Steve Wozniak

Pre-Apple

In 1969, Wozniak returned to the San Francisco Bay Area after being expelled from the University of Colorado Boulder in his first year for hacking the university's computer system.[17] He re-enrolled at De Anza College in Cupertino before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1971. In June of that year, for a self-taught engineering project, Wozniak designed and built his first computer with his friend Bill Fernandez.

Predating useful microprocessors, screens, and keyboards, and using punch cards and only 20 TTL chips donated by an acquaintance, they named it "Cream Soda" after their favorite beverage. A newspaper reporter stepped on the power supply cable and blew up the computer, but it served Wozniak as "a good prelude to my thinking 5 years later with the Apple I and Apple II computers".[18] Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where he designed calculators.[19] It was during this time that he dropped out of Berkeley and befriended Steve Jobs.[20]

Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971. Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at HP, where Wozniak, too, was employed, working on a mainframe computer.[21] "We first met in 1971 during my college years, while he was in high school. A friend said, 'you should meet Steve Jobs because he likes electronics, and he also plays pranks.' So he introduced us."

Their first business partnership began later that year when Wozniak read an article titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" from the October 1971 issue of Esquire, and started to build his own "blue boxes" that enabled one to make long-distance phone calls at no cost.[23][24] Jobs, who handled the sales of the blue boxes, managed to sell some two hundred of them for $150 each, and split the profit with Wozniak. Jobs later told his biographer that if it had not been for Wozniak's blue boxes, "there wouldn't have been an Apple."[25]

In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos, California.[26] He was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine. Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation. Whilst a lack of scoring or coin mechanisms made Wozniak's prototype unusable, Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless. Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniak's share was thus $350 .[27] Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus until ten years later. While dismayed, he said that if Jobs had told him about it and had said he needed the money, Wozniak would have given it to him.[28]

In 1975, Wozniak began designing and developing the computer that would eventually make him famous, the Apple I.[29] With the Apple I, Wozniak was largely working to impress other members of the Palo Alto–based Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of electronics hobbyists interested in computing. The club was one of several key centers which established the home hobbyist era, essentially creating the microcomputer industry over the next few decades. Unlike other custom Homebrew designs, the Apple had an easy-to-achieve video capability that drew a crowd when it was unveiled.

Zaltair

Wozniak also created the fictional computer Zaltair. Adam Schoolsky and Randy Wigginton helped him to pull it off at the West Coast Computer Conference. It was a parody of the Altair 8800 computer, which was very popular at the time. Steve Wozniak thought of the name because:"The company Zilog had come out with a compatible processor, which they called the Z-80. A few companies using this chip were establishing brands based on Z words. Like ComputerZ or Z-Node or the like.[30]"As a joke, Wozniak decided to print "20,000 brochures" (according to YouTube video "Rare video of Steve Wozniak from 1984 talking about computing, joining Apple and the Mac" filmed at a Cleveland computer club meeting) of a fake product called the 'Zaltair' with a lot of "superlative descriptions of a computer that solved every problem in the world".[30] It advertised, among other things, a new version of the BASIC programming language called "BAZIC", with the ability to "define your own language... a feature we call perZonality".[31]

To help make the ad believable, he included fake trademarks and a shipping label for MITS, the company manufacturing the Altair. Wozniak did not think that this would be an issue, as he had "made sure in advance that MITS would not be at the show." However, it later turned out that a representative from MITS was attending, and had been taking large amounts of their fake brochures.[30] He also made sure the article had a fake quote from Ed Roberts, then president of MITS, which spelled out the name of a rival company, Processor Technology, when looking at the first letter of every word, further ensuring that the article was not traced back to him.

