he went back to Apple product development. He wanted no bigger role than that of an engineer and a motivational presence for the Apple workforce.

  485343240

• 6. Leaving Apple

  ›

  From 1979 to 1981, Wozniak and human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin shaped the first concepts of the Macintosh. Raskin conceived the machine. It became the Macintosh 128k, the first mass-market personal computer with an integral graphical user interface and mouse. In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that in 1981 Jobs really took over the project.

  By the mid-1980s, Wozniak felt the company was turning its back on the Apple II. At the Macintosh introduction event, the Apple II division was not invited, apart from Wozniak, who was seen kicking the dirt in the parking lot. Apple II products still brought in about 85 percent of the company's sales in early 1985. Even so, the January 1985 annual meeting never mentioned the Apple II division or its employees.

  Wozniak came to believe that Apple was hindering him from being who he wanted to be, calling it the bane of his existence. He enjoyed engineering rather than management, and he missed the fun of the early days. With other talented engineers on board, he no longer thought he was needed. By early 1985 he left and sold most of his stock.

  Media coverage tied the departure to disagreements with management and quoted him saying Apple had been going in the wrong direction for five years. Wozniak later objected to that portrayal. He said he left mainly because he was excited to start a new company, CL 9, and recapture the fun of developing new technology. In 1987, CL 9 released the first programmable universal remote control, called the CORE.

  The Apple II outlived his departure by years. The Apple IIc arrived in 1984, and the 16-bit Apple IIGS followed in 1986, with some input from Wozniak. Apple discontinued the Apple IIe on the 15th of November 1993. An Apple IIe card, which let compatible Macintosh computers run Apple II software, stayed in production until May 1995.

  Wozniak never removed his name from Apple's employee list. He still represents the company at events and in interviews, and an estimate from 2006 put his stipend at $120,000 a year. He kept a friendly acquaintance with Jobs until Jobs died in October 2011, though in 2006 he said they were no longer as close as they had been.

  In that 2013 interview, Wozniak went further about the Macintosh. He said it "failed" under Jobs and only succeeded after Jobs left. He described the Lisa group as the team that had kicked Jobs out, and he called Jobs's cheaper rival to the Lisa "weak" and "lousy." Wozniak credited people such as John Sculley with building the Macintosh market after the Apple II went away.

  5358734247

• 7. Second Acts

  ›

  Wozniak's second lifelong goal, beyond engineering, was to teach elementary school. He eventually taught computer classes to children from the fifth through ninth grades, and to teachers as well. Unuson kept funding extra teachers and equipment. His work on technology in schools also reached abroad, through a 1990 initiative to put computers in schools in the former Soviet Union.

  That same year, Wozniak helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, supplying some of its first funding and serving on its founding board. He is the founding sponsor of the Tech Museum, the Silicon Valley Ballet, and the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. The city of San Jose named a street Woz Way in his honor, and the museum's address is 180 Woz Way.

  His attitude toward money shaped these choices. He told Fortune magazine in 2017 that he did not want to be near money because it could corrupt his values. He said he never wanted to land in the category of having more than anyone could ever need. He also said he invests only in things close to his heart.

  In 2001, Wozniak founded Wheels of Zeus, called WoZ for short, to build wireless GPS technology that would help everyday people find everyday things more easily. In 2002 he joined the board of Ripcord Networks and then that of Danger, Inc., the maker of the Hip Top. Wheels of Zeus closed in 2006, and he founded Acquicor Technology, a holding company for acquiring and developing technology companies. From 2009 through 2014 he served as chief scientist at Fusion-io, and in 2014 he took the same title at Primary Data.

  He turned to pop culture in 2015, when he and Marvel legend Stan Lee announced Silicon Valley Comic Con. Wozniak co-founded it with Rick White. In October 2017, he founded Woz U, an online educational technology service. At the end of 2020 he launched Efforce, a marketplace for funding ecologically friendly projects that used a cryptocurrency token called WOZX.

  In September 2021 came word of Privateer Space, a company he started with co-founder Alex Fielding to address space debris. It debuted its space traffic monitoring software on the 1st of March 2022. In 2024, Wozniak sued YouTube over a scam that used his likeness. He won when a San Jose appeals court ruled that YouTube was liable for failing to combat it.

  8366757862

• 8. Opinions and Honors

  ›

  In March 2015, Wozniak said he had once dismissed Ray Kurzweil's view that machine intelligence would outpace human intelligence. He had changed his mind and now called the future scary and very bad for people. By June 2015 he had reversed again. Smarter machines, he argued, would realize they need people. He joked that humans might become like family pets, and that he had started feeding his dog filet steak and chicken every night.

  In 2016 he changed course once more. He said he no longer worried about superintelligence, because he doubted computers could compete with human intuition. In 2023 he signed a Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause of at least six months in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. That May, he told the BBC that AI could make scams harder to detect.

  In July 2021, Wozniak recorded a Cameo video for right to repair activist Louis Rossmann. He said the issue had really affected him emotionally. He credited Apple's early breakthroughs to the open technology of the 1970s.

  He holds Polish citizenship, received in 2017, when he visited Poland and his father's ancestral hometown. In early December 2023, he spoke at a conference in Belgrade, where Serbia granted him citizenship through its Citizenship by Exception program. The Serbian opposition criticized the event as political promotion ahead of a parliamentary election, and the government denied that. Just weeks before, in November 2023, Wozniak had suffered a minor stroke while preparing to speak at a conference in Mexico City. He was hospitalized briefly and then went home. He also lives with prosopagnosia, or face blindness.

  His public profile reaches well beyond engineering. In 2009 he competed on season 8 of Dancing with the Stars, partnered with Karina Smirnoff. He and Smirnoff scored 10 of 30 points from the three judges in one round, the lowest of the evening, and he stayed in the contest. He then suggested the vote count was not legitimate, but later retracted that and apologized. A pulled hamstring and a fractured foot did not stop him. He was eliminated on the 31st of March with 12 of 30 points for an Argentine Tango. On the 30th of September 2010, he appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory. Actors who have played him on screen include Joey Slotnick in the 1999 film Pirates of Silicon Valley and Seth Rogen in the 2015 film Steve Jobs.

  The honors began early. In 1979 he won the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. In 1985, he and Jobs each received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan. In September 2000 he entered the National Inventors Hall of Fame, for US Patent No. 4,136,359, titled "Microcomputer for use with video display." On the 17th of February 2014, the IEEE awarded him the 66th Hoover Medal. In 2026, The Tech Interactive in San Jose gave him the 2025 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

  8687899293