Steve Jobs, Wozniak's close friend at the time, received a copy of the brochure. He fell for it, and even "took pride that the Apple II stacked up well against the Zaltair in the comparison chart". However, he, like many others, did not realize Wozniak had created the brochure until "Woz gave him a framed copy of the brochure as a birthday gift" in 1985.[32]

Apple formation and success

"Wozniak designed Apple's first products, the Apple I and II computers and he helped design the Macintosh — because he wanted to use them and they didn't exist." "Between Woz and Jobs, Woz was the innovator, the inventor. Steve Jobs was the marketing person." "Everything I did at Apple that was an A+ job and that took us places, I had two things in my favor ... I had no money [and] I had had no training." By March 1, 1976, Wozniak completed the basic design of the Apple I computer. He alone designed the hardware, circuit board designs, and operating system for the computer.[35] Wozniak originally offered the design to HP while working there, but was denied by the company on five occasions.[36] Jobs then advised Wozniak to start a business of their own to build and sell bare printed circuit boards of the Apple I.[37] Wozniak, at first skeptical, was later convinced by Jobs that even if they were not successful they could at least say to their grandchildren that they had had their own company. To raise the money they needed to build the first batch of the circuit boards, Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator while Jobs sold his Volkswagen van.[37]

On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple Computer Company (now called Apple Inc.) along with administrative supervisor Ronald Wayne, whose participation in the new venture was short-lived. The two decided on the name "Apple" shortly after Jobs returned from Oregon and told Wozniak about his time spent on an apple orchard there.[38]

After the company was formed, Jobs and Wozniak made one last trip to the Homebrew Computer Club to give a presentation of the fully assembled version of the Apple I.[37] Paul Terrell, who was starting a new computer shop in Mountain View, California, called the Byte Shop,[39] saw the presentation and was impressed by the machine.[28] Terrell told Jobs that he would order 50 units of the Apple I and pay $500 each on delivery, but only if they came fully assembled, as he was not interested in buying bare printed circuit boards.[28]

Together the duo assembled the first boards in Jobs's parents' Los Altos home; initially in his bedroom and later (when there was no space left) in the garage. Wozniak's apartment in San Jose was filled with monitors, electronic devices, and computer games that he had developed. The Apple I sold for $666.66. Wozniak later said he had no idea about the relation between the number and the mark of the beast, and that he came up with the price because he liked "repeating digits".[40] They sold their first 50 system boards to Terrell later that year.

In November 1976, Jobs and Wozniak received substantial funding from a then-semi-retired Intel product marketing manager and engineer named Mike Markkula.[41] At the request of Markkula, Wozniak resigned from his job at HP and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Wozniak's Apple I was similar to the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microcomputer, except the Apple I had no provision for internal expansion cards. With expansion cards, the Altair could attach to a computer terminal and be programmed in BASIC. In contrast, the Apple I was a hobbyist machine. Wozniak's design included a $25 CPU (MOS 6502) on a single circuit board with 256 bytes of ROM, 4K or 8K bytes of RAM, and a 40-character by 24-row display controller. Apple's first computer lacked a case, power supply, keyboard, and displayall components that had to be provided by the user. Eventually about 200 Apple I computers were produced in total.[42]

After the success of the Apple I, Wozniak designed the Apple II, the first personal computer with the ability to display color graphics, and BASIC programming language built in.[39] Inspired by "the technique Atari used to simulate colors on its first arcade games", Wozniak found a way of putting colors into the NTSC system by using a US$1 chip,[43] while colors in the PAL system are achieved by "accident" when a dot occurs on a line, and he says that to this day he has no idea how it works.[44] During the design stage, Jobs argued that the Apple II should have two expansion slots, while Wozniak wanted eight.[39] After a heated argument, during which Wozniak threatened that Jobs should "go get himself another computer", they decided to go with eight slots. Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the April 1977 West Coast Computer Faire. Wozniak's first article about the Apple II was in Byte magazine in May 1977.[45] It became one of the first highly successful mass-produced personal computers in the world. Wozniak also designed the Disk II floppy disk drive, released in 1978 specifically for use with the Apple II to replace the slower cassette tape storage.

In 1980, Apple went public to instant and significant financial profitability, making Jobs and Wozniak both millionaires. The Apple II's intended successor, the Apple III, released the same year, was a commercial failure and was discontinued in 1984. According to Wozniak, the Apple III "had 100 percent hardware failures", and that the primary reason for these failures was that the system was designed by Apple's marketing department, unlike Apple's previous engineering-driven projects.

During the early design and development phase of the original Macintosh, Wozniak had a heavy influence over the project along with Jef Raskin, who conceived the computer. Later named the "Macintosh 128k", it would become the first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse. The Macintosh would also go on to introduce the desktop publishing industry with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.[46] In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that in 1981, "Steve [Jobs] really took over the project when I had a plane crash and wasn't there."[6]

Plane crash and temporary leave from Apple

On February 7, 1981, the Beechcraft Bonanza A36TC which Wozniak was piloting (and not qualified to operate[47]) crashed soon after takeoff from the Sky Park Airport in Scotts Valley, California.[48] The airplane stalled while climbing, then bounced down the runway, broke through two fences, and crashed into an embankment. Wozniak and his three passengers—then-fiancée Candice Clark, her brother Jack Clark, and Jack's girlfriend, Janet Valleau—were injured. Wozniak sustained severe face and head injuries, including losing a tooth, and also suffered for the following five weeks from anterograde amnesia, the inability to create new memories. He had no memory of the crash, and did not remember his name while in the hospital or the things he did for a time after he was released.[49][50] He would later state that Apple II computer games were what helped him regain his memory.[39] The National Transportation Safety Board investigation report cited premature liftoff and pilot inexperience as probable causes of the crash.[51]

Wozniak did not immediately return to Apple after recovering from the airplane crash, seeing it as a good reason to leave.[49] Infinite Loop characterized this time: "Coming out of the semi-coma had been like flipping a reset switch in Woz's brain. It was as if in his thirty-year old body he had regained the mind he'd had at eighteen before all the computer madness had begun. And when that happened, Woz found he had little interest in engineering or design. Rather, in an odd sort of way, he wanted to start over fresh."[52]

UC Berkeley and US Festivals

Later in 1981, after recovering from the plane crash, Wozniak re-enrolled at UC Berkeley to complete his Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences degree that he started there in 1971 (and which he would finish in 1986).[53] Because his name was well known at this point, he enrolled under the name Rocky Raccoon Clark, which is the name listed on his diploma,[6] although he did not officially receive his degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences until 1987.[20][6]

In May 1982 and 1983, Wozniak, with help from professional concert promoter Bill Graham, founded the company Unuson, an abbreviation of "unite us in song",[54] which sponsored two US Festivals, with "US" pronounced like the pronoun, not as initials. Initially intended to celebrate evolving technologies, the festivals ended up as a technology exposition and a rock festival as a combination of music, computers, television, and people. After losing several million dollars on the 1982 festival, Wozniak stated that unless the 1983 event turned a profit, he would end his involvement with rock festivals and get back to designing computers.[55] Later that year, Wozniak returned to Apple product development, desiring no more of a role than that of an engineer and a motivational factor for the Apple workforce.[39][52]

Return to Apple product development

Starting in the mid-1980s, as the Macintosh experienced slow but steady growth, Apple's corporate leadership, including Steve Jobs, increasingly disrespected its flagship cash cow Apple II seriesand Wozniak along with it. The Apple II divisionother than Wozniakwas not invited to the Macintosh introduction event, and Wozniak was seen kicking the dirt in the parking lot.[56] Although Apple II products provided about 85% of Apple's sales in early 1985, the company's January 1985 annual meeting did not mention the Apple II division or its employees, a typical situation that frustrated Wozniak.[57]

Final departure from Apple workforce

Even with the success he had helped to create at Apple, Wozniak believed that the company was hindering him from being who he wanted to be, and that it was "the bane of his existence". He enjoyed engineering, not management, and said that he missed "the fun of the early days". As other talented engineers joined the growing company, he no longer believed he was needed there.[39] By early 1985, Wozniak left Apple again and sold most of his stock.[57] Media coverage attributed his departure to disagreements with Apple management, quoting his statement that Apple had "been going in the wrong direction for the last five years",[57] but Wozniak later objected to this portrayal and stated that he left primarily because he was excited to start CL 9 and recapture the fun of developing a new technology.[39]

The Apple II platform financially carried the company well into the Macintosh era of the late 1980s;[57] it was made semi-portable with the Apple IIc of 1984, and was extended, with some input from Wozniak, by the 16-bit Apple IIGS of 1986, and was discontinued altogether when the Apple IIe was discontinued on November 15, 1993 (although the Apple IIe card, which allowed compatible Macintosh computers to run Apple II software and use certain Apple II peripherals, was produced until May 1995).

Post-Apple

After his career at Apple, Wozniak founded CL 9 in 1985, which developed and brought the first programmable universal remote control to market in 1987, called the "CORE".[39] Beyond engineering, Wozniak's second lifelong goal had always been to teach elementary school because of the important role teachers play in students' lives. Eventually, he did teach computer classes to children from the fifth through ninth grades, and teachers as well.[58][59] Unuson continued to support this, funding additional teachers and equipment.[54]

In 2001, Wozniak founded Wheels of Zeus (WOZ)[60] to create wireless GPS technology to "help everyday people find everyday things much more easily". In 2002, he joined the board of directors of Ripcord Networks, Inc., joining Apple alumni Ellen Hancock, Gil Amelio, Mike Connor, and Wheels of Zeus co-founder Alex Fielding in a new telecommunications venture. Later the same year he joined the board of directors of Danger, Inc., the maker of the Hip Top.

In 2006, Wheels of Zeus was closed, and Wozniak founded Acquicor Technology, a holding company for acquiring technology companies and developing them, with Apple alumni Hancock and Amelio. From 2009 through 2014 he was chief scientist at Fusion-io.[61] In 2014 he became chief scientist at Primary Data, which was founded by some former Fusion-io executives.[62] Silicon Valley Comic Con (SVCC) is an annual pop culture and technology convention at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The convention was co-founded by Wozniak and Rick White, with Trip Hunter as CEO.[63] Wozniak announced the annual event in 2015 along with Marvel legend Stan Lee.[64] In October 2017, Wozniak founded Woz U, an online educational technology service for independent students and employees.[65] As of December 2018, Woz U was licensed as a school with the Arizona state board.[66]

Though permanently leaving Apple as an active employee in 1985, Wozniak chose to never remove himself from the official employee list, and continues to represent the company at events or in interviews. Today he receives a stipend from Apple for this role, estimated in 2006 to be US$120000 per year.[39][67][68] He is also an Apple shareholder.[69] He maintained a friendly acquaintance with Steve Jobs until Jobs's death in October 2011.[70] However, in 2006, Wozniak stated that he and Jobs were not as close as they used to be.[71]

In a 2013 interview, Wozniak said that the original Macintosh "failed" under Steve Jobs, and that it was not until Jobs left that it became a success. He called the Apple Lisa group the team that had kicked Jobs out, and that Jobs liked to call the Lisa group "idiots for making [the Lisa computer] too expensive". To compete with the Lisa, Jobs and his new team produced a cheaper computer, one that, according to Wozniak, was "weak", "lousy" and "still at a fairly high price". "He made it by cutting the RAM down, by forcing you to swap disks here and there", says Wozniak. He attributed the eventual success of the Macintosh to people like John Sculley "who worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away".[72]

At the end of 2020, Wozniak announced the launch of a new company helmed by him, Efforce. Efforce is described as a marketplace for funding ecologically friendly projects. It used a WOZX cryptocurrency token for funding and blockchain to redistribute the profit to token holders and businesses engaged on the platform.[73] In September 2021, it was reported that Wozniak was also starting a company alongside co-founder Alex Fielding named Privateer Space to address the problem of space debris.[74][75] Privateer Space debuted the first version of its space traffic monitoring software on March 1, 2022.[76] In 2024, Wozniak sued YouTube in respect to a scam that was being circulated on the platform using his likeness. Later, he won after a San Jose appeals court ruled YouTube was liable for failing to combat it.[77]

Honorary degrees

For his contributions to technology, Wozniak has been awarded a number of Honorary Doctoral degrees, which include the following:

• University of Colorado Boulder: 1989[138][139]
• North Carolina State University: 2004[140]
• Kettering University: 2005[141][142]
• Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale: 2005[143]
• ESPOL University in Ecuador: 2008[144]
• Michigan State University, in East Lansing 2011[145][146]
• Concordia University in Montreal, Canada: June 22, 2011[147]
• State Engineering University of Armenia: November 11, 2011[148]
• Santa Clara University: June 16, 2012[149][150]
• University Camilo José Cela in Madrid, Spain: November 8, 2013[151]
• Lincoln Law School in San Jose, California: May 19, 2023[152]
• Technical University of Moldova (UTM) in Chișinău, Moldova: October 19, 2025

Documentaries

• Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015)
• Camp Woz: The Admirable Lunacy of Philanthropy – a 2009 documentary[153]
• Geeks On Board – a 2007 documentary[154]
• The Secret History of Hacking – a 2001 documentary film featuring Wozniak and other phreakers and computer hackers.[155][156]
• Triumph of the Nerds – a 1996 PBS documentary series about the rise of the personal computer.
• Steve Wozniak's Formative Moment – a March 15, 2016, original short feature film from Reddit Formative Moment[157]

Feature films

• 1999: Pirates of Silicon Valley – a TNT film directed by Martyn Burke. Wozniak is portrayed by Joey Slotnick while Jobs is played by Noah Wyle.[158]
• 2013: Jobs – a film directed by Joshua Michael Stern. Wozniak is portrayed by Josh Gad, while Jobs is portrayed by Ashton Kutcher.[158]
• 2015: Steve Jobs – a feature film by Danny Boyle, with a screenplay written by Aaron Sorkin. Wozniak is portrayed by Seth Rogen, while Jobs is portrayed by Michael Fassbender.[158][159]
• 2015: Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates: The Competition to Control the Personal Computer, 1974–1999: Original film from the National Geographic Channel for the American Genius series.[160]

Television

• TechTV – The Screen Savers 2002-09-27 (Steve Wozniak and Kevin Mitnick a convicted hacker) Featuring an interview with Adrian Lamo
• After seeing her stand-up performance in Saratoga, California, Wozniak began dating comedian Kathy Griffin.[161] Together, they attended the 2007 Emmy Awards,[162] and subsequently made many appearances on the fourth season of her show Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Wozniak is on the show as her date for the Producers Guild of America award show. However, on a June 19, 2008, appearance on The Howard Stern Show, Griffin confirmed that they were no longer dating and decided to remain friends.[163]
• Wozniak portrays a parody of himself in the first episode of the television series Code Monkeys; he plays the owner of Gameavision before selling it to help fund his next enterprise.[164][165] He later appears again in the 12th episode when he is in Las Vegas at the annual Video Game Convention and sees Dave and Jerry. He also appears in a parody of the "Get a Mac" ads featured in the final episode of Code Monkeys second season.
• Wozniak is interviewed and featured in the documentary Hackers Wanted.
• Wozniak competed on Season 8 of Dancing with the Stars in 2009[166][167] where he danced with Karina Smirnoff. Though Wozniak and Smirnoff received 10 combined points from the three judges out of 30, the lowest score of the evening, he remained in the competition. He later posted on a social networking site that he believed that the vote count was not legitimate and suggested that the Dancing with the Stars judges had lied about the vote count to keep him on the show.[168] After being briefed on the method of judging and vote counting, he retracted and apologized for his statements.[169] Though suffering a pulled hamstring and a fracture in his foot, Wozniak continued to compete,[170] but was eliminated from the competition on March 31, with a score of 12 out of 30 for an Argentine Tango.[171]
• On September 30, 2010, he appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory season 4 episode "The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification".[172] While dining in The Cheesecake Factory where Penny works, he is approached by Sheldon via telepresence on a Texai robot. Leonard tries to explain to Penny who Wozniak is, but she says she already knows him from Dancing with the Stars.
• On September 30, 2013, he appeared along with early Apple employees Daniel Kottke and Andy Hertzfeld on the television show John Wants Answers to discuss the movie Jobs.[173]
• In April 2021, Wozniak became a panelist for the new TV series Unicorn Hunters,[174] a business investment show from the makers of the series The Masked Singer.[175][176]